'I pulled a toddler's leg from the rubble': Paramedics recall horror of Israeli strike on northern Lebanon

Monday's strike on Aitou, a Christian town in the country's north, was Israel's first attack on the area

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Mansour Dahdah has been employed by Lebanon’s Civil Defence for 38 years and has witnessed crime scenes, mangled car wrecks and the aftermaths of tragic accidents.

But the head of the team for northern Lebanon's Zgharta district says he has never seen anything as gruesome as the site of Monday’s Israeli strike on a house in Aitou village that killed at least 23 people.

“We found 22 bodies last night. And this morning we pulled out the body of an infant from the bed of a pickup lorry – no more than six or seven months old,” Mr Dahdah told The National on Tuesday. “He may have been thrown there by the force of the blast.” Only six people survived.

The strike on Aitou, a village in Christian-majority Zgharta, was Israel's first attack on the area and one of the northernmost in Lebanon since the conflict started in October last year. So far, the vast majority of Israeli military strikes on Lebanon has been in the south, the Bekaa Valley, and parts of Beirut.

The strike, which Israel's military has not commented on, targeted a two-storey house belonging to Elie Alawan, who said he had recently rented the apartment out to a family from the southern Lebanese village of Aitaroun who had been forcibly displaced by the Israeli bombardment. The Israeli army did not issue a warning before the strike and has yet to release a statement.

At least 12 women and three children were among those killed in the strike, rescue workers told The National. Monday’s attack levelled the house, which Mr Dahdah said was detached but still close to other residential buildings.

“During the first few hours of the search and rescue, there were bodies everywhere,” he said. “The dust and rubble were so bad we couldn’t tell faces apart from bodies, never mind gender from gender.”

He himself pulled out the remains of a toddler. “The scene was truly horrific. We found the child, around two years old, under the body of his father near the wall of the garden. I pulled out a leg that was severed from the child's body. I carried the severed leg and helped my colleague carry out the rest of the child.”

The owner of the house, Elie Alawan, said he had last week rented his house to eight members of the Hijazi family – two men and six women, but that other family members joined the original crew until the house was filled with around 21 people.

“They were a great family. Very respectful. They never caused any problems. Super respectful – I knew them personally,” he said.

Mr Alawan added he had a professional relationship with the family, who owned a construction equipment company he often purchased equipment from. Residents told him that two cars had pulled up to the house and that "one person came out of the car and went inside around 10 or 15 minutes or so before the strike hit".

He said he didn’t know whether the Israeli strike had targeted the Hijazi family or the visitors who had arrived minutes earlier.

Mr Alawan's brother and next-door neighbour, Dani, interjected to say, “The strike clearly targeted the house since the entire structure came tumbling down.”

Zgharta district MP Michel Moawad, who is aligned with the anti-Hezbollah opposition parliamentary bloc, had told local media on Monday that "it was not the town of Aitou that was targeted ... it was a member of Hezbollah who was with his family [in the targeted building]".

Mr Moawad cited "security forces" as the source of the information but evaded follow-up questions from the reporter. He also warned against allowing "armed or party-affiliated infiltrators" to stay in Zgharta and discouraged displacement centres and renters from hosting displaced people "without us checking their identity and without co-ordination from the Lebanese army."

A high-level security official who spoke to The National on the condition of anonymity said there was no truth in Mr Moawad's claim that a member of Hezbollah was in the building.

Sleiman Frangieh, leader of the Hezbollah-allied Marada movement – and Hezbollah's preferred candidate for the Lebanese presidency – suggested the strike on Aitou was aimed at exploiting sectarian and political tensions and creating "a negative atmosphere and internal conflicts, which is very dangerous, especially for Christians". He also named other villages in predominantly Christian areas recently targeted by Israel's bombardment, such as Deir Billa in Batroun district and Maaysra in the Keseruan district.

Residents of the small village said that while the strike may have been shocking, it was hardly a surprise. "It's a terror attack and we don't know why terrorists operate the way they do," a summer resident of the mostly seasonally occupied town said. He had driven up on Tuesday morning to check on his house nearby.

He expressed fear over Israel's targeting of several predominantly Christian or mixed-sect areas of Lebanon which host people displaced by the war. "We don't know who they are. At the same time, in the end they're civilians and we want to help them because they've lost their own homes."

Israel escalated its military campaign in Lebanon with heavy air strikes and ground troop incursions late last month, after nearly a year of low-level cross-border exchanges of fire with the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. The Israeli army on Monday ordered the residents of 25 villages in southern Lebanon to leave and move to areas north of the Awali river.

Since the conflict started last October, more than 2,300 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, at least half of them in the past month since Israel started an all-out war. The fighting has also displaced an estimated 1.2 million people.

"They were people who were running away from war," Mr Alawan told The National. "They needed somewhere to stay. What was I supposed to do, dismiss them?"

"Of course not. Not if I could help. Well, now that family is gone. And so is my home.”