ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Israel has been launching intense and widening airstrikes in Lebanon since killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in late September in Beirut. Many of those targets are in known Hezbollah areas, but recently, Israel's attacked locations far from the fighting, killing almost 200 displaced Lebanese. NPR's Jane Arraf went to the site of one of those attacks this week. And a warning to listeners - this five-minute story contains graphic descriptions of war.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIZZLING)
GHIDA: (Speaking Arabic).
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: High up in the mountains, an hour's drive from Beirut, there's a roadside stall where Ghida bats down dough on a sizzling concave grill and tosses in wild greens. This is the edge of the town of Almat.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: It's known as a quiet place, just a few hundred families, Muslim and Christian, living in stone houses perched on the tree-dotted mountains. War between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah has raged since September. But this town is 60 miles from the border, so the airstrike here Sunday was particularly shocking.
SAMIR: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: "Hezbollah men - they go to the battlefield and they fight," says Ghida's husband, Samir. "There are Hezbollah fighters there. But who are the people here? - the ones who don't fight."
"They're all displaced people, children," Ghida says. Neither want their last name used for security reasons.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
ARRAF: At the blast site, the two-story home that stood there the day before has been completely flattened. There were three extended families living here, displaced from airstrikes in the Beqaa Valley.
Lots of children, it seems, going by the rubble here. There are tiny pieces of clothing hung on the twisted metal and buried under the blocks. You can see workbooks here, school workbooks. Close to here, there's a Grade 5 French book.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLATTERING)
ARRAF: An Uno card game is scattered in the debris. Residents here say the families arrived a month ago and were invited to move into a vacant home. Among those killed was 24-year-old Zainab al-Qarseefi, a lab technician, about to join her Lebanese American husband in Kentucky. I reached her husband, Sam Najar, in Louisville.
SAM NAJAR: I mean, I was talking to her an hour before this happened. It was late night over here in the USA. She was excited. Like, today, she was supposed to get her visa to come and join me.
ARRAF: Najar had been furnishing an apartment to start their new life.
NAJAR: And next thing we know, they were all gone.
ARRAF: He said the attack killed Zainab's parents and five of her brothers and sisters, the youngest 9 years old.
ALI AWAD: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: Ali Awad, a local leader, arrived just a few minutes after the blast.
AWAD: (Through interpreter) There were 35 displaced people here, most of them women and children and elderly. An Israeli missile hit the house, and 27 people were killed.
ARRAF: For the last 25 days, he had helped deliver food to the families. On Sunday, he ended up retrieving their dismembered bodies, thrown hundreds of feet into the valley.
AWAD: (Through interpreter) I removed a 3-year-old decapitated boy, a 6-year-old girl with half her face torn and the mother who had her limbs torn off, a disfigured body...
ARRAF: Israel says it was targeting a Hezbollah weapon site and fighters involved in attacks on northern Israel. It did not provide proof and said it would have no further details. It said it had taken measures to mitigate civilian harm. Awad doesn't believe that.
AWAD: (Through interpreter) If the Israelis know that there is an individual in the house, they can target him with their drones before he arrives or after he leaves, not with an F35 or F16.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ARRAF: The bodies were taken back to their home villages to be buried, despite the risk of attacks there.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: A day after the attack, children wander in and out of the site. An 11-year-old boy says he saw someone's liver hanging out and bodies wrapped in blankets, seeping blood. He says he can't sleep.
(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS CLINKING)
ARRAF: There's a three-story home on a hill just above the destroyed house. It's the home that Radia Haider Ahmed's uncle built half a century ago. The windows are all broken. There are solar panels wrapped around tree trunks. Ahmed shows me something thrown into her yard.
RADIA HAIDER AHMED: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: Ah, it's a school backpack.
AHMED: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: New school supplies in it.
AHMED: Underwear, (speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: Ahmed pulls out a tiny pair of boys' black underpants. She and her daughter Lynn had done activities with the children, coloring and drawing, teaching them about recycling.
AHMED: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: "I can't look at this," Radia Ahmed says of the blast site. "I can't look. At home, they run. They shout rhymes. We know their names. They shout at each other when they play soccer together."
She speaks of the children as they were the day before.
LYNN: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: "The other day, they installed a satellite TV in the yard. They watched soccer, and they were all so happy," says Lynn.
Radia Ahmed says, with all that, she doesn't think they can stay there anymore. But if home is supposed to be a safe place, like so many Lebanese, she's no longer sure where that is.
Jane Arraf, NPR News, Almat, Lebanon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELMIENE SONG, "MARKING MY TIME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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