The dismay is immense. It was while watching images of military operations in southern Lebanon online that Ali Mourad discovered that the building built by his father and uncles in their border village had been dynamited by Israeli soldiers.
“A friend sent me the video, telling me to be careful so that my father doesn’t see it,” this lawyer from Aïtaroun told AFP.
Explosions filmed from the air
Ali’s father had his clinic there. This is where he had lived since the 2000s, with his wife, his daughter and his granddaughter. Upon receiving the news, the 83-year-old pediatrician and communist “remained very solid,” said his son.
In the images, filmed from the air, simultaneous explosions shake several buildings in the middle of a bucolic landscape on the hillside. An explosion occurs in the Mourads’ small building, “less than a kilometer” from the border, which collapses in a cloud of gray smoke.
Stronghold of Hezbollah, scene of cross-border shootings for a year, southern Lebanon has been the scene of open war since the end of September between the Israeli army and the pro-Iranian movement. Like hundreds of thousands of southerners, Ali’s family left.
He himself only knew his village at the age of 20, after the end of 22 years of occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.
“Orphans of their land”
At 43, this father of two children wants to “give them a connection with the land”. “I am perhaps afraid of seeing them live as orphans far from their land, as I experienced,” admits the lecturer at the Arab University of Beirut.
His return is “a right, an obligation, for the memory of my ancestors, the future of the children”.
At the end of October, the Lebanese news agency Ani named seven border villages where Israeli forces dynamited houses day after day, including that of Adaïsseh on October 26.
400 tons of explosives
That same day, the Israeli army claimed to have used “400 tons of explosives” to destroy “a tunnel” housing Hezbollah’s “anti-tank missiles” and “RPG rockets”.
And Lebanese social networks rebelled when Israeli channel N12 broadcast images of its journalist, accompanying Israeli soldiers, pressing the detonator to trigger an explosion in southern Lebanon.
It was in Adaïsseh that the Baalbaki family met in the elegant house in white stone and clay tiles, designed by the late painter Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki.
With the war, to monitor the house, his son Lubnan Baalbaki began buying satellite images. At the end of October, videos of blasting operations emerged. The Baalbaki house is destroyed, confirms the 43-year-old artist, conductor of the Philharmonic of Lebanon.
His parents “died a second time”
In the garden is his parents’ mausoleum. “We are trying to get photos to find out if it was damaged,” he says. For him, it’s as if his parents had “died a second time.”
The house housed a bookstore containing nearly 2,000 books and around twenty works of art, including paintings by the patriarch. “There was his desk, his palettes, his brushes, just as he had left them,” says Lubnan. “Even the painting he was working on, on a frame. »
This house “was more than walls and columns,” he explains. “It’s a project that has accompanied us since childhood, influenced us and pushed us towards art.”
A “campaign of destruction”, a real “war crime”
“With its airstrikes, bulldozers, its manually controlled explosions, the Israeli army illegally demolished civilian buildings and razed entire neighborhoods, including houses, schools, mosques, churches,” estimates the Commission in a recent study. Lebanese national movement for human rights, castigating a “campaign of destruction” which represents “a war crime”.
Via satellite images and videos between October 2023 and 2024, the public institution identifies several sites “unjustifiably and systematically destroyed in at least eight villages. »
On its website, the Lebanese NGO Legal Agenda studies the example of Mhaibib. The blasting operations destroyed “the majority of the village […]including 92 buildings –houses and civil infrastructure. »
“The law of war prohibits attacking civilian objects,” adds Hussein Chaabane, investigative journalist with the legal NGO, also evoking, in the event of an attack, a “principle of proportionality” which is not respected here.
“You can’t blow up an entire village because you have a military target,” he insists.
