A sudden Israeli bombing, then a Beirut family’s scramble for safety

Beirut, Lebanon – On the evening of October 10, the Merhis were all at home.

Mahdi sat in the living room while his wife prepared pasta for dinner in the kitchen. Their eldest son, Mustapha, 23, was home from his job as a chef and sat in the one “kids” bedroom with his three sisters.

The Merhi family called this two-bedroom flat in Beirut’s Basta Fawqa neighbourhood home for the previous 18 months. They had moved here to be closer to their eldest daughter’s university.

But shortly after 7pm that night, a year and a half of building a home was lost in an instant.

‘People on the street screaming’

Mustapha spoke to Al Jazeera 17 days later, standing desolately in the wreckage of his family’s home.

In the kitchen, a pot was still on the stove and flies circled the now-burned pasta his mother was preparing for dinner.

Dinner was left on the stove when the family fled. It remained, charred and covered in flies, for days afterwards [Raghed Waked/Al Jazeera]

Stepping out onto the balcony, Mustapha looked across the street.

The people living on the first floor of the building opposite theirs had already replaced their balcony curtains. But the second floor was still covered in ash and dust from the blast.

When the strike made contact, “We heard the sound of rockets,” he said. “All the glass [in the apartment] broke and the building shook.”

The strike in Basta Fawqa took down three buildings, residents said. It also badly damaged many of the surrounding buildings, including where the Merhis lived on the third floor of an adjacent concrete structure.

Israeli attacks killed at least 22 people and injured 117 in two central Beirut locations that evening. The sasaran of one of the strikes was said to be Wafiq Safa, head of Hezbollah’s Coordination and Liaison Unit whose condition is not known, though security sources told Reuters news agency he had survived.

Mahdi and his family ran down the stairs to the first floor. Their downstairs neighbour’s apartment had been badly damaged, with most of the wall and floor missing, allowing them to see right out into the street.

“People on the street were screaming,” he said.

On the first floor, the family encountered a problem. The bomb had blown away the stairs leading down to street level.

People on the street helped the family down. Today, a ladder stands propped up on a pile of rubble on the ground floor for people to use to get up to the first floor.

Mustapha and a friend delicately carried a couple of couches and a washing machine across the rubble, carefully watching their footing. The family is now moving in with a relative in a different neighbourhood.

Up in the destroyed apartment, Mahdi pointed at a strip of wood lying on the floor. It was the front door’s frame, ripped off the wall.

The door’s metal lock, meant to protect them from potential invaders, had turned into a lethal projectile. “It flew across the room,” Mahdi said.

The front door’s lock turned into a lethal projectile, shooting across the room [Raghed Waked/Al Jazeera]

He pointed to the cracks at the base of the walls and over the windows.

But despite losing his home, he saw a lot to be grateful for, too. Many near misses could have resulted in a loved one’s demise.

“Everything broke,” he said. “Thank God nothing hit us.”

The lock that flew across the room just missed hitting him, the windows in the house were cracked before the blast which eased the pressure of the impact, and if the attack occurred a couple of hours later, he may have been killed by the rotating ceiling fan over his bed.

Standing on the balcony looking over the street where he lived for the last 18 months, Mustapha said, “We’re all that’s left in this building.”

Cracking a smile, he says in Arabic and then English, “Hayda Lebnan. This is Lebanon.”

A lone chair remains, balanced on the precipice of a sheer drop to the floors below [Raghed Waked/Al Jazeera]

More than 2,600 killed in Lebanon

Israel and Hezbollah have traded cross-border attacks since October 8, 2023. Hezbollah declared it was supporting Palestinians in Gaza and pressuring Israel, which had launched a war on Gaza the previous day, for a ceasefire. The war came after Hamas’s armed wing launched an attack in Israel during which 1,139 people died and another 240 were taken captive.

On September 23 this year, Israel broadened its attacks on Lebanon, killing more than 550 people in one day.

More than 2,600 people have been killed by Israel in Lebanon during this war and more than 1.2 million people displaced, according to the Lebanese government. Many displaced people have fled to Beirut, including Basta Fawqa and its surrounds.