Lebanon Fears that bombing will stoke sectarian tensions

Ali Daher first heard the explosion and then he felt the pain. An Israeli aircraft loitering high above had shot two rockets at the building next door, collapsing the top two floors and showering him and his two sons with a deadly spray of concrete and jagged metal.

- William Christou

The target of the strike was the Dar al-Salaam hotel - Arabic for "house of peace" - in the southern Lebanese town of Wardaniyah, converted in the last weeks into a government displacement centre for 24 families forced to flee their homes under Israeli bombing. Originally a German-Lebanese cultural centre, bronze statuettes and antiquities had been pushed to the side to make room for mattresses and boxes of aid.

The strike on 9 October killed five and injured 12. It was the first time Wardaniyah had been targeted by Israel, but was the latest in a series of strikes on buildings hosting displaced people in parts of Lebanon thought to be safe. "We wanted to go somewhere safe, where there is no bombing, war or [militias], so we came here. Why did they strike here? We don't know," said Daher, a 36-year-old mine clearance operator who was displaced from Tyre, south Lebanon, on 30 September. He held out his fractured wrist and pointed to his one-year-old son Kareem's arm, which had been bandaged after a piece of debris tore it open.

The effects are also being felt in Lebanese society, where officials have said the fear of strikes have inflamed tensions between the country's many sects and the largely Shia Muslim displaced, whom they are afraid to welcome. Unconfirmed rumours of Hezbollah fighters hiding among the displaced have proliferated, despite the vast majority of displaced being civilians.