'We won't leave' People in Baalbek defiant in face of Israeli strikes

Fadi was praying last Wednesday afternoon when the ground began to shake. At first he thought it was an earthquake, but then he saw a plume of smoke rising from his house. He rushed home and began to dig. One by one, he pulled the bodies of his family members from the rubble, all eight of them killed in an Israeli airstrike.

- William Christou

Fadi was praying last Wednesday afternoon when the ground began to shake. At first he thought it was an earthquake, but then he saw a plume of smoke rising from his house. He rushed home and began to dig. One by one, he pulled the bodies of his family members from the rubble, all eight of them killed in an Israeli airstrike. "I pulled my brother out of the rubble in pieces. I found his four-year-old daughter's hand in the branches of an olive tree 20 metres away," he said. The owner of a gaming cafe in Bednayel, a town on the outskirts of the historic eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek, he asked only to be identified by his first name for fear of being targeted by the Israeli drones that circled overhead.

The day before, Fadi's brother Ali had asked him if his family could stay at his house since they lived next to a petrol station and he feared it would blow up in the event of an Israeli bombing; a local family had burned to death in an earlier Israeli bombing and Ali did not want his wife and two children to suffer the same fate.

All four were killed on Wednesday along with Ali's wife's parents and two of her sisters.

Five hours before Fadi's home was bombed, Israel's military had ordered the residents of Baalbek and two nearby towns, Douris and Ain Bourday, to evacuate ahead of what it said were strikes on Hezbollah - the first time it had issued evacuation orders outside southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.