'This is to displace us' Southern Lebanon reels from Israeli strikes

Hussein Jaber, the head of Nabatieh's civil defence station, picked his way through a mess of shattered concrete and twisted metal piled knee high, surveying what was left of the city's Ottoman open-air market, built in 1910 and destroyed by Israeli airstrikes last Saturday.

- William Christou

"When we were kids, everyone would come here to buy their things. This market wasn't just for Nabatieh, but for all the villages around," said Jaber, 30, gesturing at the ruined promenade, still smoking five days later.

Children's clothes, computer parts and products from the now-levelled stores which used to line the market littered the ground, all covered in a layer of grey ash.

Also hidden among the rubble was a fragment of the US-made munition that destroyed the marketplace. The tailfin of a joint direction attack munition (jdam) - the guidance kit that turns dumb bombs ranging from 500-2,000lbs (230-910kg) into GPS-guided bombs - was found by the Guardian and verified by the crisis, conflict and arms division of Human Rights Watch. A week earlier, another US munition was found at the site of an Israeli airstrike which killed 22 people in central Beirut.

Similar scenes of destruction were repeated across Nabatieh, the second-most populated city in south Lebanon, now eerily silent.