Senior International Investigations Correspondent, BBC World Service
Julia Ramadan was terrified – the war between Israel and Hezbollah was escalating and she had a nightmare that her family home had been bombed. When she sent her brother a panicked voice note from her apartment in Beirut, he encouraged her to join him in Ain el Delb, a sleepy village in southern Lebanon.
“It’s safe here,” he assured her. “Come stay with us until things settle down.”
Earlier that month, Israel stepped up air campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon, in response to escalating rocket attacks by the Iran-backed armed group that have killed civilians and displaced tens of thousands more from their homes in northern Israel.
Ashraf was convinced that their apartment block would be a haven, so Julia joined him. But the next day, September 29, he was subjected to the deadliest Israeli attack of the conflict. Hit by Israeli rockets, the entire six-story building collapsed, killing 73 people.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say the building was targeted because it was Hezbollah’s “terrorist command center” and that it had “eliminated” a Hezbollah commander. He added that the “vast majority” of those killed in the strike were “confirmed to be terrorist operatives”.
But a BBC Eye investigation confirmed the identities of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and found evidence suggesting only six were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing. None of the ones we’ve identified seem to have a higher rank. The BBC World Service also found that the other 62 were civilians – 23 of them children.
Among the dead were babies only a few months old, like Nouh Kobeissi in apartment -2b. In apartment -1c, school teacher Abeer Hallak was killed along with his wife and three sons. Three floors above, Amal Hakawati died along with three generations of her family – her husband, children and two granddaughters.
Ashraf and Julia were always close, sharing everything with each other. “It was like a black box, holding all my secrets,” he says.
On the afternoon of September 29, the brothers and sisters had just returned home from delivering food to families who had fled the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon have been displaced by the war.
Ashraf was in the shower and Julia was sitting in the living room with her father, helping him upload the video to social media. Their mother Janan was in the kitchen, cleaning.
Then, without warning, they heard a deafening bang. The whole building shook, and a massive cloud of dust and smoke poured into their apartment.
“I shouted:” Julia! Julia! “, says Ashraf.
“She replied, “I’m here. “
“I looked at my father, who was struggling to get off the sofa due to an existing leg injury, and saw my mother running towards the front door.”
Julia’s nightmare played out in real life.
“Julia was hyperventilating, crying so hard on the sofa. I was trying to calm her down and told her we needed to get out. Then she had another attack.”
Video footage of the strike, shared online by the BBC and confirmed by the BBC, shows four Israeli rockets flying through the air towards the building. Seconds later, the block collapses.
Ashraf, along with many others, was trapped under the rubble. He started calling, but the only voice he could hear was his father, who told him he could still hear Julia and that she was alive. None of them could hear Ashraf’s mother.
Ashraf sent a voice note to friends in the neighborhood to warn them. The next few hours were excruciating. He could hear rescuers wading through the debris – and residents wept as they discovered loved ones dead. “I was just thinking, please God, not Julia. I can’t live this life without Julia.”
Ashraf was finally pulled from the rubble hours later, with only minor injuries.
He discovered that his mother was rescued but died in hospital. Julia suffocated under the rubble. His father later told him that Julia’s last words were appeals to her brother.
In November, a cease-fire agreement was agreed between Israel and Hezbollah aimed at ending the conflict. The deal gives a 60-day deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw from southern Lebanon and for Hezbollah to withdraw its forces and weapons north of the Litani River. As this January 26 deadline approaches, we tried to learn more about the deadliest single Israeli attack on Lebanon in years.
In the apartment below Julio and Ashraf, Hawraa and Ali Fares hosted family members displaced by the war. Among them was Hawra’s sister Batoul, who, like Julia, had arrived the previous day – with her husband and two small children. They escaped intense bombardment near the Lebanon-Israel border, in areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
“We were hesitant about where to go,” says Batoul. “And then I said to my husband: ‘Let’s go to Ain El Delb.’ My sister said their building was safe and they couldn’t hear the bombing nearby. “
Batoul’s husband, Mohammed Fares, was killed in the Ain el Delb attack. The pillar fell on Batoul and her children. She says no one answered her calls for help. She finally managed to lift herself, but her four-year-old daughter Hawraa was fatally knocked down. Miraculously, her child Malak survived.
Denise and Moheyaldeen al-Baba lived three floors below Batoul. That Sunday, Denise invited her brother Hisham to lunch.
The impact of the strike was brutal, says Hisham.
“The second rocket pinned me to the floor … the whole wall fell on top of me.”
He spent seven hours under the rubble.
“I heard a voice far away. People talking. Screaming and …” Cover her. Remove her. Pick up the stone. He’s still alive. It’s a child. Raise this child. “I mean… Oh my God.
When Hisham was finally rescued, he found his niece’s fiancee waiting to see if she was alive. He lied to him and told him he was fine. They found her body three days later.
Hisham lost four members of his family – his sister, brother-in-law and their two children. He told us that he had lost his faith and no longer believed in God.
To learn more about who died, we analyzed data from the Lebanese Ministry of Health, videos, social media posts, as well as talking to survivors of the attack.
In particular, we wanted to question the IDF’s response to the media – immediately after the attack – that the apartment block was a Hezbollah command center. We asked the IDF several times what the command center was, but it did not provide an explanation.
So we began sifting through social media tributes, gravesites, public health records and videos of funerals to determine if those killed in the attack had a military affiliation with Hezbollah.
We could only find evidence that six of the 68 dead we identified were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing.
Hezbollah memorial photos for the six men use the label “mujahid,” meaning “fighter.” In contrast, the taller figures are called “qaid”, meaning “commander” – and we found no such labels used by the group to describe those killed.
We asked the IDF if the six Hezbollah fighters we identified were the intended targets of the strike. He did not answer this question.
One of the Hezbollah fighters we identified was Batoul’s husband, Mohammed Fares. Batoul told us that her husband, like many other men in southern Lebanon, is a reservist for the group, although she added that he has never been paid by Hezbollah, held a formal rank, or participated in combat.
Israel sees Hezbollah as one of its main threats, and the group has been designated a terrorist organization by Israel, many Western governments and the Gulf Arab states.
But in addition to its large, well-armed military wing, Hezbollah is also an influential political party, holding seats in the Lebanese parliament. In many parts of the country it is woven into the social fabric, providing a network of social services.
In response to our investigation, the IDF stated: “IDF attacks on military targets are subject to the relevant provisions of international law, including the taking of feasible precautions, and are carried out after an assessment that the expected collateral damage and civilian casualties are not excessive in relation to the expected military advantage.” from the strike.
He also previously told the BBC that he had carried out “evacuation procedures” for the strike on Ain el delb, but everyone we spoke to said they had not received a warning.
UN experts have expressed concern Proportionality and necessity of Israeli airstrikes on residential buildings in densely populated areas in Lebanon.
This pattern of targeting entire buildings – resulting in significant civilian casualties – has been a recurring feature of Israel’s latest conflict with Hezbollah, which began when the group escalated rocket attacks in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Between October 2023 and November 2024, Lebanese authorities say Israeli forces killed more than 3,960 people in Lebanon, many of them civilians. During the same time period, Israeli authorities say at least 47 civilians have been killed by Hezbollah rockets fired from South Lebanon. At least 80 Israeli soldiers were also killed fighting in southern Lebanon or as a result of rocket attacks on northern Israel.
The rocket strike in Ain el Delb is the deadliest Israeli attack on a building in Lebanon in at least 18 years.
The village remains haunted by its influence. When we visited, more than a month after the strike, the father continued to visit the site daily, hoping for news of his 11-year-old son, whose body had yet to be found.
Ashraf Ramadan also returns to sift through the ruins, searching for remnants of the memories his family built over the two decades they lived there.
He shows me the door to his dressing room, still decorated with pictures of footballers and pop stars he once admired. Then he pulls the teddy bear out of the debris and tells me that it was always on his bed.
“Nothing I find here will make up for the people we lost,” he says.
Additional reporting by Scarlett Barter and Jake Tacchi
