BEIRUT– The family WhatsApp group chat was full of constant messages. Israel was intensifying its air attacks in towns and cities in southern Lebanon. Everyone was glued to the news.

Reda Gharib woke up unusually early that day, September 23. Living a continent away, in Senegal, she scrolled through videos and images shared by her sisters and aunts of explosions in her neighborhood in Tyre, Lebanon’s ancient coastal city.

His aunts decided to leave for Beirut. His father, his mother and his three sisters had no such plans.

Then his father announced to the group that he had received a Call from the Israeli army to evacuate. or risk their lives. After that, the talk fell silent. Ten minutes later, Gharib called his father. There was no response.

The Gharibs’ apartment had been directly hit by an Israeli airstrike. The family did not have time to go out. Gharib’s father, Ahmed, a retired Lebanese army officer, his mother, Hanan, and his three sisters were killed.

“The entire apartment was gone. It’s about going back to basics. As if there was nothing there,” said Gharib, speaking from the Senegalese capital, Dakar, where he has lived since 2020.

The Israeli army said it hit a Hezbollah site that hides rocket and missile launchers.

Gharib said his family had no connection to Hezbollah. The direct hit destroyed their apartment, while those above and below only suffered damage, suggesting that a specific part of the building was targeted. Gharib said it was his family’s home.

The attack was one of more than 1,600 that Israel said it carried out on September 23. the first day of an intensified bombardment of Lebanon that he has liberated during the last month. More than 500 people died that day, a figure that had not been seen in Gaza in a single day until the second week, said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a London-based conflict monitoring group.

Israel has promised to paralyze Hezbollah end more than a year of cross-border fire by Iran-backed militant group which began the day after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, triggered the war in Gaza. It says its attacks target Hezbollah members and infrastructure. But there are also hundreds of civilians among the more than 2,000 people who died in last month’s bombing: often entire families killed in their homes.

Since then, the street where the Gharib family lived – an area of ​​shops, residential buildings and international agency offices in the al-Housh district of Tire – has been hit by repeated airstrikes and is now deserted.

Gharib, 27, a pilot and businessman, moved to Senegal in search of a better future but always planned to return to Lebanon to start a family.

He was close to his three sisters, the keeper of their secrets and their best friend, he said. Growing up, his father was frequently absent, so he and his mother took charge of family affairs.

The last time he visited his family was in May 2023, when his sister Maya, an engineering student, got engaged. He had planned to marry on October 12, but as tensions with Israel grew in September, Gharib’s plans to return home for the wedding were uncertain. She told him she would put it off until he could get there.

After the strike, her fiancé, also an army officer, found her body and that of the rest of her family in the morgue of a hospital in Tire.

“She was not meant to celebrate her wedding. Instead, we paraded her like a bride to paradise,” Gharib said. On the day the wedding was to take place, she posted photos of her sister, including her wedding dress.

His sister Racha, 24, was about to graduate as a dentist and planned to open her own clinic. “She loved life,” he said.

Her younger sister, Nour, 20, was studying as a dietitian and preparing to be a personal trainer. Gharib called her the “laughter of the house.”

Now there is nothing left of his family except a few photos on his phone and in social media posts.

“I am very hurt. But I know the pain will be harder when I come to Lebanon,” Gharib said. “There isn’t even a portrait of them hanging on the walls. His clothes are not there. His smell is no longer in the house. The house has completely disappeared.”

“They took my family and their memories.”