‘It was like an earthquake’: Israeli strikes kill 12 medics in bloody attack on Lebanon’s healthcare system
The Israeli strike on the healthcare centre was so huge that it felt like an earthquake. Without warning, the missile tore through the four-storey building in southern Lebanon, punching open concrete floors, eviscerating every wall, and gouging out a multistorey crater in the ground.
The dozen medics based there, whose job it is to respond to the injured across 20 nearby villages, were finishing dinner. There was nowhere to hide.
“The bodies were everywhere, in pieces,” says Ali Shaimi, 51, a first responder with the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Authority, which ran the centre. He is speaking to The Independent beside the skeletal remains of the building, which is still partly on fire and sending acrid, choking smoke into the air.
Describing the attack as like an “earthquake”, he says he rushed to tend to the wounded, only to realise there were none.
Abbas Hijazi, 36, another rescuer who was in a building across the street when the explosion happened, said the force of the blast smashed the doors in, briefly penning him in.
“The faces of the medics were so disfigured, you couldn’t work out who was who,” he adds, visibly shaken, to the staccato beat of nearby Israeli strikes. “It was incredibly hard. These are our colleagues, our friends. We work with them every day.”
This is Burj Qalaouiyah, about 11km from Lebanon’s south-east border with Israel and firmly within the epicentre of Israel’s massive assault on the country and armed group Hezbollah, which erupted two weeks ago.
Abdullah Nour Al Din, who works at the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Authority, tells The Independent the clinic provided services to 20 surrounding villages, including an emergency ambulance, an emergency room, a pharmacy, a first aid centre and a clinic.
On Friday it was pounded by a missile strike killing at least 12 doctors, paramedics and nurses, according to the World Health Organisation.
On the same day, two paramedics were also killed in an attack on a health facility four kilometres south in Al-Souaneh, the WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X, adding that it was “a tragic development in the escalating Middle East crisis.”
Israeli military told The Independent it was aware of reports of a strike in Borj Qalaouiye and the incident is under review. Medical facilities are protected under international law, and direct attacks on them, if carried out with criminal intent, could amount to war crimes, according to Human Rights Watch.
But the Israeli military’s Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee warned on Saturday that the army would strike ambulances and medical facilities it accused of being used unlawfully by Hezbollah in Lebanon “for military purposes”, though it did not provide evidence for the claim.
A Hezbollah official said the group was not using ambulances and medical facilities for military purposes. Hajj Salman Harb, Hezbollah’s media officer for the surrounding area in Burj Qalaouiyah, accused Israel of “terrorising civilians” by targeting medical and civilian facilities.
Lebanon was dragged into the regional conflict earlier this month when Iran-backed Hezbollah fired at Israel after massive US and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader.
