Interview with 66yo Hesni from Al Nasreye, Beqaa, Southern Lebanon. Hesny is married to 3 wives. His youngest child is 6 and oldeset is 40. He has 6 grandchildren.

Both his home and his son's home were bombed on the first day of the war in Lebanon on 23 September 2024. He had a gathering at his home that day of about 12 people. They decided to sit in the backyard, at the back of the house when usually they would host guests in the front of the house where there are views of the landscape ahead. Had that been the case, they would have all been killed that day as the airstrike hit the front of the house.

That day, they sat in the back whilst one of his wives decided she would slice some potatoes in the kitchen (at the front of the house). He asked her to leave it in the kitchen at the front of the house so she could join the rest of the family. The bomb striked the kitchen area and front room. Miraculously she came running to the back of the house and was unhurt.

"No one was martyred that day only because they were all gathered out the back of the house. Alhumdulilah."

Most of his property was destroyed from the inside and out. Shards of shattered glass from windows and doors were everywhere, fallen beams, upturned and destroyed furniture buried in concrete rubble now marked his home. Rooms unrecognisasble. Mattresses and children's blankets found atop trees. In the rubble tat was his son's home, a baby's car seat wobbled in the wind.

"They terrorise the living and the dead. We're not sure what they want with the dead," Hesny said as he pointed to a desecrated cemetary next to his property.