IN LEBANON, St Charbel is venerated as a miraculous intercessor. On Monday, his statue was left covered in dust in the Christian-majority town of Aitou, after an Israeli air strike that reportedly killed 22 people, including two children, at a residential property.
The UN Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an independent investigation into the incident, referring to “real concerns with respect to . . . the laws of war and principles of distinction, proportion, and proportionality”.
A reporter for The Times, Oliver Marsden, described in his dispatch on Tuesday the discovery by the Red Cross of the body of a one-year-old boy in the back seat of a truck. He observed in the rubble “children’s clothing, a teddy bear, school books and, for those who could bear to look, body parts. A statue of the Maronite Christian patron Saint Charbel stood among the ruins of homes, covered in dust.”
The town, home to mainly Maronite Catholics, is situated in northern Lebanon. The Mayor, Joseph Trad, told Reuters that the strike had hit a house that had been rented to displaced families. There are reports that the building had been entered by a member of Hezbollah.
Mgr Estephan Frangieh, who manages the Saydet Zgharta University Medical Center, a hospital owned by the Zgharta Maronite parish, which is treating survivors of the strike, told The Times: “The attack here in this area is a way for Israel to say, ‘Don’t accept the Shia Muslims’. . . There are rules in war, but this is monstrous.”
The Israeli military said that it had “struck a target belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization”, and that it would investigate reports of civilian deaths. On Sunday, four Israeli soldiers were killed and 58 were injured in a Hezbollah drone strike targeting an army base in northern Israel. The firing of rockets by Hezbollah over the border has caused the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis.
The UNHCR reported this week that, since October 2023, more than 2200 people in Lebanon had been killed, and more than 10,000 had been injured. Israeli evacuation orders had left more than on quarter of the country “under a direct Israeli military evacuation order”. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced.
While many schools have become shelters for the displaced, Fr Mouin Saba, the president of the Apostles School, in Jounieh, a city north of Beirut, told the Catholic news agency ACI Mena this week that about three-quarters of Catholic schools in the country remained open. “Through education, we have the opportunity to spread hope and life,” he said.
Noelle El Hajj, a middle-school teacher who was a child during the Lebanese civil war, spoke of losing months of education: “So much potential and so many dreams were wasted,” she told the agency. “I don’t want the current generation to endure the same fate.”
Last week, Aid to the Church in Need carried a report from local church sources that a church sheltering displaced people in Derdghaya, southern Lebanon, had been hit in a missile attack on 8 October, killing at least eight people.
In Gaza on Monday, an Israeli strike on the al-Aqsa hospital courtyard — where many Gazans are camping — left five people dead and dozens wounded, the charity Médecins sans Frontières reported. The strike caused a fire, which had been “fuelled by the explosions of families’ cooking gas canisters and flames that fed off their plastic tents”, survivors told The New York Times.
“The most difficult scene you can experience is seeing your neighbours burning alive and not being able to do anything to rescue them,” Abed Musleh told the newspaper.
A statement posted by the Israel Defense Forces on social media said that they had carried out “a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a command and control center”.
A second round of polio vaccinations for children in Gaza began this week, despite an air strike reported as killing 22 people at a school-turned-shelter in Nurseirat, which had earmarked as a vaccination centre.
