SMOKE WAS STILL billowing from the mounds of debris that was all that was left of a multistorey building in Dahiyeh hit at 4am earlier that morning. Beirut’s southern suburbs have been heavily targeted since Israel launched a widespread bombing campaign across Lebanon in September.
A neighbour in one of the residential towers adjacent to the smouldering crater left by the strike said they had heard someone screaming for a few hours beneath the rubble but no longer heard them. “We are witnessing unbelievable levels of violence,” says another resident, Gassan Jouneh, who says: “The missiles that Israel is launching at Lebanon are of the heaviest ever.”
I’m only allowed to be at the site of this strike because Hezbollah has granted permission for the media to tour the area and see the latest damage inflicted by Israeli strikes. Over the course of the afternoon, more than a hundred journalists …