'I felt like my heart was going to explode': Beirut reels from heaviest night of strikes

Dr Taghrid Diab does not follow Colonel Avichae Adraee on social media, so she didn’t see the IDF officer’s warning when it was posted late on Saturday night.

But her daughter did, and she forwarded it to her mother with an urgent question.

“Is this your clinic?”

Col Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic speaking spokesman, sometimes posts evacuation warnings on social media ahead of an Israeli air strike in Lebanon. The posts contain an aerial image with the target building highlighted in red.

Dr Diab, a 57-year-old gynaecologist who provides care to hundreds of women in the Beirut suburb of Dahieh, studied the image her daughter had sent.

It did not take long for her to recognise the apartment building directly next door to her clinic, shaded by an ominous red square. She began to cry.

“After 30 years of work, I knew my clinic was going be destroyed,” she said.

“I felt like my heart was going to explode.”

The Israeli air strike that followed was one of roughly 30 that pounded Dahieh overnight, in the most intense bombing of the Lebanese capital since Israel began its recent escalation against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah last month.

According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, 23 people were killed and 93 wounded in the strikes on Saturday and overnight into Sunday.

The IDF said in a statement it had "conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities" in the area belonging to Hezbollah. Israel says it is targeting the militant group to allow its citizens to return to the north of the country, where they have come under intensified rocket fire from southern Lebanon over the past year.

Hezbollah is the dominant force in Dahieh, a collection of neighbourhoods south of Beirut that has been heavily targeted during this recent escalation.

It was in Dahieh that a bunker-busting Israeli missile strike killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, a little over a week ago, flattening six residential buildings in the process.

And another similar strike reportedly killed Nasrallah’s presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine, in the area on Thursday night, although this has not been confirmed.

The once busy area is now largely devoid of life. Israeli drones can be easily heard buzzing overhead in the quiet left by the recent exodus of the suburb’s nearly 500,000 residents.

By the time the BBC arrived at the site of Dr Diab’s clinic on Sunday morning, the target building had vanished and been replaced by a smoking crater 9 metres (30 feet) deep, filled with twisted metal and mangled family possessions.

No one was killed in this strike, but Dr Diab’s clinic was destroyed, just as she had feared. She had decided to suspend services a few days earlier. “When they started to hit everywhere,” she said.

The destruction of the clinic was “a disaster”, she added. “Women from all over Dahieh and beyond depend on this clinic. Before the bombing we were seeing 50 patients every day.”

That service would likely now be out of commission for a very long time, she said, because the premises and medical equipment was likely all destroyed and was all uninsured.

One floor below Dr Diab’s clinic, Shakeeb Saleh’s lighting shop was also destroyed by the blast, and his ornate lighting hung blackened and charred.

“All of my stock has been smashed or burned, it is a huge, huge loss,” said Saleh, 73.

“It took me years to rebuild after a bomb hit my warehouse during the Israeli invasion of 1982. Now I am here again.”

Video footage posted on social media over the weekend showed widespread and significant destruction in Dahieh, with multi-storey buildings reduced to rubble.

A senior member of staff at the Al Rassoul Al-Azam hospital, one of the few remaining emergency healthcare facilities in Dahieh, which sits just150 metres from Dr Diab’s destroyed clinic, told the BBC that the hospital had reverberated with nearby strikes over the weekend.

The member of staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the situation at the hospital, said that it was operating at a severely limited capacity and had been receiving seriously wounded patients from strikes, including people with traumatic head and chest injuries.

Air strikes on the Dahieh area continued into the day on Sunday, and appeared to be intensifying ahead of an expected retaliation by Israel against Iran in the coming days.

Dr Diab’s voice caught in her throat when she described the neighbourhood around her clinic before the bombing began. “This area was always busy – schools, shops, clinics, there was traffic, people walking, life everywhere,” she said.

She opened her clinic with the dream that her daughters would one day work there with her. All three went to medical school, and the eldest, newly graduated, had just joined her staff before the clinic was destroyed.

That dream was now on hold, probably for some time. But not dead. “I will go back to Dahieh and work with my daughters,” she said.