Lebanese mother seeks justice after Israeli air strike kills family

In one afternoon, Amani Bazzi went from being a doting mother-of-four to a widow grieving three young children.

An Israeli strike in south Lebanon killed them as the family was returning home after having lunch with her parents.

“Our whole life was our kids. We did everything together,” said Bazzi from the Beirut hospital where her eldest daughter Aseel, 13, is being treated for devastating head-to-toe wounds.

“Why should they have been part of this horrific scene?” asked 33-year-old Bazzi. “Why did this happen to us?”

Despite the enormous challenges they face to rebuild their shattered lives, both she and Aseel said they were determined to fight for accountability. “We will carry on until the end... to reach the international community” and global courts “to get justice for Chadi, Hadi, Cylan and Celine,” Bazzi said.

Aseel, her voice soft but her gaze firm despite her injuries, said: “When I get out (of hospital) and stand on my feet, the first thing I want to do is get justice for them. “They were wronged, they were innocent. This shouldn’t have happened to them.”

A ceasefire that came into effect on Nov.27, 2024 was supposed to end more than a year of hostilities including two months of all-out war between Israel and Hizbollah.

On Sept.21, Bazzi and her husband Chadi Charara, 46, who sold cars, were driving from her parents’ house in Bint Jbeil, near the border with Israel. With them were Aseel, their daughter Celine, 10, and twin toddlers Hadi and Cylan — a boy and a girl.

They planned to visit her grandfather on their way home to the coastal city of Tyre, she said.

“We weren’t afraid because we aren’t part of a political party,” Bazzi said. Besides, they had become used to the sound of Israeli aircraft overhead.

When the strike hit, they had stopped in the car to greet a passerby on a motorbike, a relative of her husband who was also killed.

Some 340 people have been killed and almost 1,000 wounded in Lebanon since the ceasefire, according to health ministry figures.

UN rights office spokesman Thameen Al Kheetan said on Tuesday that the office had verified at least 127 of the dead were civilians.

An AFP photographer saw the wreckage of the family vehicle, which Bazzi said contained items like the twins’ stroller, tiny shoes they had just bought for Hadi, and food from her mother.

The Israeli military said in a statement that the raid killed a Hizbollah operative, without naming him. It acknowledged that “as a result of the strike, several uninvolved civilians were killed”, adding that it “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals.” It said the incident was under review.

At the funeral, crowds of mourners gathered around Bazzi and her family’s coffins, two of them tiny.

They were all draped in the colours of the Lebanese flag with its cedar tree — unlike at funerals for Hizbollah members where coffins usually bear the group’s yellow standard.

Bazzi was herself badly wounded in the strike, and attended the funeral on a stretcher, her hospital armband visible on her wrist.

Home videos show the bright-eyed twins, aged one year and seven months, laughing and playing together, or her daughter Celine singing.

Celine was like a second mother to the twins, Bazzi said. “Now for sure she’s their mother in heaven.”

UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Morris Tidball-Binz, told AFP the attack that killed Bazzi’s family “was a targeted killing of unarmed civilians.” He said it violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and international humanitarian law. Tidball-Binz is an independent expert mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations. He said in a statement that Israel was bound to international human rights law and international humanitarian law obligations, “the violation of which amounts in this case to arbitrary killings... and a war crime.”

Bazzi said her family home in Tyre was destroyed last year when an Israeli raid on a nearby building sparked a blaze.

Agence France-Presse