The Missing Bride of Anqoun
In Beirut’s coastal neighborhood of Ain el-Mreisseh, many of the residents of the Hamad Building, a seven-story apartment block, were preparing lunch. The building was one street back from the city’s corniche, a wide promenade filled with joggers, children riding bicycles, and fishermen casting lines into a serene Mediterranean. It was a little after 2 P.M. on April 8th.
One of the three apartments on the first floor was home to Samih Hassan, a ninety-two-year-old retiree who had served in the Lebanese security forces, and his wife, Amal. The couple had no children together, but their apartment, a two-bedroom, had become crowded in recent weeks: Amal’s sister Ibtisam had moved in, as had two nieces, Malak and Zahra Abboud. An Ethiopian domestic worker, Tesfanesh, also lived there.
The Abboud sisters came from Anqoun, a hillside town situated above the coastal city of Sidon, which is about an hour south of Beirut. They had left Anqoun in mid-March, fleeing the latest war that had erupted, days earlier, between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite paramilitary group. An Israeli evacuation order had been issued for an adjacent town, and they worried that it might soon extend to theirs. The sisters had taken refuge in Amal’s apartment before, during a previous war.
Their parents, Qassem and Hanan, remained in Anqoun. Qassem ran a money-transfer-and-currency-exchange franchise, and also an office that provided internet service to the town. Both of his daughters were single and lived at home. Malak, thirty-eight, was her father’s right hand, helping manage his businesses. Zahra was completing a master’s in biochemistry. She was twenty-seven, but her father liked to tell people that she was younger, because, he said, “she’s my baby.” She took shifts in a pharmacy and tutored students, but was having trouble finding a permanent job. Like many in Lebanon, her plans and ambitions had been put on hold by the hostilities.
On the morning of April 8th, there was reason to believe that the waiting might end. For the first time in weeks, Beirut felt optimistic, a calm that seemed reflected in the weather. The sky was clear, the sea flat and bright, the horizon unmarred by the vertical smoke of air strikes. It was the first day of a ceasefire between Iran, Israel, and the United States, which, according to the Pakistani negotiators who had brokered the deal, included Lebanon, too. The geography of displacement immediately began to shift. More than 1.2 million people had fled Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon and other parts of the country. For weeks, many had slept in cars, classrooms, and makeshift shelters, and now they started moving home again. Traffic thickened along the roads leading out of Beirut.
By early afternoon, however, the calm had been shattered by almost two dozen Israeli air strikes. Israeli officials said that the attacks, some of which were preceded by evacuation orders, did not violate the ceasefire, which they insisted did not include Lebanon. Then, around 2:15 P.M., some fifty Israeli warplanes launched a ferocious ten-minute barrage of strikes on more than a hundred sites across the country—an operation that Israel called Eternal Darkness. There were no warnings. What had begun as a day of anticipated reprieve would later be referred to in Lebanon as Black Wednesday. It was the deadliest day of the war.
In the Hamad Building, Amal and Tesfanesh were in the kitchen, frying a dish of chicken liver. In a bedroom, Zahra was preparing for the afternoon prayer. Malak, Ibtisam, and Samih were in the dining room, waiting to eat. In the lounge room, beige sofas bordered a deep-red Oriental rug worn smooth in places by years of use. Fading photographs of Samih in uniform lined the walls.
Neighbors would later say that they did not hear the approach of the weaponry that hit the lower floors of the Hamad Building. Security cameras mounted outside a bicycle-rental shop at street level captured the aftermath. First, the frame filled with dust. Household items, including an air-conditioner, shot outward, slamming into the building across the narrow street. Moments later, dazed residents staggered out as others rushed in to help.
Mohammad Bacha, a thirty-year-old real-estate agent, was one of the helpers. He had been jogging along the seaside promenade, about a kilometre away, when he saw gray smoke rising over Ain el-Mreisseh, where he lived. “I looked left and right,” he said. “Beirut was black. It was covered in black smoke.” He ran back, knowing that his brother, who also lived in the neighborhood, would be there, either injured or trying to assist those who were. He found him at the Hamad Building, pulling survivors from the debris.
In the wreckage of the first floor, Bacha saw a young Syrian man, who he knew did not live in the building, use a fire extinguisher to douse Samih Hassan, who was badly burned and calling for help. The force of the blast had thrown Samih through what had been a wall and into a neighboring apartment. He was rushed to a hospital. On the floor nearby lay Amal’s sister, Ibtisam, burned and unresponsive. Bacha carried her body outside.
Another man brought out Malak, injured but alive. “I ran to the corniche and stopped a passing car,” he told me. “The ambulances hadn’t yet arrived.” Zahra was nowhere to be seen. Her aunt Amal and Tesfanesh were believed to be trapped beneath the rubble of the kitchen.
As Bacha moved toward the second floor, he heard the building begin to crack. A wall had buckled at a sharp angle. “Get out!” he shouted. Fifteen minutes after the air strike, half of the Hamad Building collapsed. Concrete dust clotted the air, turning the afternoon dark. Bacha switched on the light of his cellphone, and, with others, continued searching, following traces of blood on broken concrete and stone.
Qassem Abboud was at work in Anqoun when the bombs fell. His brother-in-law, a bachelor in his mid-fifties who lived in Ain el-Mreisseh, called him in tears. He told him that the Hamad Building had been hit and that the side in which the family lived had caved in. “I dropped everything,” Qassem said. He did not own a car, so he ran to a rental office, took a vehicle, picked up his wife, and sped north. As they drove, they called their daughters. At first, they heard the calls ring. Then the lines went dead.
Qassem phoned the elder of his two sons, Ali, who, like his uncle, Samih, had joined the Lebanese security forces. Ali lived north of Beirut. He had gone home for lunch and was preparing to return to duty. He was praying when his phone began ringing repeatedly. He reached Ain el-Mreisseh before his parents.
The April 8th strikes ravaged a range of sites across the country. In Beirut, the charred remains of employees were found inside a branch of a well-known nut-and-confectionery store situated on a street usually choked with traffic. In residential neighborhoods, families were buried beneath the debris of their own homes. In the Bekaa Valley, an attack hit a cemetery during a funeral. Operation Eternal Darkness “was based on weeks of precise intelligence and careful planning,” an Israeli Army spokesman said, in a video posted to social media, adding that the targets included Hezbollah command centers and missile infrastructure. Members of Hezbollah were moving out of their “usual strongholds,” the spokesman claimed, and into other areas. The bombings continued into the evening, including on a residential building in the capital, where a poet and her husband were among the dead. Lebanon’s Ministry of Health reported that at least three hundred and fifty-seven people were killed, with more than twelve hundred wounded.
The current war is the second between Hezbollah and Israel in less than two years. The first began in 2023, when Hezbollah opened a “support front” in solidarity with Hamas, after its October 7th attacks. Large swaths of southern Lebanon and northern Israel emptied out, as missiles and rockets fell nearly every day for almost fourteen months. More than four thousand Lebanese and a hundred and twenty Israelis were killed. A truce was reached in November of 2024. During the truce, Israel killed more than three hundred and fifty Lebanese, a number that comprised Hezbollah members as well as civilians, including children. Hezbollah launched one attack—on an Israeli military outpost in Lebanese territory, which resulted in no casualties—but otherwise held its fire. That ended on March 2nd of this year, when the group launched half a dozen rockets in retaliation for the Israeli-American assassination of its patron, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and, it said, “in defense of Lebanon.”
That same day, the Lebanese government proclaimed Hezbollah’s armed wing illegal—an unprecedented move. For more than three decades, Hezbollah’s arsenal had been considered part of the country’s national defense. But not anymore. “We announce a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities and restrict its role to the political sphere,” Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said. “We declare our rejection of any military or security operations launched from Lebanese territory outside the framework of legitimate institutions.” Hezbollah repudiated the announcement, saying that it would keep its weapons. Its leaders have repeatedly contended that their resistance to occupation is protected under international law and the Lebanese constitution, if not under the new domestic policy. (Throughout the ceasefire, Israel had maintained control of five newly seized hilltops in southern Lebanon, in addition to other disputed territory it has held for decades.)
For many Lebanese, this war feels more difficult than the last. International attention has shifted to the broader conflict with Iran, and humanitarian aid has been limited. The country has yet to recover from the previous war’s losses: of life, of income, of infrastructure, of territory. The World Bank estimates that reconstruction efforts from that war will cost eleven billion dollars. Israel now occupies sixty-eight villages in southern Lebanon, amounting to roughly ten per cent of the country’s physical territory. Israel is razing and looting homes and has vowed to prevent hundreds of thousands of residents, predominantly Shiites, though also members of other religious communities, from returning. Some Israeli ministers are now calling for the establishment of settlements in southern Lebanon.
The possibility of long-term displacement is exacerbating social tensions, in part because Israel has struck mixed sectarian areas where Shiite families have taken refuge, claiming that they have ties to Hezbollah. Many, though not all, Shiites support Hezbollah, as do Lebanese from other religious groups. (In addition to its military wing, Hezbollah has representatives in Parliament, ministers in the cabinet, and operates schools, hospitals, a financial institution, and an ambulance service.) Recently, in Christian villages in the south, residents said that they were warned by Israeli forces to expel their displaced Shiite neighbors or risk being attacked. Some landlords have refused to rent to Shiites altogether, and certain municipal governments have required background checks and restricted visitors. Many Lebanese have nonetheless taken in the displaced, despite the risks.
Most of the residents of the Hamad Building had lived there for decades. The building itself has been around for seventy years; a man in his nineties, who lived nearby and told me that his roots in the area were so deep “they reach the sea,” said that he remembered the construction of the building when he was young. It stood among a cluster of dilapidated but still elegant homes with soaring ceilings, trifora windows, and intricately carved balustrades. Across the street was a sandstone mosque, with pointed arches, built in 1887.
One afternoon, I visited Aref Chkeir, the local mukhtar, in his office, a few streets away from the site of the strike. He was using a glue stick to affix postage stamps to official papers, including death notices for some of the building’s residents. “We, as Lebanese, have suffered so much that on Judgment Day we will go straight to heaven,” he said. “God will say we have received our punishment here on earth.” Chkeir holds a position that his father and grandfather held before him. Ain el-Mreisseh, he said, is traditionally Sunni, though it is also home to Christians, Druze, and Shiites. Syrians live there, too. (Some apartments in the Hamad Building had been sublet to Syrian families.)
Chkeir would not estimate the population of the neighborhood—Lebanon has not had a census in more than ninety years, in part to avoid disputes about its sectarian power-sharing system—but he pointed to voter-registration records as a rough guide. Of about twelve thousand total registered voters, some sixteen hundred were Shiites. More than a thousand of those, he said, traced their origins to Anqoun.
Like others in the neighborhood, he struggled to understand why the Hamad Building had been struck. It was within walking distance of the American University of Beirut and its affiliated hospital. The old U.S. Embassy building, the one that was bombed in 1983, was down the street. “Maybe this is payback,” a relative of one of the dead told me. Speculation circulated quietly. Some wondered whether a Hezbollah target had been inside the Hamad Building, or visiting. Suspicion fell on Shiite families, though many dismissed these conjectures; in Ain el-Mreisseh, people know their neighbors. “Even if there was somebody,” Chkeir said, “why bring down a building and kill so many people?”
A spokesperson for the Israeli military, when asked why the Hamad Building was hit, said that the site was “Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure,” but declined to elaborate further. More broadly, the spokesperson said that “at least 250 Hezbollah terror operatives were eliminated” during Operation Eternal Darkness, and that Hezbollah uses “the civilians of Lebanon as human shields.” (A Hezbollah spokesman denied both claims.) The Lebanese state has filed a complaint with the U.N. Security Council and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The attacks “targeted densely populated residential areas during peak hours,” it wrote, and the majority of the dead were unarmed civilians, which constituted “a blatant violation of the principles of international law, the United Nations Charter, and international humanitarian law.”
A munition fragment was recovered from Amal’s dining room. Before it was taken by Lebanon’s military-intelligence agency, I photographed it and sent the images to Peter Bouckaert, a senior director with the human-rights group Fortify Rights who has long worked on weapons identification. He and other weapons experts with whom he shared the images were unanimous in their view that it was the remnants of a nose cone of a small-diameter precision-guided bomb called a GBU-39B. The munition has “a very accurate guidance system,” Bouckaert told me, and a fuse that allows it to “penetrate inside the building before exploding.” It is manufactured by Boeing, one of the largest American defense contractors.
When Ali Abboud got to the Hamad Building, he searched frantically for Malak and Zahra. The lower floors of the building were on fire, and he could hear gas cannisters, common in Lebanese kitchens, exploding. He entered what remained of his aunt’s apartment. The pot of fried chicken liver was still sitting on the counter, oddly undisturbed. By the time his parents, Qassem and Hanan, arrived, he’d learned that Malak had been rescued and taken to a hospital, and that his aunt Ibtisam was in a morgue.
Qassem and Hanan drove from one hospital to another, trying to find Malak, while Ali stayed behind and kept looking for Zahra. At the Clemenceau Medical Center, affiliated with Johns Hopkins International, Qassem was told that a woman had recently been admitted, and that she was in surgery. He pulled up a photo of Malak on his phone and showed it to a staff member. “Was this her?” he asked. The staff member offered a pained smile in acknowledgment. Qassem left his wife at the hospital and returned to the site of the strike. Malak underwent a three-hour operation to remove a large piece of metal lodged in the left side of her head.
Khaled Tawil, who heads Beirut regional operations for Lebanon’s Civil Defense, arrived at the Hamad Building after helping at the site of another strike elsewhere in the capital. He is thirty-three years old, and has spent half his life working for the directorate, which conducts search-and-rescue operations and responds to emergencies all over the country. Tawil quickly determined that the building had not collapsed “like a mille-feuille, with layers on top of each other.” It had cracked in half, likely throwing people in two directions.
As smoke billowed from the rubble, Tawil organized first responders alongside volunteers from the neighborhood, among them Mohammad Bacha. Bacha had been in the Lebanese Army for four years before he injured his forearm in a motorcycle accident that ended his service. His injury, however, did not stop him from climbing back into what remained of the Hamad Building’s first floor.
Bacha spotted a leg and began to clear the rubble around it, revealing the body of a small girl. He recognized her from the neighborhood. He also retrieved the body of the young Syrian man who had been using a fire extinguisher, which he was still clutching, to try to contain the flames before the building had fallen. The top of his head had been sheared off. “I still don’t know who he was,” Bacha told me. “His parents might not even know that he has been martyred.” Amal and Tesfanesh were found pinned beneath a collapsed ceiling. It took hours, stretching into the next day, to pull out their bodies.
In the days that followed, Ali moved between the strike site and hospitals, chasing every report or rumor of an unidentified victim. He hoped that one might be Zahra, and that she was still alive, but he braced for the worst. “My family was whole, and suddenly, in an instant, I am searching refrigerators in morgues for my sister,” he said. “May God spare everyone this experience.”
Ali, who has a dark beard and thick hair, was close to his little sister. He described her as a shy, gentle woman, someone who blushed easily, and who was more drawn to religious texts and nonfiction books—such as “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” the best-seller on financial literacy, which she read in English—than to social media. She had been thinking about continuing her studies in Italy. “She was the heart of the house,” he said.
The last time Ali saw Zahra was four days before the strike, when he had joined his sisters for lunch at their aunt’s apartment. Afterward, he and Zahra strolled along the corniche. She took photos of his son, Alex, a toddler. Ali had suggested that his sisters stay with him in his apartment in a Christian suburb north of Beirut, his wife’s home town. But both Malak and Zahra wore hijabs and worried that they would stand out, especially in the current climate of rising sectarian tensions. Besides, Ain el-Mreisseh was near the sea, and close to the city’s shops and restaurants. “It’s a safe area,” Ali said. “Or so we thought.” He’d served in Lebanon’s security agencies for almost twenty years and said that if he “suspected, even just one per cent, that there was a danger in this building, I wouldn’t have let my sisters stay here. I would have told my aunts to leave.” He continued, “They want to say it was a Hezbollah outpost? Rocket launchers? This street is very busy because of the university and people trying to escape traffic on the corniche road. What idiot would put anything military in this street? It’s illogical, a lie.” Of the two Shiite political parties in Lebanon, it was the Amal Movement, not Hezbollah, that had support among some residents in the neighborhood.
Qassem watched as Tawil and his team worked through the rubble. Qassem hadn’t eaten in days, consuming only water and coffee. His throat felt tight, and his blue eyes were exhausted. He spoke so softly that I often had to lean in to make out what he was saying. “I can’t sleep,” he said. “Who can sleep?” Malak was recovering in the hospital. She was conscious but had not yet been told that her aunts were dead, that Samih was hospitalized elsewhere, or that Zahra was missing. She kept asking for her sister. Her mother told her that Zahra was in Anqoun.
After three days, Tawil declared the mission over. An excavator that had been brought in to sift through the wreckage had reached ground level, meaning that everything above it had been checked. Twenty bodies, and fragments of others, were recovered. Bacha had helped retrieve eighteen of the dead. Almost all of them were women and children. Apart from the Syrian with the fire extinguisher, there were no young or middle-aged men.
Two people were still unaccounted for, both from the first floor: a ten-year-old girl named Fatme Jalib, one of a family of refugees from eastern Syria, who had fled the civil war there, and Zahra Abboud.
Qassem could not accept that the search had ended. It was the fourth day after the strike, and he was still wearing the navy-blue hoodie and jeans that he had on in Anqoun when he received the call that changed his life. He remained at the Hamad Building, surrounded by relatives, friends, and neighbors, refusing to leave without his daughter. Ibrahim, Fatme’s older brother, who had been at work at the time of the strike, was there, too. The bodies of everyone in his first-floor apartment—including his mother and four other siblings—had already been taken back to Syria to be buried. He had also lost three cousins on the sixth floor.
The rubble could not be moved and reëxamined without judicial authorization, which could be difficult on a Saturday. “If it were the relative of an official, they would have rushed to clear it,” one man at the site said. Calls went out to ministers, to security personnel, to anyone thought to have influence. Qassem called the Civil Defense. Tawil returned, saying that he was prepared to “repeat the work a second, third, and fourth time until we find something to cool his heart.” The governor of Beirut was alerted and gave permission to proceed. An excavator rumbled down the street shortly after 6 P.M. Tawil reassembled his team. He turned to Qassem. “You are going to collapse,” he said. “Please, just sit and watch.”
“No,” Qassem replied. “I will stand next to you, I can’t sit.”
Ali, who was nearby, stepped forward. “I can’t stand by while others search for my sister,” he said. He pulled off a gray sweatshirt and approached what was left of the building. Bacha and the other men followed.
Tawil hadn’t been home since the war began, nearly six weeks earlier. He had married just days before the previous war, in October, 2023, and cut short his honeymoon to return to duty. (His parents, he said, were more used to his work than his wife was.) This conflict, he said, was “psychologically harder,” and more dangerous, because the targets seemed more indiscriminate. Israel had killed more than a hundred first responders. The risk of follow-up air strikes, known as “double taps,” often forced Tawil and his teams to think twice, eying the skies, before approaching a site. “We go into every mission knowing that we might be martyred in it,” he told me. “In the meantime, let’s try and help as many people as we can.”
Qassem stood on the excavator’s rotating platform, scanning what remained of people’s lives: family photographs, blood-stained clothes, books, cooking pots, a wheelchair. There were packets of medication from a pharmacy that had been on the ground floor, an old sewing machine from an antique shop. Passports and paperwork. Children’s notebooks, filled with homework. A pink scooter. A green plush toy. Purses, dentures. Men’s shirts still on hangers. Diapers. A pearl earring. A newspaper from 2006. And, amid it all, a decorative plaque inscribed with a prayer, in Arabic: “Oh Lord, bless this place.” Ali, Tawil, and men from the neighborhood crowded around the excavator arm as it dug into the debris, turning it over again and again. The excavator dumped bucketfuls of what had been reëxamined, to no avail, into a pile on the street, kicking up dust. A fire truck arrived to spray everything down. The call to prayer rose from the nearby mosque.
The excavator’s tracks screeched as it climbed over crushed concrete. Copies of the Quran were carefully set aside, placed beside a Bible and a picture of the Virgin Mary. Money, gold, phones, and identification cards were collected to be handed to military intelligence. Ali found a pair of round, gold-rimmed glasses without lenses, and a denim jacket. He stared at them for a long time, then pressed them to his chest. “These are Zahra’s,” he said.
He and his father searched with bare hands. “May God grant them patience,” the men around them whispered. Tawil later told me that he struggled to remain composed as he watched Zahra’s father, his gray hair matted with dust, turn over the debris. “I put on a strong public face,” he said. “But my exterior and interior were two different things.”
Fragments of bodies, including clumps of flesh and part of a jaw, were placed in a plastic bag. Well after midnight, Bacha bought and distributed dozens of small cups of strong Arabic coffee. He scrambled over the rubble in slides with socks. At one point, he found a small piece of flesh, which he put between a folded piece of paper and secured with a rubber band. At 3 A.M., electricity generators that provided lighting shut off, and so the men had to go home.
The search resumed the next morning. It was Orthodox Easter Sunday, a public holiday, but Tawil returned anyway. Fatme’s brother, Ibrahim, sat on a ledge overlooking the remains of his apartment. He is twenty-one years old, thin and wiry, with a narrow mustache and a wispy beard. “I have nothing left, just the clothes on my back,” he said. He, too, hadn’t changed since the strike; he wore the same beige shirt and hiking pants, blue jacket, and black baseball cap, turned backward, that he had on when he had left for work on the morning of April 8th. That afternoon, when the strikes began, he had raced back to the Hamad Building, arriving before it collapsed. Rubble blocked his front door. “I couldn’t save anyone,” he said. He was staying with cousins as he searched for Fatme. “I can’t return to Syria,” he said. “My relatives will ask me, ‘Where is your sister? Where did you leave her?’ What will I say?” He showed me photos of her. In one, she held a yellow hibiscus flower up to her dimpled face, smiling into the camera. In another, a video filmed on the corniche, she said, “I like to help mama with cooking.”
Ibrahim believed that a foot recovered in the early part of the search may have belonged to Fatme. Later that day, another small foot was found. Now he was certain that both were Fatme’s, though he waited for DNA confirmation, which came four days later. The fragment of jaw was also hers. “I will take her two feet and make her a grave,” Ibrahim said. “I will tell my family, ‘Here she is.’ ”
The search for Zahra, too, had become a search for fragments, for traces. “Keep an eye out for flies,” Tawil told the men. The excavator had been through so much rubble that a mound of it on the road rose nearly three stories high. Overhead, an Israeli drone could be heard in the moments when the excavator stopped. Ali walked away before the final bucket had been sifted. “I haven’t done enough, I’ve fallen short in my duty to her,” he said. “We are late. We have kept her waiting.” Shortly after 6:30 P.M., the second search ended.
The next morning, Ali and his father widened their search, accompanied by some members of the Civil Defense and other first responders. They walked into neighboring buildings on the off chance that something, some body part, had flown in during the blast. Most had already been checked more than once. They knocked on the door of a first-floor apartment that had buckets of cleaning products sitting outside. A bespectacled economist invited them in. His balcony windows had been shattered, leaving a jumbled pile of aluminum and blackened, pulverized concrete, but the rest of the apartment was spotless, the floors freshly mopped. Qassem and Ali moved through every room, peering into corners, opening doors. “Take your time,” the economist said. “Our hearts are with you.” Qassem looked under the sofa cushions, then asked to inspect the upper floors. “We will do it,” a firefighter told him. “We will go everywhere, to China if you want.” Nobody had the heart to tell Qassem and Ali to stop.
On the eighth day, Qassem sat on a slab of debris, his head in his hands. “I’m tired,” he said. His phone rang with calls from well-wishers asking about the search, and about his daughter Malak. Her right side was still immobile, but she was recovering, and would be discharged from the hospital the next day. (Doctors expect her eventually to regain full mobility.) The family had told her that everyone in the apartment had died—Samih, too, had succumbed to his wounds—but not that Zahra’s body was still missing.
I asked Qassem about the last time he had spoken to Zahra. He checked his phone: 1:08 P.M., about an hour before the air strike. “I haven’t opened these,” he said, clicking on a voice message.
“What are you doing?” Zahra said playfully. “Are you working or sitting at home?”
Qassem smiled. “She loves me a lot,” he said. “She spoils me.”
He spent his evenings at morgues. In the chaotic aftermath of the simultaneous strikes, body parts were sometimes loaded onto ambulances without being properly linked to specific locations, or were later misclassified at hospitals. He told me about one he had seen two nights earlier: a right arm, intact from shoulder to fingers, the shoulder blade still attached, but no torso or head—only a waist, two damaged legs, and badly disfigured feet. “I have a feeling, I can’t describe it, that this arm is ours,” he said. I asked him why. “I know her hand,” he said. “She used to place it on my neck, caress my hair. She would stroke my face. Her hand, it’s hard to forget.”
He paused. “When I saw the arm, my heart fluttered.”
Qassem’s heart did not deceive him. DNA tests confirmed that the arm was Zahra’s. She had died on Black Wednesday and was buried two weeks later, in her home town of Anqoun. Women in black hijabs and abayas, many wearing badges depicting Zahra’s smiling face, lined the streets as men prayed over her casket, placed outside the Husseiniya, a Shiite hall. A hard sun beat down on the tightly packed mourners as the procession wove through the streets toward the cemetery. When the casket neared Zahra’s mother, she collapsed. “Forgive me,” she said, over and over again, her face flushed and streaked with tears. “Forgive me.”
Qassem and Ali stepped into the grave to place Zahra’s body. Men wept. Outside the cemetery, father and son stood in a line with their male relatives to receive condolences. They returned to the grave as workers were smoothing it over with cement. “Leave a space in case I find more parts of her,” Qassem said. A sheikh told him that it was not religiously permissible to disturb the grave, but that he would keep an adjacent plot open.
Mourners followed Qassem to the family’s home, down a narrow path near an olive grove lined with yellow wildflowers. A poster of Zahra, dressed in white with angel wings, covered the façade. “The martyr Zahra Abboud, bride of Anqoun,” another poster in the courtyard read. Qassem and Ali thanked the stream of mourners. Many had helped with the search. “We are relieved,” Qassem told me. “We found Zahra.”
Zahra was one of at least twenty-four people who were killed in the Israeli air strike on the Hamad Building. They are among more than three thousand people who have perished in the war in Lebanon. (On April 17th, a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect, but it exists only on paper—nearly eight hundred Lebanese have been killed since it began, and both sides continue daily strikes.) The carefully sifted rubble has been removed, and the remaining half of the Hamad Building vacated while Beirut’s municipality determines its fate. Qassem said that he still felt drawn to the site. “It’s carved into my heart,” he said. “I find myself there. Maybe because I imagine her there. I see her with her sister and her aunts.” ♦