This is a translated version of the Arabic article published on: 16/11/2024

Bilal Raad, the chief of the Lebanese Civil Defense Regional Center in Baalbek, was supplying Civil Defense volunteer Lara Karkaba with the latest statistics pertaining to Israel’s strikes on the villages and towns of Baalbek District when the bombing intensified and disrupted the landline. Raad called Lara again via the radio to continue the daily digest of the missions carried out by the center, which oversees 15 Lebanese Civil Defense centers in Baalbek-Hermel Governorate. During the call, the Israeli air force struck the towns of Chmistar and Haouch al-Nabi. A few seconds later, Lara heard something that sounded like a missile, and the call cut out. She tried to call the chief back via landline, radio, and mobile to no avail. She called her father, Hussein Karkaba, who was a volunteer in the same center, via mobile and radio with no success. She did the same for all 15 colleagues whom she knew were present at the center at 8:00 PM on Thursday, 15 November 2024, the moment Israel attacked it.

As Lara was trying to call the center back, the tragic news arrived: Israel had targeted the center, destroying the three-story building on top of the personnel inside. A statement from the General Directorate of the Lebanese Civil Defense later said that the two missiles that the Israeli air force fired into the center martyred 14 of the personnel present and severely wounded volunteer Abduh Shibli, who was taken to Baalbek Governmental Hospital.

On the afternoon of the same day, Israel had directly targeted the Islamic Health Organization’s civil defense center in the town of Arab Salim, Southern Lebanon, martyring four medics. With Israel’s deliberate assassination of 18 medics and rescue workers in one day, the toll of its attacks on civil defense workers as part of its aggression against Lebanon over one year and 38 days rose to 210 martyrs and 309 wounded.

By targeting the Lebanese Civil Defense’s regional center in Douris, Baalbek, Israel is continuing its offensive on Baalbek-Hermel Governorate and its effort to prevent rescue and emergency aid work, just as it did in the region south of the Litani River. This trend is confirmed by the increase in the frequency of attacks, along with the casualty numbers, in the governorate. As of the evening of November 14, the governorate had been hit by 1,176 strikes that martyred 824 people and wounded 1,389, not including the Civil Defense martyrs in Baalbek.

As soon as news of the attack spread, social media was flooded with comments like “Who will now rescue those who were rescuing everyone?” and “Who will collect the remains of those who were collecting the martyred and wounded?”. These comments reflect the major role that the center and its personnel were playing in rescuing victims of the Israeli aggression despite the grave shortage of equipment in Civil Defense centers, particularly in Baalbek-Hermel and particularly in terms of large machinery for lifting and clearing rubble.

At 9:00 AM the day after the attack, Governor of Baalbek-Hermel Bachir Khodr eulogized Chief Raad on X: “I was calling you after every strike to follow the rescue, and every time, you were already at the targeted location. Who will we call now? Who will lift the rubble? Who will extinguish fires ignited in hearts targeted by the aggression? Chief of Baalbek-Hermel Civil Defense Center, hero, and martyr Bilal Raad, may there be mercy for you and your comrades”.

Governor Khodr was not the only one to mourn the zeal and gallantry of the center’s civil defense personnel and chief; rather, so did the entire district of Baalbek. One of the region’s notables tells the Legal Agenda how personnel from one of the 15 centers subordinate to the regional center refrained from heading out on a difficult mission after a fierce Israeli attack. Raad reported the center to the directorate in Beirut, and the people responsible for the decision were punished.

Risking Life and Limb

Locals who live near the center say that civil defense personnel in Baalbek work under difficult conditions that reflect the state of the country. They struggle by “risking life and limb. Some of their cars are broken and many are constantly being repaired. They have no large machinery to help them dig and lift the rubble in a large governorate that is being subjected to fierce bombardment and massacres every day. Even their diesel, they were getting from the army”. As for their center and their salaries:

 “They haven’t got a single couch to rest on. They have no fridge in which to store a bite to eat so that it doesn’t go bad while they are sleeping at the center. They live at the center day and night so that they don’t let people down. Most of the martyrs hadn’t had a chance to celebrate becoming permanent staff members in August 2023, after many years of volunteering and sacrifice, with salaries that barely cover the bare necessities of life, especially for those with families and children. They even brought bedding and blankets from their houses so that they wouldn’t get sick from the cold when they opted to stay to rescue people as the Israeli aggression escalated”.

The civil defense personnel understood the extent of the danger surrounding them, not only because of Israel’s systematic targeting of medical teams and hospitals in Lebanon but also because the Israel army’s spokesperson had directly threatened them and instructed them to evacuate the second time he threatened the city of Baalbek and the surrounding area. Raad received a phone call on the landline from a Danish number telling the staff to evacuate within half an hour. At that time, Raad and the center’s personnel went to the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks. In media interviews, some of the surviving personnel said that they returned to the center after reassurances that they would not be targeted, although we do not know the source of these reassurances. They were then attacked without any subsequent warning or threat. Instead of vacating the center, Raad and the personnel resided there day and night. “We lived together in the center more than we lived with our families,” survivor Hassan Rabah tells the Legal Agenda.

The personnel of Lebanese Civil Defense Center Baalbek 2 joined the regional center because the Asaira area in the hills of Baalbek, where it is located, was targeted before Baalbek the city. Some of them were martyred in the attack on the regional center. “Now only seven personnel from the two centers remain – four from Baalbek Center 2 and three from the regional center,” explains Rabah.

“We Must Go On for Them and for the People”

The personnel were supporting one another: “We were creating things to cheer one another up and so that we could bear all the massacres that we see daily,” says Rabah. “We go out on at least three or four missions per day, most of them massacres,” he adds. Rabah, who brought the Lebanese people to tears when he wept over his lost comrades live on air, survived the massacre because he left to buy chicken for dinner: “I arrived and found the martyr Haidar al-Zain frying potatoes. I told them, ‘I’ll go get the chicken for dinner. Wait for me’”. As soon as he got in his car to return to the center, he heard Israeli missiles. “I drove quickly and thought, we’ll definitely be heading out on a rescue mission now,” he says. On the way, he received a message about the attack on the center. “I arrived and there was nobody. The center was on the ground. I began to shout, ‘Chief Bilal’, ‘Hussein’, ‘Abduh’, ‘Omar’, ‘Ali’, and so on, and nobody responded,” he recalls. Around him, he found only human remains. Upon the arrival of the Palestinian Red Crescent personnel, who come out from the Jalil Palestinian refugee camp in Baalbek after every strike to aid the rescue operations as best they can, Rabah found al-Zain: “He had been martyred. His head was hit”. He also found Hassan Wahhoud, chief of Baalbek Center 2 – “His entire body was burned, and he died in the intensive care unit” – and Hussein Hassan (Abu Haidar), who was bleeding severely. “The rest were in pieces,” he explains.

Rabah breaks into tears as he utters the name of each of his martyred colleagues. “These are my brothers, not coworkers,” he tells the Legal Agenda. “We were boosting each other’s morale and saying, what we are doing is worth the risk and toil, and this is our duty. We would lift our heads and rejoice every time we rescued someone. We would forget the danger and toil every time we raised a living child or even an animal from underneath the rubble,” he says. Between missions, the personnel were helping each other prepare what food was available: “Each person brought what he could based on the money he had. Haidar al-Zain, the talented cook, would make the most delicious dishes, and we would share them”. This beautiful relationship strengthened amidst the circumstances of the Israeli aggression: “We became closer to one another. We had all left our families and were living together. Haidar al-Zain, along with Omar al-Sulh and Hussein Hassan, were preparing manakish weekly, and we would celebrate when we could gather around and eat them hot. Most of the time, we would put the food out, Israel would bomb, and we would eat it cold when we returned”.

Today, after burying al-Sulh in his home city of Baalbek, Rabah says that he does not know how he will return to work: “None of us will weaken or surrender. We must go on for the people and for them. But with every mission, our sadness and pain will grow stronger because we will miss them and remember everything they were doing, these brave martyred heroes who didn’t fear death, bombardment, or Israel”.

“Too Many to Cry For… I Lost My Father and My Second Family”

Half an hour of conversation with Lara means half an hour of tears. The volunteer in the Civil Defense’s Baalbek Regional Center is crying not just over her martyred father, Hussein Karkaba: “Too many to cry for! I’m crying for all of them”. She chokes back tears before adding, “Even my cup of coffee, I would drink with them once I arrived at the center – I don’t drink coffee at home”. Since the beginning of the Israeli aggression against Lebanon more than a year ago, Lara had been accustomed to working at the center from 8:00 AM to midnight. However, with the escalation of Israel’s attacks on Beqaa beginning on 23 September 2024, especially the nighttime strikes and massacres in the district’s towns and villages, Chief Raad told her, “Don’t stay at night anymore as you’ll be in great danger when you head home”.

When the call between Lara and Raad cut out and the phones of all the center’s personnel went out of service, her heart seized with anxiety. “I said, maybe they [the Israelis] targeted them,” she tells the Legal Agenda immediately after returning from burying her father in the cemetery of his town of Kasarnaba. In tears, she says, “I arrived and found the center on the ground and fires burning. I said to everyone, ‘Nobody will come out okay’”. She stood there helpless: “I was the one going with them to help rescue people, but I couldn’t help them”. She cried out of fear not just for her father but “for every one of them. These people were my second family. I was living with them more than I was living in my house”.

Lara followed the emergency aid teams as they transported some bodies and many body parts to Baalbek Governmental Hospital. In the intensive care unit, they led her to a wounded civil defense worker: “They took me to a room containing a burnt worker wrapped entirely in white gauze and asked me whether I recognized him. How could I recognize him when none of his features remained?” Later, after he died, she learned that he was Hassan Wahhoud – “the gazelle of the center”, as she calls him. “He would run ahead of everyone and knew all the rescue and fire-fighting plans, and he would throw himself at the difficult tasks,” she explains.

In the hospital’s morgue, Lara took a deep breath and asked the employees to open the bags with which they had wrapped the bodies and remains. With names already on the first two bags, Lara asked for the third bag – labeled “unknown” – to be opened. Immediately, she told them, “This is Hussein Hassan. I recognize him immediately from what’s left of his features”. When the fourth bag was opened, Lara saw part of the tracksuit belonging to her colleague Ali Noon: “This is Ali”. Ali had asked the chief for permission to wear sports clothes because the belt of his uniform had broken. She identified the martyr in the fifth bag by his round head and the martyr in the sixth by his broad shoulders: “I had memorized all of them well as I saw them every day”. On the top level of the refrigerator, Lara saw another bag: “Is this one of ours?”, she asked. When the employee answered in the affirmative, she asked for the bag to be brought down. The first thing she saw was a hand, which she quickly grabbed: “These are Dad’s fingers”. She then saw his ring. “I said to them, write ‘Hussein Karkaba’ on it and close it up,” she explains. Lara did not cry: “I didn’t shed a tear. I had come in the name of everyone, not just as the daughter of Hussein Karkaba. But I was relieved and said to myself, this way we can bury him and when we visit him, there’ll be someone there”. 

Lara then went to check on the sole surviving but wounded volunteer from the center, Abduh Shibli. His body was trembling and covered in blood. “Obliging, decent, respectable, and brave Abduh,” she says before correcting herself: “They were all brave”. As soon as Abduh saw her, he asked her about Hussein Hassan: “Hussein and Abduh were twin souls. We called them two peas in a pod. They would wait to eat together, even if they had to wait all day without a bite to eat”. The following day, Abduh admonished her because she had told him that Hussein was in intensive care, not dead. “I was on the center’s balcony, and Hussein was coming to join me, but the explosion came before he arrived. I remember hearing the missile, and then I woke up in the hospital,” he told her. “The shockwave threw Abduh away from the center – that’s how he survived. But the blast probably wounded Hussein and caused him to bleed severely, so he died,” Lara adds.

On the afternoon of November 16,, after the rescue and emergency aid teams announced that they had finished surveying and recovering what was left of the bodies of the 14 martyrs, the remaining civil defense personnel erected a column piece from their destroyed center and two tall pieces of wood. They placed the boots of one of their martyred colleagues at the bottom of the column and fixed the hat of another onto the wood. On the rubble of the center, they raised the Lebanese flag. There they stood and saluted the heroes who were “armed only with water cannons”, as survivor Hassan Rabah said.

The names of the martyred heroes are as follows:

• Bilal Raad, chief of the center
• Hussein Hassan
• Khalil Nasr al-Din
• Ali Noon
• Ali Karkaba
• Abbas al-Halabawi
• Hussein al-Khatib
• Ahmad Hamza
• Hassan Wahhoud
• Haidar al-Zain
• Ali Awada
• Omar al-Sulh
• Hussein Karkaba
• Abbas Raad

This article is an edited translation from Arabic.