After six weeks of relentless Israeli shelling, there were fleeting hopes that a ceasefire between the United States and Iran might ease tensions in Lebanon.
Instead, the country was plunged into one of the most devastating attacks since this war began.
100 pieces in just 10 minutes Israeli The rain of strikes left at least 357 people dead across the country. residents of Beirut They described a scale and intensity never experienced before. The whole neighborhood shook. The building collapsed.
On Wednesday afternoon, just before the start, 13-year-old Naya Fakih was doing what most teenagers do in central Beirut: recording a goofy video for her friends. snapchat.
Photo: @ghidamargie
Then everything changed.
“I heard something,” she told me. “We didn’t know what it was…and they bombed the building right in front of us.”
Naya and her father ran.
“It was very scary,” she said. “You never know what they’ll do next.”
Naya has experienced bombings before. But this is different, she said. “I never saw a building fall in front of me. I always knew I was safe where I was.”
That sense of security is now gone.
After the explosion… the line was cut
At least 357 people were killed in the airstrike. Photo: Marwan Nahmani/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
When I met her a few days later, she was shaken but surrounded by a supportive family. Her mother, Guida, said she was at work that afternoon when the phone rang.
“It was Naya. She was screaming and crying. All I could make out was ‘explosion’ and ‘building’. And then the phone went off.”
What followed was a combination of fear and confusion. A phone that won’t connect. A piece of information that makes no sense at all. Eventually, her husband contacted her and told her that she was safe. Still, she didn’t fully understand what had happened.
Then Guida said something to me that helps explain what life is like here in Beirut right now.
Naya and her mother Guida spoke to Sky News’ lead world presenter Yalda Hakim.
“We ignored it,” she said of the first explosion she heard. “Because we normalized it.”
Explosions, sonic booms, and distant bangs are part of everyday life. But this time it feels different. For many in Beirut, it feels indiscriminate.
“I couldn’t stay where I was,” Guida said. “As a mother, I had to go to my children.”
However, the road was blocked. Traffic was frozen. At that moment, Beirut was paralyzed with fear.
It wasn’t until she saw Naya’s video that she fully understood the reality. “I saw what happened,” she said. “And then it started to sink.”
“No child deserves to go through this.”
Buildings destroyed in a strike in central Beirut. Photo: AP/Hassan Ammar
What the video captured, almost by chance, was horror. One minute a kid is filming a social media video and the next he’s running for his life.
“I hope something like this never happens again,” Naya told me. “No child deserves to go through what I went through.”
Her mother said she shared the footage as a message to the world.
“It’s not about Naya,” she said. “This is about childhood. It’s about what’s happening to the kids here.”
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Although Israel claims it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure, the attack hit a residential area in a densely populated area. The dead included children, mothers, elderly couples, doctors, and poets.
The Lebanese government has accused Israel of committing war crimes as well as violating international law, and the scale of the attack raises serious questions about its proportionality.
Beirut has known war for some time. It understands loss. But this time there was no warning. There was no evacuation order. There’s no time to escape. What remains is a traumatized population still searching for bodies in the rubble.
Naya’s video disappears from the timeline and is replaced with the next viral clip. But for her, and for countless children across Lebanon, this is not a moment in time. It’s a reality that doesn’t end even when the cameras stop rolling.
