SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
There's been a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon for a year now. Despite that, Israel has launched almost daily attacks in South Lebanon, killing not just what it says are Hezbollah operatives, but also civilians. NPR's Jane Arraf brings us this story about one family with U.S. ties. A warning - this report contains details of injury and death.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Celine Charara's phone alarm still rings every school day at 6 a.m., a week after she's been killed. It's at her grandparents' house, together with other possessions retrieved from the wreckage of a drone strike. The strike killed Celine, a fourth grader in a Christian evangelical school, along with her 18-month-old siblings, Hadi and Silan, and their father, Shadi Charara. Her older sister and her mother were injured. Their father's cousin was also killed in the attack in late September.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: Celine was almost 11. Her school held a memorial for her.
There's a ceasefire with Lebanon, but Israel still attacks almost every day. Hezbollah has held its fire. Israel says it takes every precaution to kill only its targets. But since the ceasefire alone, the U.N. says Israel has killed at least 111 civilians in Lebanon. In this strike, Israel acknowledged uninvolved civilian casualties and said it was reviewing the attack. It said it killed a Hezbollah operative. But more than a month later, the Israeli military refused to give the name of the man or results of the review. Mohammad Mroueh, the other man killed, had stopped his motorcycle to say hello to his cousin Shadi. Neither man had any ties to Hezbollah, according to relatives and the militant group.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: Three days after the funeral, a civilian burial rather than Hezbollah ceremony, townspeople from Bint Jbeil are still coming to pay their condolences.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: This is a tight-knit community, with thousands of former residents American citizens in Michigan. News of the deaths hit hard there.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Well, tonight, metro Detroiters in mourning following a tragic attack in Lebanon.
ARRAF: Shadi Charara, a car dealer, was 45 years old. His older brother, Hilal, who has flown over for the funeral from Dearborn, says just a few weeks before, the family had been accepted for immigration to the United States. The entire Charara family immigrated decades ago, apart from Shadi. Hilal Charara has used car business and rental properties. He says, while they love Lebanon, he and his family are law-abiding, taxpaying Americans.
HILAL CHARARA: I did good over there. I did business. I'm an honest man. I don't do something stupid. I don't do something bad to my country because I love my country.
ARRAF: He says Shadi planned to open a business in the U.S. He wanted to emigrate to keep his children safe. The family is Muslim, but Shadi's wife, Amani Bazzi, who's 38, graduated from a Catholic university. The couple sent their daughters to a private evangelical school because they felt it was a better education. On Sunday, September 21, Shadi and his family had gathered for lunch at Amani's parents, along with other siblings and their children. A short while after they left, there was the sound of an airstrike down the road.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Through interpreter) I reached the door of the hospital and saw the whole team there. Everyone started holding me and saying, stay calm. Stay calm. You know what stay calm means? It means there is a disaster.
ARRAF: His daughter was so covered in blood, she was unrecognizable. Her injuries, though, paled in comparison to what she'd seen before she lost consciousness.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Through interpreter) She told me Shadi's head flew off, and the children were torn apart. Part of her husband's head and shoulders landed on her. She saw her daughter decapitated.
ARRAF: Aseel, her eldest daughter, who wanted to be a fashion designer, was severely wounded. Almost every bone in her body was broken. The mother, Amani, had a concussion and neck injuries that required surgery. At Amani's parents' home, the children's grandmother, Fadiya Shami, shows a first-birthday photograph of the twins. The boy wears a powder blue suit and a big grin. His sister perches on a white stool, wearing a frothy cobalt blue dress, a sparkly headband holding back her red hair. The grandmother says, when the older girls would worry about planes they could hear dropping bombs during the war, she would tell them, it's OK. They won't come near civilians.
MALAK: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: Amani's sister Malak says, the Sunday they were killed, there were low-flying drones firing flares. The children came inside from the park where they were playing, and then went out on the balcony to watch.
MALAK: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: "I didn't know that once they left, that's what would kill them," she says.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: (Singing in non-English language).
ARRAF: At the funeral three days earlier, the mother, Amani, is carried in on stretcher and given the bodies of her twins wrapped in satin shrouds to hold before being buried. She seemed sedated and bewildered. Others were inconsolable.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: (Crying, non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: The uncle just went by cradling the tiny body of his niece in his arms wrapped in a pink satin shroud with white netting. You can hear the drones up ahead.
Hilal, who has carried his niece's body, cries as he hands her over to be lowered into a concrete grave. Mohammad, the cousin, left behind a pregnant wife and a 2-year-old child. You expect soldiers and fighters to die, the children's grandfather says later. Civilians, maybe once in a thousand times by accident, you kill two or three civilians. They wiped out an entire family.
For NPR News, I'm Jane Arraf in Bint Jbeil, South Lebanon. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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