Julia Ramadan was terrified. The war between Israel and Hezbollah was escalating, and she had a nightmare that her family’s home was being bombed. When she sent her brother a panicked voice message from her apartment in Beirut, he encouraged her to join him in Ain al-Delb, a quiet village in southern Lebanon.

“It’s safe here,” he reassured her. “Come stay with us until things calm down.”

Earlier that month, Israel intensified its air campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon, in response to a surge in rocket attacks by the Iranian-backed militant group, which led to the deaths of civilians and the displacement of tens of thousands from their homes in northern Israel.

Ashraf was confident that his family’s apartment building would be a haven, so Julia joined him. But the next day, on September 29, it was subjected to the deadliest Israeli attack of the conflict. After being hit by Israeli missiles, the entire six-story building collapsed, killing 73 people.

The IDF says the building was targeted because it was a “terrorist command center” for Hezbollah and that it “led to the liquidation” of a Hezbollah leader. She added that the “overwhelming majority” of those killed in the raid were “confirmed to be terrorist elements.”

But a BBC investigation verified the identities of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and revealed evidence suggesting that only six were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing. None of the people we have identified appear to be of senior rank. The BBC World Service also found that the other 62 were civilians, 23 of whom were children.

Among the dead were children as young as a few months old, such as Nouh Qubaisi in Apartment 2B. In Apartment No. (1C), teacher Abeer Hallaq was killed along with her husband and three children. Three floors above, Amal Al-Hakawati died with three generations of her family: her husband, children, and two granddaughters.

Ashraf and Julia were always close, sharing everything with each other. “It was like a black box, holding all my secrets,” he says.

On the afternoon of September 29, the siblings had just returned home after distributing food to families who had fled the fighting. The war has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon.

Ashraf was taking a shower, and Julia was sitting in the living room with their father, helping him upload a video to social media. Their mother, Janan, was in the kitchen cleaning the place.

Then, without warning, they heard a deafening sound. The entire building shook, and a huge cloud of dust and smoke poured into their apartment.

Ashraf says: “I shouted: Julia! Julia!”

She replied: I am here.

“I looked at my father, who was struggling to get off the couch because of a leg injury, and saw my mother running toward the front door.”

Julia’s nightmare was manifesting itself in real life.

“Julia was hyperventilating, crying really hard on the couch. I was trying to calm her down and told her we needed to get out. Then there was another attack.”

Video footage of the raid, which was posted online and verified by the BBC, shows four Israeli missiles flying through the air towards the building. Seconds later, the block collapses.

Ashraf, along with many others, was trapped under the rubble. He started calling out, but the only voice he could hear was his father’s voice, who told him that he could still hear Julia and that she was alive. Neither of them could hear Ashraf’s mother.

Ashraf sent a voice message to his friends in the neighborhood to alert them. The next few hours were painful. He could hear rescuers searching through the wreckage, and residents crying when they discovered their loved ones dead. “I kept thinking, ‘Please, God, not Julia. I can’t live this life without Julia.’

Ashraf was finally recovered from under the rubble hours later, with only minor injuries.

He found out that his mother had been saved but had died in the hospital. Julia suffocated under the rubble. His father later told him that Julia’s last words were calls to her brother.

In November, a ceasefire agreement was agreed between Israel and Hezbollah aimed at ending the conflict. The agreement gives a 60-day deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw from southern Lebanon and for Hezbollah to withdraw its forces and weapons north of the Litani River. As the January 26 deadline approaches, we sought to learn more about the deadliest Israeli attack on Lebanon in years.

In the apartment below Julia and Ashraf’s, Hawraa and Ali Fares were hosting family members displaced by the war. Among them was Batoul, Hawraa’s sister, who had arrived the previous day, like Julia, with her husband and two young children. They had fled intense bombardment near the Lebanese-Israeli border, in areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

“We hesitated about where to go,” Batoul says. “Then I said to my husband: Let’s go to Ain al-Delb. My sister said the building was safe and they couldn’t hear any bombing nearby.”

Batoul’s husband, Muhammad Fares, was killed in the Ain al-Delb attack. A column fell on Batoul and her children. She says no one responded to her calls for help. She was finally able to lift it on her own, but her four-year-old daughter, Hawraa, was fatally crushed. Miraculously, her baby, Malak, survived.

Three floors below Batoul were where Dennis and Mohieddin Al Baba lived. That Sunday, Denise invited her brother Hisham to lunch.

Hisham says the impact of the strike was brutal.

“The second missile hit me on the ground… and the entire wall fell on top of me.”

He spent seven hours under the rubble.

“I heard a sound in the distance. People talking. Screaming and… Cover her. Take her away. Lift the stone. He’s still alive. It’s a child. Lift this child.” I mean… Oh God, I thought to myself, I’m the last one living underground and no one will ever know that I’m going to die here.

When Hisham was finally rescued, he found his niece’s fiancée waiting to see if she was alive. He lied to him and told him she was fine. They found her body three days later.

Hisham lost four members of his family: his sister, his brother-in-law, and their two children. He told us that he had lost his faith and no longer believed in God.

To learn more about who died, we analyzed Lebanese Ministry of Health data, videos and social media posts, as well as speaking to survivors of the attack.

In particular, we wanted to investigate the Israeli military’s response to the media – immediately after the attack – that the apartment building was a Hezbollah command center. We asked the Israeli army several times what constitutes a command center, but it did not provide clarification.

So we began sifting through social media sites, cemeteries, public health records, and funeral videos to determine whether those killed in the attack had any military affiliation with Hezbollah.

We were only able to find evidence suggesting that six of the 68 deaths we identified were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing.

Hezbollah’s memorial photos of the six men bear the title “Mujahid,” meaning “fighter.” In contrast, senior figures are referred to as “qaid,” meaning “leader” – and we found no such labels used by the group to describe the dead.

We asked the IDF whether the six Hezbollah fighters we identified were the intended targets of the raid. She did not answer this question.

One of the Hezbollah fighters we got to know is Batoul’s husband, Muhammad Fares. Batoul told us that her husband, like many other men in southern Lebanon, was a reservist in the group, though she added that he never received any pay from Hezbollah, held an official rank, or participated in combat.

Israel considers Hezbollah one of its main threats, and Israel and many Western governments and Gulf Arab states classify the group as a terrorist organization.

But besides its large and well-armed military wing, Hezbollah is also an influential political party, holding seats in the Lebanese parliament. In many parts of the country, they are integrated into the social fabric, providing a network of social services.

In response to our investigation, the IDF said: “IDF strikes on military targets are subject to the relevant provisions of international law, including the taking of feasible precautions, and are carried out after an assessment that the anticipated collateral damage and civilian casualties are not excessive in the area.” . “With regard to the military advantage expected from the strike.”

She had previously told the BBC that she had implemented “evacuation procedures” after the raid on Ain al-Delb, but everyone we spoke to said they had received no warning.

United Nations experts have raised concerns about The proportionality and necessity of Israeli air strikes on residential buildings In densely populated areas in Lebanon.

This pattern of targeting entire buildings – resulting in significant civilian casualties – has been a recurring feature in Israel’s recent conflict with Hezbollah, which began when the group escalated its rocket attacks in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Between October 2023 and November 2024, Lebanese authorities say more than 3,960 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces, many of them civilians. During the same period, Israeli authorities say at least 47 civilians were killed by Hezbollah rockets fired from southern Lebanon. At least 80 Israeli soldiers were also killed during fighting in southern Lebanon or as a result of rocket attacks on northern Israel.

The missile attack on Ain al-Delb is the deadliest Israeli attack on a building in Lebanon in at least 18 years.

The village is still haunted by its influence. When we visited, more than a month after the raid, one father continued to visit the site daily, hoping for news of his 11-year-old son, whose body had not yet been found.

Ashraf Ramadan also returns to scrutinize the rubble, searching for what remains of the memories that his family built over the two decades they lived there.

He showed me the door to his closet, still decorated with pictures of the football players and pop stars he once admired. Then he pulls a teddy bear out of the rubble and tells me it was always on his bed.

“Nothing I find here replaces the people we lost,” he says.

Additional reporting by Scarlett Barter and Jake Tashi