‘Family’: Lebanese villager won’t blame displaced people for Israeli attack

The villagers of Ain Yaaqoub spent days identifying charred remains. They fear Israel was targeting displaced people.

Ain Yaaqoub, Lebanon – Shredded clothing, dusty broken table legs, torn copies of the Quran, a red “I love you” teddy bear and a book on Aristotle amid piles of socks – these, among many other things, lie strewn amid the rubble in the northern Lebanese village of Ain Yaaqoub in Akkar following a deadly Israeli air raid.

Beneath all this, at least one body remains trapped under the rubble of what was a two-storey apartment building, Red Cross rescuers say. Metres away, charred, unrecognisable body parts litter the ground.

Monday night’s Israeli air strike on Ain Yaaqoub in this remote, far northern corner of Lebanon, killed at least 14 people, says Walid Semaan, head of the Lebanese Red Cross.

This was the second Israeli attack on Akkar, Lebanon’s northernmost governorate, since Israel ramped up its deadly bombardment of Lebanon in late September. The previous hit, a week before, destroyed a bridge linking two remote villages in the mountainous region. Nobody was killed that time around.

The attack on Monday, however, was even further north and was nothing less than a “massacre”, according to people in Ain Yaaqoub, taking out not only the apartment building but many more homes around it as well.