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Mustafa Taha, 49, stands out side his destroyed apartment block after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike in the southern city of Sidon, Lebanon.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
Mustafa Taha didn’t pick up the first call, or the second, from the foreign number that kept ringing his mobile phone Tuesday evening. It was almost time to break the day-long Ramadan fast, and he was too hungry and distracted to have a conversation with a stranger.
It was only on the fourth call that Mr. Taha picked up and heard a recorded voice telling him in Arabic that he should immediately flee his home. He did, along with his wife and two children, just minutes before an Israeli missile slammed into the five-storey apartment building where they had lived for the past 16 years.
“I didn’t have time to take anything with me – just my family. I couldn’t grab my money, my documents, anything,” the 49-year-old electrician said Wednesday, as smoke continued to rise from the rubble of the apartment building in Sidon, a city that until Tuesday was considered a relatively safe space in the widening war for the Middle East.
Israel expands war with incursion into southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah back
The first two air strikes to hit Sidon marked the latest expansion of Israel’s campaign against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, a conflict that is just one front in what is now a regional war. The strikes were among the first major attacks beyond the traditional Hezbollah strongholds of southern Lebanon, near the Israeli border, and the southern suburbs of Beirut.
The larger conflict began Saturday, when the United States and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran, and continued to broaden Wednesday when Iran launched a ballistic missile toward Turkey for the first time, apparently targeting a NATO airbase there.
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Mr. Taha with a photo of his thirteen-year-old daughter, which he found in the rubble of his destroyed apartment block.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
In Lebanon, the telephone warnings – which came from an apparently spoofed number in Kazakhstan that gave a busy signal when The Globe and Mail called it back – meant no one was killed in the attack on Mr. Taha’s building. But anger and fear were nonetheless raw in the aftermath.
“This is my daughter,” Mr. Taha said, picking a photograph of the 13-year-old girl – smiling in a white shirt with pictures of ladybugs on it – out of the detritus. “And this belongs to my boy,” he said, knocking concrete dust off a half-deflated basketball.
Residents of Haret Saida, the neighbourhood where Mr. Taha’s building stood until Tuesday night, say theirs is a working-class area where Sunni and Shia Muslims live side-by-side. They said Hezbollah had no presence in the area, though many of the 11 apartments in the building – some of whose owners live abroad for much of the year – had recently been filled by internally displaced persons fleeing the intense Israel-Hezbollah fighting further south.
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Sami Eid, 49, picks up a child’s swing and carry cot from the rubble of his cousin’s destroyed apartment block, hit by an Israeli airstrike, in Sidon.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
Ahmad Jbaili, the 62-year-old real estate developer who oversaw construction of the building back in 1992, said he believed the Israelis had targeted an ordinary apartment block in a mixed neighbourhood in an effort to get Sunnis to blame Hezbollah and the Shia for such attacks.
The apartment strike was one of two explosions that echoed Tuesday across Sidon, a mainly Sunni city that had been largely spared during previous wars in 2006 and 2024 between Israel and Hezbollah.
The other strike hit a building belonging to the Islamic Group, a Sunni force that fought on Hezbollah’s side in the two-month war of 2024 – a conflict that killed more than 4,000 Lebanese and left swaths of the country in ruins. Members of the Islamic Group acknowledged to The Globe on Wednesday that the six-storey building had been their local political headquarters, which they said was empty when it was hit.
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The offices of the Sunni militant and political group Jamaa Al Islamiya, which were targeted by an Israeli airstrike.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
The latest chapter in the long Israel-Hezbollah conflict erupted Monday, when Hezbollah launched a volley of rockets at the Israeli port city of Haifa in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the initial U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran. Ayatollah Khamenei was revered as a spiritual leader by many Shia Muslims, and his portrait is a common sight in Shia neighbourhoods across Lebanon.
On Wednesday, a day after the first Israeli ground troops entered southern Lebanon, the Israeli military announced that Lebanese civilians should evacuate from everywhere south of the Litani River, an 850-square-kilometre region that’s home to an estimated 250,000 people. The area was under Israeli military control from 1982 until 2000, an occupation that gave birth to Hezbollah as a force dedicated to expelling the foreign army.
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A poster of former Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei’s predecessor, lines the road in Sidon.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
At least 75 Lebanese have now been killed by Israeli fire. Hezbollah has continued to fire missiles and drones into Israel for the past three days, sometimes in apparent co-ordination with volleys from Iran that have killed 12 Israelis.
The Israeli military said two of its soldiers were injured in southern Lebanon on Wednesday by anti-tank fire.
It seemed Wednesday as though Israel was also waging a campaign of psychological warfare inside Lebanon. There were scenes of chaos and confusion in some parts of Beirut as residents received warning calls telling them to evacuate their homes and offices – some of them well outside the Hezbollah-controlled suburbs – only for no attack to follow.
“I don’t know what’s going on – we have nothing to do with any of this,” said Imad Bakkar, a 72-year-old lawyer who fled into the Sodeco Square shopping centre in central Beirut with his daughter Wednesday morning after receiving a recorded message.
The male voice identified himself as being a member of the Israeli military and said they should leave the area immediately, though nothing happened afterward.
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Sidon, a mainly Sunni city, had been largely spared during previous wars in 2006 and 2024 between Israel and Hezbollah.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
There was also panic at the Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria after security personnel there received similar warnings of an imminent Israeli strike that, as of Wednesday night, didn’t happen. The Syrian government responded by closing its side of the crossing.
Identical warning calls were also received in Tyre, the biggest city in southern Lebanon, and as far away as the northern port of Tripoli, a largely Sunni city that has not yet been targeted in the fighting.
Hours later, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem made his first remarks since the start of the new conflict. Addressing widespread anger in Lebanon that the group had dragged the country into another war by launching Monday’s attack on Israel – an act Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called “illegal” – Mr. Qassem said “American-Israeli aggression” had forced Hezbollah to act.
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A poster of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is sprayed with mud and shrapnel marks following an Israeli airstrike in Sidon.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
Military analysts have cast Hezbollah’s decision to enter the war – just 15 months after the end of the devastating 2024 conflict – as borderline suicidal, given that the group has yet to recover from losing thousands of fighters. But Mr. Qassem said Hezbollah was ready to fight and called on the country to unify behind “the resistance.”
“Our choice is to confront them to the utmost,” he said in televised remarks broadcast from an undisclosed location. “We will fight to the end and will not surrender.”
