A Lebanese family planning their daughter’s wedding was killed in an Israeli strike on their home.

BEIRUT (AP) — A family WhatsApp group chat was full of constant messages. Israel has stepped up airstrikes on villages and towns in southern Lebanon. Everyone was glued to the news.

That day, September 23, Reda Gharib woke up unusually early. Living across the continent in Senegal, he watched videos and photographs shared by his sisters and aunts of explosions around Tire, an ancient coastal city in Lebanon.

His aunts decided to leave for Beirut. His father, mother and three sisters had no such plans.

His father then announced to the group that he had received a call from the Israeli military telling them to evacuate or risk their lives. After that, silence reigned in the chat. Ten minutes later, Gharib called his father. There was no answer.

The Garibs’ apartment was damaged by an Israeli airstrike. The family did not have time to get out. Gharib’s father Ahmed, a retired Lebanese army officer, his mother Hanan and his three sisters were killed.

“The whole apartment disappeared. It’s back to bare bones. It was as if nothing was there,” Gharib said, speaking from the Senegalese capital Dakar, where he has lived since 2020.

The Israeli military said it struck a Hezbollah facility hiding rocket launchers and rockets.

Gharib said his family has no connection to Hezbollah. The direct hit destroyed their apartment, but only caused damage to those above and below, suggesting that a specific part of the building was attacked. Gharib said this was his family’s home.

The strike was one of more than 1,600 that Israel said it carried out on Sept. 23, the first day of intensified bombing of Lebanon that it has waged over the past month. More than 500 people were killed that day. This number of casualties had not been seen in the Gaza Strip until the second week, said Emily Tripp, director of London-based Airwars, a conflict monitoring group.

Israel has vowed to cripple Hezbollah to end more than a year of cross-border shelling by the Iran-backed militant group, which began a day after a Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, sparked a war in the Gaza Strip. It said its strikes targeted Hezbollah members and infrastructure. But among the more than 2,000 people killed in shelling over the past month, there are also hundreds of civilians – often entire families killed in their homes.

Since then, the street where Gharib’s family lived – an area of ​​shops, homes and international agency offices in the Al-Khush area of ​​Tire – has been subject to repeated airstrikes and is now empty.

Gharib, a 27-year-old pilot and entrepreneur, moved to Senegal in search of a better future, but always planned to return to Lebanon to start a family.

According to him, he was close to his three sisters, the keeper of their secrets and their best friend. During their childhood, their father was often absent, so he and his mother took charge of the family.

The last time he visited his family was in May 2023, when his sister Maya, an engineering student, got engaged. She planned to get married on October 12. But as tensions with Israel rose in September, Gharib’s plans to come home for the wedding were uncertain. She told him that she would put it off until he arrived.

After the strike, her fiancé, also an army officer, found her body and that of the rest of her family in the morgue of a hospital in Tire.

“She was not destined to have a wedding. Instead, we paraded her as a bride to heaven,” Gharib said. On the day the wedding was supposed to take place, he posted photos of his sister, including her wedding dress.

His 24-year-old sister Racha was getting ready to graduate as a dentist and planned to open her own clinic. “She loved life,” he said.

His younger sister, Noor, 20, was studying to become a nutritionist and training to become a personal trainer. Gharib called it “the laughter of the house.”

There is nothing left of his family now except a few photos on his phone and posts on social networks.

“I’m in so much pain. But I know that the pain will be worst when I arrive in Lebanon,” Gharib said. “There aren’t even their photographs hanging on the walls. Their clothes are not there. Their smell is no longer in the house. The house has completely disappeared.”

“They took my family and the memories of them.”