A Lebanese family was holding a Sunday meeting when their building was destroyed in an Israeli strike.

A few seconds later, a huge roar shook the basement apartment. Al-Baba fell to the floor. Something hit him in the chest, knocking the breath out of him. He pulled himself up and reached for the door, calling out his sister’s name. A second explosion knocked him back to the floor. The bathroom ceiling and the entire building above it collapsed onto his back.

An Israeli air raid hit a six-story residential building in Ain el-Delb, an area near the coastal city of Sidon. The entire building flipped over the hillside and landed face down, taking with it 17 apartments full of families and visitors. More than 70 people were killed and 60 were injured.

Israel said the Sept. 29 strike targeted a Hezbollah commander and said the building was the group’s headquarters. It could not be independently confirmed whether any of the residents belonged to Hezbollah.

In a video posted online mourning one of the people believed to have lived in the building, he appeared in an old photograph wearing a military uniform, a sign of Hezbollah affiliation.

Either way, experts say the strike illustrates Israel’s willingness to kill significant numbers of civilians to achieve a single goal. These tactics have led to an increase in the number of Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s decades-long campaign against Hamas.

Israel has stepped up its bombing of Lebanon since Sept. 23, vowing to cripple Hezbollah, which began shelling northern Israel after a Hamas attack on Oct. 7 sparked a war in the Gaza Strip. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah members and infrastructure and says the group is placing military assets in civilian areas.

About 2,000 people were killed, including Hezbollah fighters and commanders as well as hundreds of civilians, often in house-to-house attacks.

“This seems to be a very similar pattern to Gaza, with families being killed together in single strikes,” said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a London-based conflict monitoring group.

In the first week of the escalating Israeli attack, it hit a house in Tire province, killing a family of 15, all women and children except a Hezbollah member. The Byblos strike killed six family members of a Hezbollah fighter who had already died in fighting a month earlier, raising questions about the quality of intelligence used in the strikes. The attack on a shack housing families of Syrian migrant workers killed 23 people.

The strike in Ain el-Delb was one of the deadliest in the entire Israeli campaign. Among those killed were al-Baba’s sister, her husband and their two children, a daughter in her 20s and a teenage boy.

Al-Baba was trapped for hours, with debris pinning him to an agonizing kneeling position, his neck twisted, his face stuck to the bathroom floor, and unable to feel his legs. He knew that his sister’s family had died due to their phones constantly ringing without answer.

“Nobody said a word. I didn’t hear any movement,” he said.

The Israeli military said it made evacuation arrangements before acting on confirmed intelligence about the Ain al-Delb strike. Residents who spoke to The Associated Press said they received no warning.

“I wish we could do that. We would have left,” said Abdul-Hamid Ramadan, who lived on the top floor and whose wife Jinan and daughter Julia were killed. “I would have lost my home. But not my wife and daughter.”

Israel says it often issues evacuation orders before launching strikes. But in Lebanon, as in the Gaza Strip, human rights groups say advance warnings are often inadequate and come in the middle of the night or through social media.

Ramadan, a retired army officer, said he knew of no Hezbollah members or weapons in the building where he has lived for more than 20 years.

No one thought that the area, whose majority population is Sunni Muslim and Christian, would end up on Israel’s target list. In the building, 15 of the 17 apartments were occupied by long-time residents, everyone knew each other. Displaced people from the south had begun arriving a week earlier, seeking shelter with relatives in the building.

Al-Baba said his sister, before she was killed, confided in him that she was worried about her beloved Shiite tenant, mainly because he was hosting guests. She feared he might be targeted by Israel and asked her brother if she should leave. She decided to stay because she had no idea where to go.

Neither al-Baba nor his sister knew anything about the tenant’s connection to Hezbollah.

The Israeli strikes raised fears among the Lebanese that their building could be hit because it was hosting someone who Israel claims, rightly or wrongly, to be linked to Hezbollah. Building administrations asked tenants to tell them the names of internally displaced persons. Some refused to accept people from the south.

The first strike hit the lower floors of the building around 4 p.m. Ramadan’s family was shocked, but did not think the building was collapsing. Only Ramadan’s wife, Jinan, ran up the stairs. A few moments passed, long enough for Ramadan’s son Achraf to bring his sister Julia a glass of water to calm her down.

Then the second missile hit. The building swayed and then collapsed.

Ramadan fell from the sofa, which, together with the closet standing next to it, protected him from the falling ceiling. Ashraf, a fitness trainer and former soldier, took cover under the doorframe. Julia fell to the floor.

For what seemed like two hours, all three communicated through the rubble. Ramadan said Julia was only two meters (yards) away, her voice weak but audible. He called for help using his mobile phone, which was still in his hands.

When help arrived, Achraf got out first; then his father, about six hours after the strike. In the chaos, they thought Julia had been pulled out. But rescuers returned and found the 28-year-old man dead. Her mother died in hospital from internal bleeding.

“I lost the cornerstone of my home: my wife, my partner and my friend,” Ramadan said. “I lost my daughter Yulia… She was my joy, my smile, my future.”

They are buried in unmarked graves in the section of the Sidon Cemetery dedicated to the victims of the construction of Ain el Delb.

As in the Gaza Strip, there are concerns that the number of civilian casualties is “quite high,” given that the intended military target is often unspecified or relatively small, said Rich Weir, senior conflict, crisis and weapons researcher at Human Rights Watch.

He said there had been “an increase in the scale of damage… the demolition of entire buildings in densely populated residential areas, posing an imminent risk to civilians.” Israel also expanded the scope of its targets by targeting Hezbollah’s financial institutions, he said.

Ramadan was not surprised that so many people were killed for one possible Hezbollah member. According to him, this has already happened.

“We heard on the news that the apartment came under fire. And people wonder who it was,” he said. “People don’t know. Israel knows.”

At the foot of the rubble of the building, Hesham al-Baba spent four hours in pitch darkness, pinned down with his legs tucked under him. The falling door broke two of his ribs. It was difficult to breathe. The only thing he could think about was that he might lose his legs.

“There was no blood flowing to my feet,” he said. “I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t move. I tried to stay strong. I don’t want to remember. It upsets me.”

Finally he heard movement: people removing bricks, a bulldozer. He started screaming. His lungs and chest hurt. They called him to shout louder. “I told them I couldn’t.”

Then a ray of light flashed through a hole in the darkness. Seeing him, the rescuer shouted: “What a way to get stuck! It’s worse than a coffin.”

Another four hours passed before rescuers pulled him out headfirst through the floor beneath him, covered in dust and soot.

The entire rescue operation took more than 43 hours. The Health Ministry put the death toll at 45, but Sidon’s civil defense chief Mohamed Arkadan said emergency workers had recovered 73 bodies from the rubble. Five bodies remain missing, he said.

Doctors told al-Baba that his ribs would heal over time.

But not his pain.

He said he would wear black for the rest of his life, mourning his sister. Past conflicts never stopped him from returning to Lebanon to visit his family. This time it may be a while before he returns.

“There will be no peace,” he said, thinking about his family’s tragedy and the wars in Lebanon and Gaza. “No one will bring me justice. Nobody.”