Beirut firefighters leave a legacy of courage and commitment

Rita Hitti (C) cries during the funeral procession of her son Najib Hitti, nephew Charbel Hitti and son-in-law Charbel Karam, who all left together in one firetruck to douse a port blaze believed to have sparked the August 4 mega-blast in Beirut and never returned home. (AFP)
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Updated 21 August 2020
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Beirut firefighters leave a legacy of courage and commitment

  • Colleagues praise sense of duty of firefighters who died trying to contain port blaze before Aug. 4 blast
  • The firefighters did not know the warehouse stored 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate next to fireworks

BEIRUT: Family, friends and colleagues bade a tearful farewell on Aug. 15 to Ralph Mallahi, the sixth identified firefighter out of the 10 who perished in the explosion that destroyed or damaged nearly half of Beirut and led to the Lebanese government’s resignation.

Mallahi’s remains, encased in a white coffin, were carried by his colleagues — firefighters, officers and rescuers — all dressed in white, while his grieving family and relatives walked behind.

Wedding music played in the background as the funeral procession passed his workplace at the Beirut Fire Brigade headquarters in Karantina before touring the areas of Ain Al-Remmaneh and Forn El-Chebbak where Mallahi grew up. Rice and flowers were scattered, adding to the poignant scenes.




Relatives carry the coffins of firefighters Charbel Hitti, Najib Hitti and Charbel Karam during their funeral procession in their hometown of Qartaba, north of the Lebanese capital Beirut. (AFP)

A dashing, tall and blue-eyed 24-year-old, Mallahi was among a group of firefighters who died while trying to contain the fire in warehouse No. 12 at the Port of Beirut, before two explosions destroyed the waterfront and its neighborhoods on Aug. 4.

Neither the firefighters nor the rescuers knew that the warehouse contained 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, stored next to fireworks.

The explosion claimed the lives of 180 civilians, while 30 people are still missing. More than 6,000 people were injured, and thousands more were displaced in the tragedy that caused huge losses to private and public property, infrastructure, hospitals, educational establishments, churches and mosques.

The body of Staff Sergeant Charbel Karam was found on Saturday, days after the remains of Mallahi, Staff Sergeant Rami Kaaki, Sergeant Elie Khouzami, firefighter Joe Noon and rescuer Sahar Fares were discovered. Other bodies are yet to be identified.

The remains of firefighters Charbel Hitti, 22, his cousin Najib Hitti, Michel Hawwa and Joe Bou Saab have also been found.




Lebanese women look at a poster bearing the portraits of three missing related firefighters who left together in one firetruck to douse a port blaze believed to have sparked the August 4 massive blast in Beirut and never returned home, with text below reading in Arabic "The Heroes." (AFP)

“Rescuers told us they pulled out remains and did a DNA test,” Charbel’s father George told Arab News.

Najib’s driving license was found next to human remains, indicating that he drove the fire truck.

On Monday, at a funeral for the three young men in their town, neighbors bid them a tearful last farewell.

An outwardly resilient George described the impact of the tragedy on his family: “My son wasn’t the only one killed in the crime committed against the Lebanese. Najib, 25, was working with him.”

They both joined the fire brigade three years ago, having previously served in the Civil Defense brigade in Qartaba. “My cousin Charbel Karam, who is also my brother-in-law, was also killed with them,” said George.

As the villagers raised the pictures of their three lost sons with the caption “Heroes,” the grieving mother said: “I don’t know who to cry for, whether for my son Charbel Hitti, my brother Charbel Karam or my brother-in-law’s son Najib.”

George said the three young men served the people and helped the needy. They worked in Beirut and returned to their homes in Qartaba 55 km away, he said, adding: “Thank God they never joined any (political) party.”

On the day of the explosion, George was in Beirut and wanted to visit them at their workplace for the first time.

“I went to the headquarters where they were sleeping after a long night shift. I woke up my son Charbel and his cousin Najib, and told them I’d see them in Qartaba after their shift. ‘Go back to sleep’,” he said.




Karlen cries during the funeral procession of her husband Charbel Karam, brother Najib Hitti, and cousin Charbel Hitti in their hometown of Qartaba, north of the Lebanese capital Beirut, on August 17, 2020. (AFP)

George stayed in Beirut a little longer then returned home. “It didn’t occur to me that it would be the last time I’d see them — a farewell call,” he said. Karam, 37, leaves behind a wife and two baby daughters.

Beirut Mayor Marwan Abboud was the first to mourn the 10 firefighters on TV as he headed to the port, saying: “We lost 10 young people.”

The victims had headed from the Beirut Fire Brigade headquarters in Karantina to the port aboard a fire truck and an ambulance.

The body of young rescuer Fares was the first to be found in the explosion site. She was identified through her nails and pants.

The fire brigade to which the victims belonged carries the slogan “Chivalry — Sacrifice — Loyalty.”

It includes an organized and militarily trained technical group consisting of technicians specialized in firefighting, rescue and relief, in addition to military personnel to supervise abiding by order and command.

Colleagues who were with the victims when the fire alarm went off on the afternoon of Aug. 4 said Mallahi was the first to get on the fire truck bound for the warehouse.

Fares was the most enthusiastic and took pictures of the group smiling before sending it to the man she was to marry in June 2021.

Her body was found under the rubble the day after the explosion, and the group’s picture went viral on social media.

Her family is still in shock, and her mother cannot believe that a daughter getting ready to wear a wedding gown is dead.

Her colleagues described her as “passionate in doing her work, the first to run whenever she heard the fire alarm, and a dynamic rescuer.”

The team headed to the port, two minutes away, to assist the fire unit stationed there. “There are preliminary pictures taken by the team while our firefighters were trying to open the warehouse accompanied by a civilian,” said Lt. Ali Najm, PR officer for the Beirut Firefighter Brigade.

“It turned out they needed help and we sounded the fire alarm one more time. So all the firefighters were headed to the scene when a huge explosion occurred, the headquarters’ walls crumbled and great damage ensued,” he added.

“Had our firefighters been at the headquarters at the time, we would’ve endured even greater human loss.”

Kaaki’s mother said her son was doing his duty although he was not on that day’s shift. “I’m trying to calm myself saying God had given him to me and God took him away, yet I can’t bear the tragedy,” she said at her home in Burj Abi Haidar in Beirut. “My daughter-in-law is pregnant and already has a 4-year-old daughter. Is this acceptable?”

The grieving mother added: “Everyone should be hanged … especially the one who says his party has no access to the port or the airport. If you know what’s stored in Haifa, how come you don’t know what’s stored in the Port of Beirut or the rest of the country?”

After Kaaki’s body was identified through a DNA test, his colleagues and friends wrote on his pictures raised in Beirut: “Farewell O’Hero.”

“Rami had been in service in the fire brigade for 12 years now,” his brother Khairuddin said. “He was the one who called the headquarters asking for support, and had other firefighters not headed to the fire trucks on their way to the port, they would’ve definitely got hit. Rami saved his colleagues.”

Noon, 27, came from Mishmish village in Jbeil district. After the explosion, his brother William, a volunteer in the Civil Defense brigade, returned to the port every day for information.




Relatives react during the funeral procession of firefighters Charbel Hitti, Najib Hitti, and Charbel Karam in their hometown of Qartaba, north of the Lebanese capital Beirut. (AFP)

The body of strong and sturdy Noon, known for once singlehandedly dragging a truck, was found under the rubble. The last picture taken of him showed him trying to open the warehouse door.

Firefighters who survived the explosion blamed port officials. “They reported a fire but didn’t report what was stored in the warehouse,” one said.

“They took our teammates to certain death. Had they known what was in warehouse No. 12, they’d never have gone in to become mangled corpses.”

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Twitter: @najiahoussari


‘No Eid’ for West Bank residents who lost sons in Israeli raids

Updated 5 sec ago
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‘No Eid’ for West Bank residents who lost sons in Israeli raids

  • An armored car arrived at the site shortly after, unloading soldiers to clear the cemetery of its mourners, who walked away solemnly without protest

JENIN: Abeer Ghazzawi had little time to visit her two sons’ graves for Eid Al-Adha before Israeli soldiers cleared the cemetery near the refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
The Israeli army has conducted a months-long operation in the camp, which has forced Ghazzawi, along with thousands of other residents, from
her home.
For Ghazzawi, the few precious minutes she spent at her sons’ graves still felt like a small victory.
“On the last Eid — Eid Al-Fitr, celebrating the end of Ramadan in March — they raided us. They even shot at us. But this Eid, there was no shooting, just that they kicked us out of the cemetery twice,” said the 48-year-old.
“We were able to visit our land, clean up around the graves, and pour rosewater and cologne on them,” she added.
As part of the Eid celebrations, families traditionally visit the graves of their loved ones.
In the Jenin camp cemetery, women and men had brought flowers for their deceased relatives, and many sat on the side of their loved ones’ graves as they remembered the dead, clearing away weeds and dust.
An armored car arrived at the site shortly after, unloading soldiers to clear the cemetery of its mourners, who walked away solemnly without protest.
Ghazzawi’s two sons, Mohammed and Basel, were killed in January 2024 in a Jenin hospital by undercover Israeli troops.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group claimed the two brothers as its fighters after their deaths.
Like Ghazzawi, many in Jenin mourned sons killed during one of the numerous Israeli operations that have targeted the city, a known bastion of Palestinian armed groups fighting Israel.
In the current months-long military operation in the north of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, Israeli forces looking for militants have cleared three refugee camps and deployed tanks in Jenin.
Mohammed Abu Hjab, 51, went to the cemetery on the other side of the city to visit the grave of his son, killed in January by an Israeli strike that also killed five other people.
“There is no Eid. I lost my son — how can it be Eid for me?” he asked as he stood by the six small gravestones of the dead young men.

 

 

 


Israel’s Netanyahu announces four soldiers killed in Gaza

Updated 06 June 2025
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Israel’s Netanyahu announces four soldiers killed in Gaza

  • Netanyahu extended his condolences “to the families of our four fallen heroes in Gaza”
  • The military said the four were killed in southern Gaza

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday the deaths of four soldiers in Gaza, with local journalists who cover the military reporting they were all killed in a booby-trapped building.

Netanyahu extended his condolences “to the families of our four fallen heroes in Gaza in the fight to defeat Hamas and bring back our hostages,” naming two of the soldiers as Staff Sergeant Yoav Raver and reservist Sergeant Major Chen Gross.

“Our four fighters sacrificed their lives for the safety of all of us,” he added.

The names of the other two soldiers have not yet been cleared for publication, the military said.

Their deaths bring the number of Israeli soldiers killed since the start of the ground offensive in Gaza to 429.

The military said the four were killed in southern Gaza, with Israeli media reporting they were in
a house in the city of Khan Yunis when it exploded.

The army said another reserve officer was severely wounded in the same incident.

Israel recently stepped up its campaign in Gaza in what it says is a renewed push to defeat Hamas, whose October 7, 2023 attack sparked the war.


Israel army issues evacuation warning for parts of Gaza City

Updated 06 June 2025
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Israel army issues evacuation warning for parts of Gaza City

  • The evacuation order comes at the beginning of the Eid Al-Adha holiday
  • Israel has faced mounting pressure to allow more aid into Gaza

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: The Israeli military issued an evacuation order for residents of parts of Gaza City on Friday ahead of an attack, as it presses an intensified campaign in the battered Palestinian territory.

“This is a final and urgent warning ahead of an impending strike,” army spokesman Avichay Adraee said.

The army “will strike all areas from which rockets are launched.”

The evacuation order comes at the beginning of the Eid Al-Adha holiday, one of the main religious festivals of the Muslim calendar.

The Israeli military has recently stepped up its campaign in Gaza in what it says is a renewed push to defeat Hamas, whose October 2023 attack sparked the war.

International calls for a negotiated ceasefire have grown in recent weeks.

Hamas’s lead negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya said on Thursday that the Palestinian Islamist group was ready to enter a new round of talks aimed at sealing a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Talks aimed at brokering a new ceasefire have failed to yield a breakthrough since the last brief truce fell apart in March with the resumption of Israeli operations in Gaza.

Israel and Hamas appeared close to an agreement late last month, but a deal proved elusive, with each side accusing the other of scuppering a US-backed proposal.

Israel has faced mounting pressure to allow more aid into Gaza, after it imposed a more than two-month blockade that led to widespread shortages of food and other essentials.

It recently eased the blockade and has worked with the newly formed, US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to implement a new aid distribution mechanism via a handful of centers in south and central Gaza.

But since its inception, the GHF has been a magnet for criticism from the UN and other members of the aid world — which only intensified following a recent string of deadly incidents near its facilities.

Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

According to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, at least 4,402 people have been killed since Israel resumed its offensive on March 18, taking the war’s overall toll to 54,677, mostly civilians.


Homes smashed, help slashed: no respite for returning Syrians

Updated 06 June 2025
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Homes smashed, help slashed: no respite for returning Syrians

  • The community center, funded by UNHCR, offers vital services that families cannot get elsewhere in a country scarred by war
  • “We have no stability. We are scared and we need support,” said Fatima Al-Abbiad, a mother of four

DAMASCUS: Around a dozen Syrian women sat in a circle at a UN-funded center in Damascus, happy to share stories about their daily struggles, but their bonding was overshadowed by fears that such meet-ups could soon end due to international aid cuts.

The community center, funded by the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR), offers vital services that families cannot get elsewhere in a country scarred by war, with an economy broken by decades of mismanagement and Western sanctions.

“We have no stability. We are scared and we need support,” said Fatima Al-Abbiad, a mother of four. “There are a lot of problems at home, a lot of tension, a lot of violence because of the lack of income.”

But the center’s future now hangs in the balance as the UNHCR has had to cut down its activities in Syria because of the international aid squeeze caused by US President Donald Trump’s decision to halt foreign aid.

The cuts will close nearly half of the UNHCR centers in Syria and the widespread services they provide — from educational support and medical equipment to mental health and counselling sessions — just as the population needs them the most. There are hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees returning home after the fall of Bashar Assad last year.

UNHCR’s representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, said the situation was a “disaster” and that the agency would struggle to help returning refugees.

“I think that we have been forced — here I use very deliberately the word forced — to adopt plans which are more modest than we would have liked,” he told Context/Thomson Reuters Foundation in Damascus.

“It has taken us years to build that extraordinary network of support, and almost half of them are going to be closed exactly at the moment of opportunity for refugee and IDPs (internally displaced people) return.”

BIG LOSS
A UNHCR spokesperson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the agency would shut down around 42 percent of its 122 community centers in Syria in June, which will deprive some 500,000 people of assistance and reduce aid for another 600,000 that benefit from the remaining centers.

The UNHCR will also cut 30 percent of its staff in Syria, said the spokesperson, while the livelihood program that supports small businesses will shrink by 20 percent unless it finds new funding.

Around 100 people visit the center in Damascus each day, said Mirna Mimas, a supervisor with GOPA-DERD, the church charity that runs the center with UNHCR.

Already the center’s educational programs, which benefited 900 children last year, are at risk, said Mimas.

Nour Huda Madani, 41, said she had been “lucky” to receive support for her autistic child at the center.

“They taught me how to deal with him,” said the mother of five.

Another visitor, Odette Badawi, said the center was important for her well-being after she returned to Syria five years ago, having fled to Lebanon when war broke out in Syria in 2011.

“(The center) made me feel like I am part of society,” said the 68-year-old.

Mimas said if the center closed, the loss to the community would be enormous: “If we must tell people we are leaving, I will weep before they do,” she said

UNHCR HELP ‘SELECTIVE’
Aid funding for Syria had already been declining before Trump’s seismic cuts to the US Agency for International Development this year and cuts by other countries to international aid budgets.

But the new blows come at a particularly bad time.

Since former president Assad was ousted by Islamist rebels last December, around 507,000 Syrians have returned from neighboring countries and around 1.2 million people displaced inside the country went back home, according to UN estimates.

Llosa said, given the aid cuts, UNHCR would have only limited scope to support the return of some of the 6 million Syrians who fled the country since 2011.

“We will need to help only those that absolutely want to go home and simply do not have any means to do so,” Llosa said. “That means that we will need to be very selective as opposed to what we wanted, which was to be expansive.”

ESSENTIAL SUPPORT
Ayoub Merhi Hariri had been counting on support from the livelihood program to pay off the money he borrowed to set up a business after he moved back to Syria at the end of 2024.

After 12 years in Lebanon, he returned to Daraa in southwestern Syria to find his house destroyed — no doors, no windows, no running water, no electricity.

He moved in with relatives and registered for livelihood support at a UN-backed center in Daraa to help him start a spice manufacturing business to support his family and ill mother.

While his business was doing well, he said he would struggle to repay his creditors the 20 million Syrian pounds ($1,540) he owed them now that his livelihood support had been cut.

“Thank God (the business) was a success, and it is generating an income for us to live off,” he said.

“But I can’t pay back the debt,” he said, fearing the worst. “I’ll have to sell everything.”


Netanyahu admits Israel supporting anti-Hamas armed group in Gaza

Updated 06 June 2025
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Netanyahu admits Israel supporting anti-Hamas armed group in Gaza

  • Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab

JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel is supporting an armed group in Gaza that opposes the militant group Hamas, following comments by a former minister that Israel had transferred weapons to it.
Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR) think tank describes Abu Shabab as the leader of a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks.”
Knesset member and ex-defense minister Avigdor Liberman had told the Kan public broadcaster that the government, at Netanyahu’s direction, was “giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons.”
“What did Liberman leak? That security sources activated a clan in Gaza that opposes Hamas? What is bad about that?” Netanyahu said in a video posted to social media on Thursday.
“It is only good, it is saving lives of Israeli soldiers.”
Michael Milshtein, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, told AFP that the Abu Shabab clan was part of a Bedouin tribe that spans across the border between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Some of the tribe’s members, he said, were involved in “all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that.”


Milshtein said that Abu Shabab had spent time in prison in Gaza and that his clan chiefs had recently denounced him as an Israeli “collaborator and a gangster.”
“It seems that actually the Shabak (Israeli security agency) or the (military) thought it was a wonderful idea to turn this militia, gang actually, into a proxy, to give them weapons and money and shelter” from army operations, Milshtein said.
He added that Hamas killed four members of the gang days ago.
The ECFR said Abu Shabab was “reported to have been previously jailed by Hamas for drug smuggling. His brother is said to have been killed by Hamas during a crackdown against the group’s attacks on UN aid convoys.”
Israel regularly accuses Hamas, with which it has been at war for nearly 20 months, of looting aid convoys in Gaza.
Hamas said the group had “chosen betrayal and theft as their path” and called on civilians to oppose them.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, said it had evidence of “clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel), and the enemy army itself in the looting of aid and the fabrication of humanitarian crises that deepen the suffering of” Palestinians.
The Popular Forces, as Abu Shabab’s group calls itself, said on Facebook it had “never been, and will never be, a tool of the occupation.”
“Our weapons are simple, outdated, and came through the support of our own people,” it added.
Milshtein called Israel’s decision to arm a group such as Abu Shabab “a fantasy, not something that you can really describe as a strategy.”
“I really hope it will not end with catastrophe,” he said.