When I met Ali Haj Hassan in Douris, a town in northeastern Lebanon, he was sifting through all that remained of a state-run civil defense center: a massive pile of rubble. It was Nov. 15, 2024, and the night before, an Israeli airstrike had leveled the center, killing 15 first responders and five bystanders. “They were my friends,” Ali told me. “They were like brothers.”
Ali was 17 at the time, with a round face that spoke to his youth. During the war, he had made the decision to volunteer as a rescue worker. He pulled a firefighter jacket, a red hard hat, and a single work boot from the rubble, then carefully assembled them atop the pile. “Farewell, civil defense martyrs,” he scrawled on a piece of paper, pinning it onto the jacket and standing back to take in the makeshift memorial.
Haidar al-Zein, another rescuer worker at the center, had just finished removing the bodies. “We were just helping,” he said. “Is this our sin? Is this the reason our friends are now in pieces?”
Many were his colleagues of 18 years. He’d known them since joining the civil defense team as a university volunteer. When Israel escalated its bombardment of the region, they lived together at the center for days on end — ready to rush to the scene of strikes, scrambling to rescue civilians caught in the line of fire.
Haidar spoke in a voice that was barely audible, fighting to hold back tears. “We were a team, brothers, we’d go out on missions together,” he managed. “We’d care, protect, and help each other. … We’d drink coffee together, joke around, and laugh.”
Most of those at the civil defense center were volunteers, putting their daytime jobs on hold to serve the rescue efforts of the war. One of the men killed, whose name was also Ali, was a chef, and another a barber, frequently trimming the rescue workers’ hair. “I greeted them just yesterday. I wish I’d died with them, honestly … ” Haidar went on, and without finishing his sentence turned around, leaning on the tree behind him for support, and broke down sobbing.
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The rescue workers at the Douris strike were not the first who’ve broken down in tears while speaking with me, and they would not be the last. Israel has repeatedly attacked first responders during its war in Lebanon, against what it says are Hezbollah targets. On Oct. 8, 2023, Hezbollah launched an attack on Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and Israel retaliated immediately.
The fighting mostly occurred on the Lebanon-Israel border until mid-September 2024, when Israel significantly escalated its attacks across the country — and along with it, its assaults on Lebanon’s rescuers.
The Israeli army has accused rescue teams of transporting Hezbollah’s weapons and healthy fighters, a charge that concerns rights groups. “These accusations are alarming because healthcare workers and hospitals are especially protected under the laws of war,” Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch, told me. “They cannot be attacked and they don’t lose their protection unless they are being used to commit acts harmful to the enemy — we did not find evidence of that being the case.”
Israeli strikes have killed at least 201 medics and wounded over 253, according to a report Lebanon’s Health Ministry released on Jan. 30. The report also said that Israel had targeted 67 rescue centers, 177 ambulances, and 59 fire engines.
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Whenever Israel targeted fire responders, Kaiss said, it forced them to stop or delay their rescue work. On Nov. 11 — days before the Douris strike — I’d met 52-year-old Hussein Fakih, the head of Lebanon’s civil defense in the southern Nabatieh governorate. He was with his rescue team on a hilltop overlooking Nabatieh’s city center, where they could quickly locate the Israeli airstrikes below.
To protect the team members’ lives, Hussein told me they had begun to “constantly reposition and spread out” and if there were no known civilians, they would wait five minutes before responding to a strike.
At the time, Hussein had just left the hospital after 18 days of treatment — including seven under intensive care — for severe wounds to his head and lungs. He had bags under his eyes, moved slowly, and spoke softly, as if it pained him to talk.
He was injured while responding to a series of Israeli airstrikes on Oct. 16, which pounded the southern city. While clearing bodies from the rubble, an Israeli airstrike hit an adjacent building, wounding him and six of his colleagues. A separate strike that day hit around 40 meters (around 43 yards) from a civil defense center, wounding three more rescue workers and killing one, 30-year-old Naji Fahes.
Hussein said Israel began to directly target their team in September, beginning with a strike on Sept. 7 on a firetruck in Faroun, on the border with Israel. Three clearly-designated paramedics were killed and two others wounded while putting out a fire.
“Their truck was targeted by Israel with two missiles,” he said. “The fire truck was clear, it has logos on it used in 147 countries. Sadly, they still targeted us.”
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In late January, I met Hussein again. Israel and Lebanon were in the first 60 days of a ceasefire agreement. Although Israel had stopped bombing Nabatieh’s city center, it was still carrying out airstrikes and other military operations closer to the border.
Hussein looked a decade younger, strolling into his office with a bounce to his step. This time, he spoke with vigor. “We need to continue our work to serve our people, our family, and our friends,” he told me. “As I’ve told you, these are the souls we are responsible for. We should not disappoint them.”
Hussein and his team had been uncovering bodies of those killed. He said that they had to wait for orders from the Lebanese army before they could enter an area. The army had to respond to the United Nations peacekeeping troops, who ultimately coordinated with Israel. “If we had more freedom to work, we would be able to lift [more bodies] from the rubble,” he said.
By the time they reached many villages, the bodies had disintegrated to white-boned skeletons, he explained, swiping through his cell phone to show me haunting photos of their remains.
He also said they were waiting for funds to repair their damaged equipment and rebuild the destroyed rescue centers. Only five out of 21 centers in the Nabatieh governorate were still able to operate. Israeli strikes completely destroyed six and significantly damaged another 10. “Our vehicles have plastic for windows that we keep when it’s raining and remove them when it’s not,” Hussein said, “but we are working with what we have until we are provided with better equipment.”
I asked to take a photo of Hussein, and he called his team over. They gathered around him outside the rescue center. On the wall behind them was a poster of their colleague, Naji Fahes. The Israeli blast in October had taken his life. “Make sure he’s in the photo,” Hussein insisted.
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About a week later, on Jan. 28, I was on Lebanon’s border with Israel when I met Mohammad Salam, a 28-year-old rescue worker. He was standing near a dirt barricade, blocking locals from returning to their village.
They came from Yaroun, one of several villages where Israeli troops remain stationed as part of an extension of the ceasefire agreement to Feb. 18. Israeli attacks on citizens attempting to enter their villages have killed over 24 people and wounded over 150 others. Mohammad was one of those responding, hauling those severely wounded to hospitals.
Mohammad had the gentle face of an academic, framed by his short wavy hair and large round glasses. Before the war, he was an economics professor at a university just south of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. “When the war started, I wanted to be helpful,” he told me, recalling how he joined the Islamic Health Committee (IHC), a rescue group affiliated with Hezbollah. “We say in Arabic, ‘al nas, al nas’, people for the people,” he said.
We’re only medics. – Mohammad Salam
Hezbollah operates an extensive network of social services, including infrastructure, healthcare facilities, schools, and youth programs. These services are vital for many people in the country, especially as the Lebanese government’s ability to provide basic public services has deteriorated across four years of economic crisis.
The IHC has borne the brunt of Israel’s targeting of rescue workers. In a period of 66 days — between Israel’s escalation on Lebanon on Sept. 23 and when the ceasefire went into effect on Nov. 26 — Mohammad said that the violence had killed 155 of his colleagues in the IHC. That’s a rate of roughly two per day. (Kaiss, of Human Rights Watch, had told me that medical workers remain protected “even if they’re with the Islamic Health Committee affiliated with Hezbollah.”)
“I was there through the whole war. We could see the weapons, we could go to the places where they were, but we didn’t touch them,” Mohammad said. “It would put us in danger, and it’s not our role. We’re only medics.”
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Sometime around Oct. 5, after multiple direct Israeli attacks on Mohammad’s team, it was no longer safe for them to operate in the border area. So, they moved their base from the southern village of Kounine to Jouaiyya, roughly 20 kilometers (around 12.4 miles) north. Those who lived near the border, in Mohammad’s telling, were on their own.
The International Red Cross continued to work along the border, Mohammad recalled, but because it had to coordinate all of its movements with the UN, it often faced long delays. “Most of the time, by the time the Red Cross would reach [them],” Mohammad said, “the people would be dead.”
Mohammad told me the story of one woman, a 75-year-old named Nawja, who refused to leave Yaroun. He said each time they tried to reach the village to check on her, Israeli troops opened fire.
When they finally managed to enter the village on Dec. 27, Mohammad found Najwa dead. She had three gunshot wounds in her chest, and bruises blanketed her body as if someone had beaten her or stepped on her. “I saw the body,” he said. “She’s an old lady. They didn’t need to shoot her more than once.”
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Mohammad has gradually begun to resume teaching, this time as an English instructor at a public school in his village, Tebnine, near the border. He has training in trauma-informed education, which he said is critical for his students, who’ve now lived through over a year of war.
Still, Mohammad, like the other rescue workers I spoke to, also bears his own psychological scars. Returning to normal life, surrounding himself with other people, was a challenge. “I start crying easily, when a child, or a student, tells me about someone they lost,” he explained. “I know I’m tough now, but maybe in 20 years, I don’t know what will happen.”
All he hoped for now was that his words would reach the world outside. “We should have had protection,” he said. “We should have had the international community at our backs, but there was no one.”
