When Your Home Becomes a War Zone

When Your Home Becomes a War Zone

Lama Fakih: [00:00:00] My name's Lama Fakih.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: What kind of person are you?

Lama Fakih: Um, I'm a mom. I'm Lebanese. I'm also American. I live in Beirut. 

Beirut, Lebanon. About 50 years ago, Lama Fakih's grandparents got an apartment in a building in the southwest suburbs of that city. Her dad grew up there, and Lama lived there too when she was really young.

Much later, Lama and her husband got married in that apartment. It has been a habit of hers to visit it since she moved out long ago. So we live on a really congested street. And there's never enough parking in front of the apartment building. So there's a small cafe in front of the house called Maatouk.

They'll come out because they'll assume that I'm trying to take their parking. They'll recognize me, and then help me find a place where I can s- stick the car for a couple hours while [00:01:00] I run up. 

Ngofeen Mputubwele: And can you just, like, describe the house to me? Give me, like, a mental picture. I want to see what we're coming up on.

Lama Fakih: It's, like, an older building, so you get in the elevator, and you're hoping you can make it up to your floor before the electricity cuts or you get stuck. You have this big, heavy door entering into the apartment, um, with these-

Ngofeen Mputubwele: What kind of flooring do you have? Like, tile, wood? 

Lama Fakih: Tile. Okay. Tile flooring, and, you know, these sort of double doors that are always open but that lead you into the main living and family room, with this huge dining table that we would gather around.

A balcony that overlooks this really congested and busy street, and very ornate chandeliers that my grandmother loved. Big kitchen where my grandmother would cook up meals for the entire family, and then a long corridor leading into the bedrooms.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Lama has her [00:02:00] own family now, and she lives with her husband and two children in another apartment in Beirut.

Archival: Fire and destruction across the Middle East this Saturday night, after the US and Israel unleashed a massive joint strike on Iran.

Lama Fakih: The Iran strikes happened on a Saturday, and there was a feeling that things are gonna escalate h- from here quite quickly.

There's, uh, televised this attack, uh, that's happening in the Ghobeiry neighborhood where my f- family home is, and we see the, the strike on, on the building. Is this our building? Is it not our building? Is that our apartment?

In the morning we were able to confirm that it was our apartment building that had been [00:03:00] struck

Ngofeen Mputubwele: This is Rights & Wrongs from Human Rights Watch. I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. This week, when your home becomes a war zone

At the very top of this episode, when Lama was introducing herself, we snipped out an important phrase.

Lama Fakih: I'm a mom. I'm a lawyer. 

Ngofeen Mputubwele: She's a lawyer. Uh, I'm Lebanese and- A human rights lawyer, and?

Lama Fakih: I'm the Global Program Director at Human Rights Watch, which means that I oversee our research across the world.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: She's been based in Beirut for Human Rights Watch for a long time, and over those years, Lama has interviewed a lot of people.

Lama Fakih: In my work, I have, in so many conflicts, documented forced displacement, and by every measure, the [00:04:00] situation that we were in was a privileged one. We had somewhere to go. We were safe.

The level of disruption and harm from that, even in a really privileged context, is so much deeper than I think I could have ever appreciated had I not experienced it myself.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Today's episode is about what happens when you reach the limits of storytelling and enter into story living. On Rights & Wrongs, we interview people who have experienced some terrible things.

Arrest, detention, torture, environmental poisoning, drone attacks, displacement.

Lama Fakih: And for so many people, when we're documenting their stories, it's the details of what happened to them, the events that happened. But the psychological harm, the suspension of their life, the [00:05:00] trauma that they will carry is not something we can fully capture even in the stories that we tell, and even though one of our main objectives is trying to depict the experience of civilians in conflict.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: On October 7th, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, and the next day Hezbollah launched rockets and artillery on Israel from southern Lebanon. Since October 8th, 2023, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed more than 8,700 people, including more than 560 children and 350 medical workers, according to Lebanon's health ministry, and displaced over one million people.

Hezbollah attacks have killed at least 32 civilians since October 2023, according to Israeli media. These are numbers, important numbers. Numbers give us a sense of scale of the war's death and [00:06:00] destruction, but there are no numbers for many of the harms done to civilians in war. As a human rights lawyer working in Lebanon, Lama knows professionally and personally that human rights law exists because civilian harm is real, even when it's not captured by a body count.

Lama Fakih: When the war really escalated in 2024, it was clear to me what areas would most likely be attacked. I was monitoring the hostilities so closely that I had as probably a good of an understanding as anyone about when things were gonna escalate and how. The Israelis would also telegraph that they were gonna target certain areas.

So even though we could anticipate how things were gonna develop, I also knew that I needed to protect my family, physically, but also psychologically

Ngofeen Mputubwele: And in the, in terms of the intellectual gap and the remoteness, like, [00:07:00] what sort of, like, pushes it over into feeling like, "Ah, this is now completely different"?

Lama Fakih: It's a little bit of a protective mechanism. You want to feel that there are certain terrible things that are just not gonna happen to you. So part of it is a, that denial. But at some point, we weren't going to the office because it was not safe. There were strikes next to our office. M- the kids' school was closed.

We had so many relatives that were displaced from their homes. We could not operate under a pretense of normalcy. I suspected that Hassan Nasrallah, who was the secretary general of Hezbollah, was gonna be killed, and I said to my husband, "When they kill Hassan Nasrallah, we have to leave the city."

Ngofeen Mputubwele: On September 27th, 2024, Lama was driving in Beirut.

Lama Fakih: I was picking up my kids from my mom's house, and we were on a main thoroughfare, [00:08:00] three lanes of traffic each way. We started hearing massive explosions. The sound is so overwhelming that you think it's happening u- above you. And I had my kids in the car, and I knew that when an attack is actually happening on top of you, you don't hear it like this.

So I knew that, but the people around me were paralyzed. But we were in the car, in this sort of gridlock traffic, trying to not panic my kids, but also realizing I need to get out of this traffic. So, you know, laying on the horn, trying to turn the car around to go back to where I was coming from. And was able to get out, and later that evening we learned that those were the strikes that killed Nasrallah.

Archival: An overwhelming use of force focused on breaking Hezbollah's command and control center. And we had to then leave the home where I was living with my husband and my kids, which is a few kilometers away from where my family house is. But in, in [00:09:00] proximity to an area that I knew was gonna be hit. So the next morning I put the kids in the car and we, we left the city.

Like- Mm ... this situation is, uh, I can no longer guarantee their safety here. I need to get them out of this situation. And I didn't, in that moment, I think, pay enough attention to their psychological safety.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: That feels like a, like harsh judgment of yourself. I mean, you're sort of like trying to do a lot of things.

Lama Fakih: I mean, we're, you know, as a parent you feel, I think first and foremost, responsible to keep your kids safe. And we were making a choice to stay in Lebanon. Trying to do it in as responsible way as we could. And minimizing the harm to them. But there was harm. And that is painful.

I will say, when, when I took the decision that we could no longer be in our home- Yeah ... my husband dutifully, you know, came along. He also became [00:10:00] really angry that I had displaced our family, and I didn't realize the level of psychological trauma that he had as someone who grew up in the Lebanese Civil War, of having been displaced so many times from his childhood, what that would do to him as an adult.

And that also gave me an appreciation for how this was impacting our kids.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: So that was 2024, and all this is prelude to the destruction of Lama's family home in 2026, which as you heard, she witnessed on TV after she and her family had fled Beirut yet again.

Lama Fakih: My aunt lives in the building. And it's, is, is everyone safe, you know?

And I wanted to speak with her because You know, this home means everything to her. You know, it's the place where she lost her parents, where, um, [00:11:00] you know, people work their entire lives to be able to build these homes. So I was just so worried about her and trying to just provide comfort. It was later that you feel the anger, and the disbelief, and the deep sense of mourning.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Her aunt, it turned out, was not in the building when it was attacked. The family was safe, and Lama made a transition from the land of enabling rigorous storytelling through facts and interviews and investigation into the heart of story living.

Lama Fakih: I wanted to know, was there a legitimate reason to strike the building?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: In other words, did Israeli forces have a legitimate military reason to strike the building? Lama wanted to know the answer to that question, because if there was no legitimate reason, it could be a war crime. When we come back, what Lama found out about the strike, and also what is a legitimate reason, and what [00:12:00] makes something a war crime?

I am Giorgi Gogia, Deputy Europe and Central Asia Director at Human Rights Watch. My job is to investigate how authoritarian governments persecute and silence their critics, often even after they have fled their home countries. This work has never been more important. Across our region and beyond, governments are expanding state power and rolling back human rights.

Just recently, we documented arrests of journalists living abroad, raids on LGBT-friendly venues, and crackdowns on peaceful protests. We don't just expose abuse. We use our findings to press governments to close the loopholes that allow repression to cross borders. Our work has helped stop the forced returns of activists and expose the misuse of international policing systems [00:13:00] like Interpol.

To support this work, please donate at hrw.org/podcast/donate. That's hrw.org/podcast/donate.

Clive Baldwin: Hi, I'm Clive Baldwin. I'm senior legal advisor with Human Rights Watch.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Awesome. So maybe you can just start with like at the most basic level, what is a war crime?

Clive Baldwin: So a war crime is a serious violation of the laws of war, the laws that govern armed conflict, and it's a serious violation that's committed with criminal intent.

So it's either done deliberately or it's done what they call recklessly, but that's knowing something's going to happen and going ahead anyway. One good example of that is deliberately targeting [00:14:00] civilians in a conflict, bombing them, killing them, knowing that they're civilians and attacking them anyway.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: And where does that concept come from? Short answer, it's been in lots of places all across history. But the modern version of these rules, that's different. 

Clive Baldwin: Some people say began with the Red Cross, and the Red Cross was essentially created in the eighteen fifties by this businessman from Geneva called Henry Dunant, who was in northern Italy when a war was going on there and saw the aftermath on a battlefield and thought something should be done essentially to relieve the suffering.

He created the Red Cross. Some of the states agreed a treaty, the first Geneva Convention, so it was in Geneva because of him in the middle of the nineteenth century. But since then, those laws have developed. There's been different treaties, more Geneva Conventions [00:15:00] over the years. States have agreed to them, so virtually every state in the world is bound by them.

The Red Cross, the Inter-- ICRC, International Committee of the Red Cross, remains, as we know, as the guardian of this law. It's called the laws of war, sometimes called international humanitarian law.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: So as I learned from Clive, there are a lot of rules governing war that have accrued over the years. That's the laws of armed conflict, AKA international humanitarian law.

War crimes are serious violations of international humanitarian law. After World War II, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials convicted Nazi and Japanese military leaders of war crimes. And what in modern times began as an agreement among European states on how to conduct their wars eventually spread to the whole world.

And now they [00:16:00] apply to all forms of armed conflict. These laws have a lot of priorities, but one of those priorities is civilians, protecting civilians.

Clive Baldwin: You have armed forces, members of the armed forces who are part of war. You can target them, you can fight them. But others should be protected. In any armed conflict, the armed forces must distinguish between civilians and military as individuals, as targets, as buildings.

They can only target military objectives. And if there's any doubt about whether an individual, a building, an objective is military or civilian, they must assume that it's civilian.

Lama Fakih: And in this case, I wanted to know was there a legitimate reason to strike the building?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: That's what Lama was talking about before the break.

Lama Fakih: And so began that [00:17:00] inquiry of trying to identify was anyone in the building?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Which means gathering a lot of evidence.

Lama Fakih: There were a couple of strikes on the building. The first one was targeting the first floor. There is a, um, kind of tutoring center that is there. Uh, it's like one of these, you know, prepares you for the SAT kind of places.

And there had been an evacuation order, uh, before the strike.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: The Israeli military had issued the evacuation order, so that's why Lama's aunt wasn't in the apartment. And no one was in the building.

Lama Fakih: No one was, uh, killed in the attack. But There were no military objectives in the building.

Unfortunately, with many of these attacks, there's also no attempt to try to justify them.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: If the building sheltered weapons or Hezbollah fighters, it might have been a legitimate military target. But in her investigation, Lama didn't find a legitimate military target, and the Israeli military didn't explain or justify why they targeted the building.

Lama Fakih: Before the strike took [00:18:00] place, I mentioned there had been an evacuation warning. And it happened that that one was a very targeted one for that specific building. But the Israeli military did also issue evacuation warnings of entire parts of the country, entire cities, areas covering, like, where a million people live.

And this did cause significant displacement of the civilian population, and it risked forced displacement, which is a war crime.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Forced displacement, uprooting civilians from their homes, their towns, their cities, with no military objective. But as Clive told me, those investigating if an incident rises to the level of a war crime should identify who was responsible, and if there is proof of intent.

Clive Baldwin: Did the people carrying out the attack know they were civilians? Did they think they were attacking a military target? [00:19:00] If the evidence shows that they were deliberately attacking a civilian, that looks like criminal intent. There can be situations where you attack civilians and the person made a mistake.

Their evidence was out of date. They thought they were attacking something they didn't. May still be a violation of the law of armed conflict, but the person didn't have the intent to commit a war crime.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: That broader category, laws of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, includes things like how you treat prisoners of war and a ton of other things.

Clive Baldwin: So there's quite a lot of situations where they can say it's a violation of the laws of war, but the war crimes, which is criminal law, is a different type of law that is for individuals and requires that degree of criminal intent, and that makes it a much more limited area.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: In the case of Lama's family home, there's still a lot of unknowns.

Who exactly ordered the strike? [00:20:00] What did they know about the target?

Lama Fakih: We are in a period now where justice feels remote, but this is the critical period for the documentation of the crimes. It may take years, but the victims will insist on justice today, tomorrow, ten years from now, twenty years from now. I mean, what else do we do?

Otherwise, we have just hopelessness.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: When I spoke with Lama, she kept coming back to the fact that while no one was killed in the attack on her family's building-

Lama Fakih: In cases like that, we say we are lucky ...

Ngofeen Mputubwele: there was still significant harm that she is now personally painfully aware of.

Lama Fakih: But when it happens to your home, you also lose everything.

And this is not like someone's gonna swoop in to compensate you, let alone the memories lost, the history lost. It's the community that is also destroyed. You know, it's, may- maybe it sounds unimportant, but the butcher that you get [00:21:00] your meat from, the bakery that you go to, the pharmacist, the neighbor who has been your neighbor for generations, it's leaving a lot behind.

I have not been able to go there. I did drive by, but I never stopped. I just didn't want to experience it like that. And again, going to a site of a bombing is something that I have done with some regularity in my work, and I just didn't wanna have those memories. A family home is more than a house.

It's a memory bank in your brain.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Is there either a smell or a sound that you associate with being in that house?

Lama Fakih: So the first shop on the block is a place called Lama Star. It's a juice shop. There is this coffee shop, so you have this smell of the coffee beans, and it, it's really this, [00:22:00] uh, dual smell of this juice shop and the coffee shop.

For us when we were kids, like, you would... Your grandparents would give you $5, and you go down, and you grab a juice, freshly squeezed juice. And the coffee shop also was, like, a small supermarket, so we would always go in there and get sweets, so it just would fill the shop but also the area in front of the building.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: You 

might be wondering, what happened to Lama's aunt who had been living in the building?

Lama Fakih: So she's rented an apartment in a different part of the city, and I was asking her, you know, "Would you go back?" And there's no hesitation when she says, "Yeah, if I, if I can rebuild, I will go back."

Ngofeen Mputubwele: You've been listening to Rights & Wrongs from Human Rights Watch.

The archival clips in this episode came from Reuters and Channel 4. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Sophie Soloway is the [00:23:00] associate producer. Ife Fatunase and Anthony Gale are the executive producers. I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I'll be back in a couple weeks with a new episode. Thanks for listening.