'He Didn’t Carry a Weapon': Israel Is Killing Lebanon's Medics at an Unprecedented Rate
Zeteo speaks to the colleagues and families of some of the more than 130 Lebanese paramedics killed in Israeli attacks since March.
BEIRUT, Lebanon – Zeinab Qassir had been preparing for her brother’s wedding.
Hussein, 37, was weeks away from getting married when, on the morning of May 22, he woke to the sound of an explosion near his home in the southern Lebanese village of Deir Qanoun. A Syrian family had been struck while on a motorbike. He learned there were injured people. He dressed in his paramedic gear and moved toward the site.
Zeinab tried to stop him. She had seen a drone circling low over the area.
He went anyway.
“I held him before he left,” she tells me, “without knowing it was the last time I would see him alive.”
A short time after paramedics arrived at the site, a woman filming from her window captured the moment a second strike hit their ambulance.
Zeinab ran toward the scene.
“When I arrived, Hussein was still alive,” she says. “There were victims on the ground around me. I didn’t see any of them. All my attention was on my brother as he took his final breaths.”
“Hussein loved ambulance work since he was a child. He didn’t carry a weapon,” says Zeinab. “He woke up from sleep because he heard there were civilians who needed help, and he went to save them.”
Israel’s targeting of medical personnel in Lebanon is not new. But the scale is.