The blasts could be heard throughout Beirut, an earth-shaking thunder that rolled across the city on Friday evening. For Doctor Jihad Saadeh, director of Lebanon’s largest public hospital, it was the beginning of a sleepless night full of carnage.
Saadeh’s private clinic was just a few hundred metres away from the target of Israeli jets that dropped bombs on at least six residential buildings that collapsed before his eyes. Their aim was to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, who was confirmed dead on Saturday.
“We saw the jets of red smoke shoot up into the sky, the buildings just collapsed,” he said. He had raced from his clinic to the Rafik Hariri hospital to ready his staff.