The Bashoura Massacre: The Day the Medics Were Targeted in Their Sleep
Translated by Al-Ahed News, Al-Akhbar Newspaper
On this day one year ago, members of the Civil Defense team of the Islamic Health Society — the Bashoura unit — were still clearing rubble and searching for martyrs at the site in Haret Hreik where Hezbollah’s late Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, had been assassinated.
That evening, the team returned to their base to rest. They set the alarm to ring at 6 a.m., except for Mohammad Farhat, whose shift began later, at 9 a.m.
But most of them never woke up. After midnight, the “Israeli” enemy struck their center with three missiles, then hit it again with a fourth while they were still asleep in their beds — killing them all except Farhat and Hussam Ballouk, who fell into a coma and remains in critical condition to this day.
Farhat found himself trapped under the rubble, stones falling around him, flames closing in. He cried out for his friends — “Mahdi! Abu Ali! Mustafa!” — but no one answered. Drawing on his rescue training, he began calculating how long it would take for emergency teams to arrive, for the crowd to clear, and for him to be found. His thoughts raced: “What if the whole building collapsed and they don’t find me for days? What if they assume we’re all dead and stop searching?”
Then he heard shouting. “That’s when I knew I wasn’t completely buried — they could reach me more easily,” he recalls. When one of the rescuers called out his name — “Farhat!” — he answered, “I’m alive!” and started moving the stones around him to guide them to his location.
The Martyred Rescuer and Volunteer Hassan Khansa
Farhat miraculously made it out of the building after a wall fell on him, pinning him in place but saving his life. His comrades were not as lucky — some were thrown by the blast into the nearby Bashoura cemetery, others crashed down to the first floor. Most were pulled out later, their bodies mutilated or dismembered.
Trying to soften the blow, fellow rescuers told Farhat about the martyrs one by one. “My last hope was that Mahdi Halbawi (the Beirut area commander of the Health Society) might still be alive — I thought he was just injured. But when I learned he’d been martyred too, a suffocating loneliness came over me.”
The team at the Bashoura center were more than colleagues — they were lifelong brothers.
Farhat remembers how exhausted Mahdi seemed in his final days. “After the pager-bomb massacre, he looked drained, especially after Sayyed Hassan’s martyrdom. When we gathered together, his body was with us, but his spirit was somewhere else.” On their last night together, “we were laughing, smoking shisha, while Mahdi sat on the floor, hunched over, hands over his head, staring upward.”
After the strike, the Society relocated the Bashoura center and filled the vacant posts. But the memory of the martyred rescuers “will never fade.” Mahdi remains the leader in spirit, and Raja Zreiq — known as Abu Ali Malak, the tireless operations director whose phone never stopped ringing — is remembered by everyone who ever called him for help and was never turned away.
The center will also never forget Mustafa Mousawi, Beirut’s rescue-team leader and “the Joker” — the man for tough missions — who had stayed at the center since the pager explosion and hadn’t gone home to his family in Nabi Sheet.
There were others who can never be replaced — Wisam Sallhab, the machinery technician “who would run around at midnight looking for a welder to fix something just so the volunteers could eat,” because, as he said, “it’s shameful to serve them simple thyme manakish like we eat.” And Ahmad Hayek, the equipment manager, known for his humor — when a woman called during the COVID-19 outbreak asking for disinfectant and the center was out, he brought her a gallon of Dettol from his own home.
“I Didn’t Send My Son to the Front”
Among the martyrs of the Bashoura center were volunteer rescuers Sajed Sherri and Hassan Khansa. Farhat says, “Hassan could have lived a very different life — his family was well-off, he was educated and talented — but after the pager-attack massacre, he refused to leave the center until he was martyred there.”
On the day of his martyrdom, Hassan came home briefly just to wash his uniform. “He kept asking me if it was dry,” recalls his mother, Fatima Daqmaq. “As soon as it was, he put it on and rushed back to the center.” After his martyrdom, his pants became a keepsake she now hangs on her wall.
A Mother’s Story
Hassan’s mother had never prepared herself for losing her only son. She had his passport and belongings ready for his trip to continue his dentistry studies, waiting for his acceptance to Tehran University. The acceptance letter arrived two days after his martyrdom.
“Unlike the mothers of fighters,” she says, “I didn’t send my son to the battlefield — I sent him to do humanitarian work. I kept him close to me, at the Civil Defense center just two minutes from our home, in Beirut, which until then was considered safe.”
She thought he was safe — until she saw the strike on the center from her own window. She rushed out, searching among the bodies being pulled from the rubble: “This one is heavier, that one has long hair, this one has a tattoo on his hand…” But she didn’t find him.
Finally, she found him at the entrance of Beirut Governmental Hospital, lying on a bed. “I recognized him instantly — I lifted the sheet just to be sure, and there he was, handsome as ever, smiling, with his white teeth showing.”
“That’s where the story ended,” she says. She refused to let them place him in the morgue freezer — “Hasan gets cold easily.” She stayed with him, holding him close despite the overwhelming smell of gunpowder, reciting the Qur’an over him.
At his burial in Ghobeiry Cemetery, the bombing resumed before she could take a final look. So, she scooped up a handful of soil from his grave, held it in her hands — and walked away.
