BBC investigates deadliest single Israeli attack in recent conflict with Hezbollah
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson and at 1400 hours GMT on Friday the 24th of January, these are our main stories. A BBC investigation into the deadliest single Israeli attack in its recent conflict with Hezbollah finds evidence that almost all the 73 people killed were Lebanese civilians. The exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya says the country's presidential election due this weekend is a sham. A court in Pakistan orders a popular social media personality to publish a video every month on animal rights. Also in this podcast, the actor Hugh Grant says settlements made to victims like Prince Harry in the phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's newspapers don't end there.
In light of these findings, we think that the police should launch a new criminal investigation into this. The people who were giving the orders are still there and they're still effectively running this country.
We start in Lebanon, where a ceasefire has been underway for two months after more than a year of fighting between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. In the weeks before the ceasefire, Israel had intensified its bombing campaign against Hezbollah targets. The single deadliest attack in nearly two decades took place on 29 September, when an Israeli airstrike destroyed an apartment block in the quiet village of Ein El Delb, killing 73 people. Israel says the building was a terrorist command centre and they were targeting a senior Hezbollah leader. But a BBC Eye investigation has found that most of the victims were in fact civilians, many of them children. Ashraf lost his mother and sister in the apartment block.
For 20 years, my dad has been paying for this flat. Now, gone. Nothing we find here is worth the people we lost. The people who died are the most precious.
Our senior international investigations correspondent, Nawal Al-Maghafi, told me what they'd found out.
We went to Ain al-Delb. It's in southern Lebanon. It's a mainly Christian village. And it's this six-storey building that was hit by multiple Israeli missiles. It killed... 73 people. Most of the people killed in that building were civilians, based on our investigation. The IGF say it was a Hezbollah command centre, that they were targeting the head of the Hezbollah Sidon compound, But they didn't provide us with any evidence and our investigation showed that the majority of those in the building were in fact civilians. But the Israelis were insisting that the overwhelming majority of those killed were, they called them terror operatives, didn't they? There is no doubt that Hezbollah is a threat to Israel. It's launched thousands of rockets. into Israeli territory.
But in this particular incident, you know, we went through health records, we went through social media, we spoke to eyewitnesses, and we were able to identify 68 of the people that were killed 68 out of the 73. Now, six of those did have some links to Hezbollah, although we found no evidence that they were senior members or commanders. But the rest, you know, the 62 people were all innocent civilians, 24 of them women and 23 of them children. So tell us about these people. So we met a couple of them. You know, one that really struck me was this woman called Betul. She lost her daughter and her husband in the attack. And I think what struck me about her was how stoic and resilient she was. in this interview.
We also met with a young man called Ashraf who lost his sister Julia and his mother in the attack. And their story was quite striking because his sister Julia was in Beirut a few days before the attack. And she'd moved home because she thought that this building was in an area that was a lot safer than the capital Beirut. And just before she moved back, she sent her brother a voice note detailing
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