Thirteen-year-old Naya Fakih smiled as she recorded herself walking down a residential street in Beirut with her dad yesterday, donning pink bunny ears dotted with hearts through a Snapchat filter.
Seconds later, as Israel launched a barrage of strikes across Lebanon’s capital, she was wailing as the sounds of explosions rang out around her.
“Daddy!” she cries out in the video, her face crumpling into tears as her father pulls her into a building, desperate to bring his young daughter to safety.
Moments before, he had been picking her up from basketball practice, just minutes from their home in Beirut’s Mazraa neighborhood, Naya’s mother, Ghida Margie Fakih, told NBC News yesterday.
“We are civilians. This is a noncombat zone … and this happened without warning,” Fakih, a researcher and mother of three, said in a phone interview after shared the video on Instagram.
“It was only seconds,” she said, describing how her daughter can barely sleep, shaken by the harrowing ordeal.
She said her two sons, Ayan, 4, and Habib, 11, were also terrified after they heard blasts ring out around their home as they hid for cover in the bathroom with their babysitter. The family, whose home in southern Lebanon Fakih said had already been destroyed, immediately gathered what they could and fled Beirut, staying with Fakih’s sister just outside the city.
Fakih said she felt “extremely angry” seeing Israel bomb civilian areas in Beirut “in broad daylight.”
