Julia Ramadan was terrified – the war between Israel and Hezbollah was escalating, and she had such a nightmare that her family home was bombed. When she sent a panicked message to her brother from their Beirut apartment, he encouraged her to join Ain El Delb, a sleepy village in southern Lebanon.

“It’s safe here,” he reassured. “Come stay with us until things calm down.”

Earlier that month, Israel stepped up its air campaign against Lebanese Hezbollah in response to rocket attacks by the Iran-backed armed group that killed civilians and displaced them from their homes in northern Israel.

Ashraf believed that their family’s apartment block would be a paradise, so Julia joined him. But the next day, September 29, came the deadliest Israeli attack of the conflict. An Israeli missile hit and the entire six-story building collapsed, killing 73 people.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the building was targeted because it was a “terror command center” for Hezbollah and that the Hezbollah commander was “eliminated”. It added that the “vast majority” of those killed in the strike were “identified as terrorist agents”.

However, a BBC Eye investigation verified the identities of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and found evidence that only six had links to Hezbollah’s military wing. None of those we identified appear to have senior ranks. The BBC’s World Service also found that a further 62 were civilians – 23 of them children.

Among the dead were babies only a few months old, such as Nouh Kobeissi from Apartment-2B. In apartment -1c, school teacher Abeer Hallak was killed along with her husband and three sons. Three floors above, Amal Hakawati died with three generations of her family – her husband, children and two granddaughters.

Ashraf and Julia have always been close and shared a lot with each other. “She was like a black box that held all my secrets,” he said.

On the afternoon of September 29, the brothers and sisters had just returned from distributing food to families fleeing the fighting. Thousands of people in Lebanon have been displaced by the war.

Ashraf was taking a shower and Julia was sitting in the living room with her father, helping him upload the video to social media. Their mother, Janan, was cleaning up in the kitchen.

Then, without warning, they heard a deafening boom. The entire building shook and a huge cloud of dust and smoke poured into their apartment.

“I yelled, ‘Julia! Julia!'” Ashraf said.

“She responded, ‘I’m here.’

“I looked at my dad, who was trying to get up from the couch due to an existing leg injury, and saw my mom running towards the front door.”

Julia’s nightmare is playing out in real life.

“Julia was hyperventilating and crying on the couch. I tried to calm her down and told her we needed to get out of the car. Then, another attack happened.”

Footage of the strike, shared online and verified by the BBC, shows four Israeli missiles flying through the air towards the building. After a few seconds, the block collapsed.

Ashraf was trapped under the rubble along with many others. He begins to call, but the only voice he can hear is his father, who tells him that he can still hear Julia and that she is alive. Neither of them could hear Ashraf’s mother.

Ashraf sent a sound to nearby friends to alert them. The next few hours were agonizing. He could hear rescue workers sifting through the debris – and residents crying as they found loved ones dead. “I just kept thinking, please, God, not Julia. I wouldn’t be able to live this life without Julia.”

Ashraf was eventually pulled from the rubble hours later with only minor injuries.

He found that his mother had been rescued but died in hospital. Julia suffocated under the rubble. His father later told him that Julia’s last words were calling for her brother.

In November, a ceasefire agreement was reached between Israel and Hezbollah with the aim of ending the conflict. The deal sets a 60-day deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw their troops and weapons from southern Lebanon and Hezbollah north of the Litani River. As the January 26 deadline approaches, we seek to learn more about the deadliest Israeli attack on Lebanon in years.

In the apartment below Julia and Ashraf, Hawraa and Ali Fares hosted family members displaced with the war. Among them was Hawraa’s sister Batoul, who, like Julia, arrived with her husband and two children. They fled intense bombing near the Lebanese-Israeli border, an area where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

“We were hesitant about where to go,” Barto said. “Then I told my husband, ‘Let’s go to Ain El Delb. My sister said their building was safe and they couldn’t hear any bombings nearby.'”

Batoul’s husband Mohammed Fare was killed in the Ain El Delb attack. A pillar falls upon Baltu and her child. No one responded to her offers of help, she said. She finally managed to lift it on her own, but her four-year-old daughter Hawraa was fatally crushed. Miraculously, her baby Malak survived.

Three floors below Batoul lived Denise and Moheyaldeen al-baba. That Sunday, Denise invited her brother, Hisham, for lunch.

Hisham said the impact of the strike has been brutal.

“The second missile knocked me to the floor…the whole wall fell on top of me.”

He spent seven hours under the rubble.

“I heard a voice far away. I mean… my God.

When Hisham was finally rescued, he found his niece’s fiancé waiting to hear if she was still alive. He lied to him and told him she was fine. They found her body three days later.

Hisham lost four members of his family – his sister, brother-in-law and their two children. He told us that he had lost his faith and no longer believed in God.

To learn more about who died, we analyzed Lebanese Ministry of Health data, videos, social media posts and spoke to survivors of the attacks.

We particularly want to question the IDF’s response to the media – in the immediate aftermath of the attack – in an apartment block that had been a Hezbollah command center. We repeatedly asked why the IDF was the command center, but no clarification was given.

So we began sifting through social media tributes, cemeteries, public health records and funeral videos to determine whether those killed in the attacks had any military affiliation with Hezbollah.

We could only find evidence that six of the 68 dead we identified were linked to Hezbollah’s military units.

A Hezbollah commemorative photo of the six men uses the label “Jihad,” which means “fighter.” By contrast, senior figures were called “QAID,” meaning “Commander” – we found that the group did not use these labels to describe those killed.

We asked the IDF whether the six Hezbollah fighter jets we identified were the intended targets of the strike. It doesn’t answer the question.

One of the Hezbollah fighters we identified was Barto’s husband, Mohammed Fare. Batoul told us that her husband, like many other men in southern Lebanon, was a reservist for the group, although she added that he had never been paid by Hezbollah to hold an official position or fight.

Israel considers Hezbollah one of its main threats, and the group is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, many Western governments and the Arab Gulf.

But beyond its large, well-equipped military force, Hezbollah is also an influential party with a seat in the Lebanese parliament. In many parts of the country, it is woven into the social fabric, providing a network of social services.

In response to our investigation, the IDF said: “IDF strikes against military targets are governed by relevant provisions of international law, including taking feasible precautions and conducted after an assessment of expected collateral damage and civilian casualties in relation to the desired military advantage of the strike.”

It also told the BBC earlier that it had implemented “evacuation procedures” for the Ain El Delb strike, but everyone we spoke to said they had received no warning.

United Nations experts have proposed The proportion and necessity of Israeli airstrikes on residential buildings in densely populated areas of Lebanon.

This pattern of targeting entire buildings – resulting in heavy civilian casualties – is a recurring feature of Israel’s latest conflict with Hezbollah, which began with the group escalating rocket attacks in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Between October 2023 and November 2024, Lebanese authorities said Israeli forces killed more than 3,960 people in Lebanon, many of them civilians. During the same period, Israeli authorities said at least 47 civilians were killed by Hezbollah rockets fired from southern Lebanon. In southern Lebanon, at least 80 Israeli soldiers were also killed or killed as a result of rocket attacks in northern Israel.

Ain El Delb’s missile strike was the deadliest attack on a building in Lebanon in at least 18 years.

The impact on the village remains haunting. When we visited more than a month after the strike, a father continued to visit the site daily in the hope that news of his 11-year-old son had not yet been found.

Ashraf Ramadan also spent the rest of his time sifting through the rubble, searching for the memories his family had built during the two decades they lived there.

He shows me the door of his wardrobe, which is still decorated with photos of football players and pop stars he once admired. He then pulled a teddy bear from the crumbs and told me it was always on his bed.

“There’s nothing I’ve found here that will make up for the people we’ve lost,” he said.

Additional reporting by Scarlett Barter and Jake Tacchi