Recognizing the Unrecognizable

Powerful reporting from The Intercept on Lebanon, ghoulishness from Forbes, and the Miami Herald reveals the harms of gambling addiction.

Qassem Aboud spent weeks scouring the hospitals in Beirut, looking for his daughter Zahraa. After air strikes relentlessly pummeled their hometown, in Southern Lebanon, she and her sister fled to the city to live with their aunts. They thought Beirut would be safer.

It was not. On April 8, just hours after Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire in the war with Iran, Israel launched a massive aerial assault on Lebanon without warning. Israeli jets conducted more than a hundred strikes in just ten minutes, killing more than three hundred and fifty people and wounding more than a thousand others, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health. It is now known in Lebanon as “Black Wednesday.”

Zahraa’s aunts were killed during the attack. Her sister was injured and taken to a nearby hospital. Zahraa went missing.

In a devastating piece for The Intercept, Alaa Serhal explores the aftermath of Black Wednesday. The strikes hit densely populated civilian areas in Beirut, demolishing residential buildings and leaving damage so severe that many of the dead are unrecognizable. In the ensuing chaos, families have been forced to submit DNA samples to identify loved ones, underscoring both the scale of the destruction and the difficulty of recovery efforts. “The remains are scattered and the features obliterated. We are often not dealing with whole bodies. We are dealing with human fragments that the force of the explosions has turned into medical puzzles,” Hisham Fawwaz, a hospital director at the health ministry, told Serhal.