12 December 2024

Qana, Lebanon – Past olive groves and orange orchards in Lebanon’s southern hilly terrain is the quaint village of Qana. In biblical times, Jesus is said to have found refuge in the village. It is where he is also believed to have performed his first miracle, turning water into wine. 

The village’s full name is “Qana al-Jalil”, which locals say means, “The nest where birds fly for safety and security”. However, subsequent periods of Israeli onslaught have long broken the peace and security in the usually quiet village. 

“Qana is the city of holiness and martyrdoms,” Qana’s mayor, Mohammad Kresht, told Middle East Eye. 

In 1993, amid Israel‘s occupation of southern Lebanon, the village came under heavy Israeli fire, during a week-long campaign against Hezbollah. Then, in April of 1996, during a brutal Israeli military operation, named Grapes of Wrath, Israeli forces fired on a UN peacekeeping compound in the village, where around 800 civilians were sheltering inside. More than 110 people, including women and children, were killed. 

Khresht, who was just 17 years old at the time, was one of those inside the compound.

He remembers its immediate aftermath: “I was in a state of shock when we went out and saw the limbs, and scorched bodies. Fire was breaking out. Missiles lay shattered in a room with 54 people, a big hall, all of it filled with martyrs.” 

Again, in the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, an Israeli air strike hit an apartment building in Qana, killing at least 28 civilians taking shelter in the village. Among them were 16 children. 

And today, Israel has levelled much of the village in its intense aerial and ground campaign against what it says are Hezbollah targets. 

“In 2024, we have experienced a war of unprecedented brutality,” Kresht said. “Having lived through the conflicts of 1993, 1996, and 2006, nothing was as fierce as this war.”

The Lebanese health ministry reported on 5 December that 4,047 people have been killed and 16,638 wounded in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. A staggering 84 percent of people were killed in the last few months, when Israel escalated its attacks on Lebanon. 

Ten civilians were killed in Qana, all of whom had fled to the village – about 12km from the border – thinking it might be safer than their homes farther south.