Maysa Moghnie’s childhood home in south Lebanon was the culmination of decades of work. She recounts how her father spent most of his life building the palatial family compound in the village of Burj Rahal, room after room. “All the memories we have are of him building this house,” said Moghnie, an American-Lebanese dual citizen. She now lives in Irvine, California, where she is raising her own children.
Video footage of her twin sister’s engagement party two years ago, filled with joy and music, shows what a grand home it had been. A three-story compound of traditional stone walls, it featured ornate stone-column balconies with slanted red-brick roofs. The piece de resistance was a grand split staircase that landed on a spacious terrace. In the video, the family and their guests are dancing.
All of it is gone now, destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on May 9. On paper, there was a ceasefire in place, but in reality, it was a period of sustained Israeli military assaults, and Hezbollah rocket fire. The images her sister captured after the strike show the trajectory of the projectile, which ripped through floor after floor, and left a gaping hole covered in a thick layer of white dust.
By chance, her parents and her sister had left the house just three days before the strike, because her mother couldn’t sleep. “My mom couldn’t take the drones and the airplanes and all those really harsh sounds anymore,” she said. They learned of the strike through neighbors.
