The last thing young girl Khadija Atwi said before the Israeli bullet hit her was that she wanted to visit her father’s grave.
At the Atwi family’s apartment in the bomb-battered suburbs south of Beirut, Khadija’s cousins were busy preparing for ifta, the fast breaking meal after sunset during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Her eldest sister, Mona Atwi, 30, was sitting upright on the living room sofa, wearing an immaculate black chador. When she spoke of her sister’s death, her voice was calm with conviction.
“Khadija was studying for her midyear exams at secondary school … She wanted to study Arabic literature at university,” Mona told The New Arab.
With money tight in the family, Mona suggested that her sister take a course in arts and crafts over the summer so that she could learn to paint keychains and sell them to help pay her way through her degree.
“She loved the idea, she said this summer we’re going to do it,” Mona’s eyes looked down at the floor. “She was like any girl would be, she would come and go, she was happy. The most important thing for her was to remind everyone in the family that they could drive a car, and she couldn’t, so they should teach her.”
“She had dreams in Lebanon. Her goal was to go to university, to have a job, to have a life. But now she can’t,” Mona said.
On 16 February, at around midday, 17-year-old Khadija entered her childhood village of Houla for the first time in 16 months. She was with her sister Hanan Atwi, 28, and Hanan’s children and husband.
The Atwi family had fled Houla, which lies about 1km from the Israeli border, at the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah on 8 October 2023, when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israeli-controlled territory “in solidarity” with Hamas’s fight in Gaza.
A US-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah brought fighting to an end on 27 November. According to the deal, Israeli forces were to withdraw from southern Lebanon by 26 January, while Hezbollah was to move north of the Litani River, some 30km from the border.
However, Israeli troops stayed beyond the deadline and only conducted a partial withdrawal on 18 February. They continue to occupy five “strategic” locations where they will remain “indefinitely,” according to Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz.
“When we entered, everything was normal,” Hanan said. “There were no Israelis anywhere.” Hanan and Khadija were among a large group of residents determined to re-enter their village, despite the Lebanese army barriers, after the initial deadline for an Israeli withdrawal had passed.
But as Hanan and her family walked further into the village, two white four-by-fours came down the road and stopped ahead of them. Israeli soldiers jumped out and began shouting at them in Arabic, telling them to leave. A minute later, they began firing.
Khadija was holding her five-year-old cousin when she was hit in the cheek by an Israeli bullet. She fell to the ground, unconscious. Hanan rushed to help her and tried to dress the wound, but bullets were landing all around them. She grabbed her two small children and ran, finding refuge in a bombed-out house with her husband and two other residents.
Trapped in the house, the six of them called UNIFIL – the UN’s peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon – and the Red Cross to try and coordinate a safe escape. Then their phones went dead. The family spent the night without electricity, food or water. They waited, and they listened. Khadija was lying outside in the dark, alone.
“They [Israel] brought out a drone and flew it above us all night. They took out a big loudspeaker and started making noises to scare us. There were loud explosions during the night. It was a very scary night,” Hanan said.
Despite Hanan’s pleas to rescue her sister, and the fact she was sheltering with a five- and a three-year-old, she says that the Israeli military did not allow emergency teams to enter the village. According to Houla’s municipal council president Chakib Koteich, Israel denied an initial attempt by peacekeepers to enter the village.
In order to operate in restricted areas in southern Lebanon, the Red Cross is obliged to coordinate with the Lebanese army and UNIFIL, who must first request permission from Israel.
At the earthen barricade blocking the entrance to Houla, a crowd had gathered in exasperation to demand access to rescue Khadija and the six residents trapped in the village. Melhem Khalaf, a Lebanese member of parliament, was among them.
“Not allowing the International Red Cross to enter and withdrawing a family including children is a war crime,” Melhem said, speaking to reporters at the scene in a video shared on social media.
It was not until noon the following day, when all seemed still outside, that the group chanced an escape to the village’s entrance. At around 6 pm that evening, Red Cross workers were finally able to enter Houla and recover Khadija’s body. Sha had lain unattended for at least 30 hours.
Two other residents were injured in Houla when the group came under fire. One of them, Hussein Koteich, 63, was shot in the leg and abducted to Israel. He was released on Tuesday.
By 18 February, Israeli forces had left Houla entirely. Hanan went back to the spot where her sister was killed. A photo shown by Hanan to The New Arab shows the stony ground strewn with wilted leaves where Khadija died. The spot is soaked in blood.
Hanan believes that her sister’s injury was not immediately fatal and that the amount of blood, still fresh that evening, suggests her sister may have bled to death. She says that Khadija’s death might have been prevented had she been rescued earlier, that she did not have to die alone in the night.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military said that on the day Khadija was killed, a group had broken through the barriers placed by the Lebanese armed forces and entered Houla, approaching “the IDF in a manner that constituted a threat.”
“Warning shots were fired to halt their advancement towards the IDF’s forces. When they did not halt their advancements, shots were fired to their legs. Hits were identified. The IDF is not aware of a death of a girl during the incident,” a spokesperson said.
Three days before Khadija was killed, on 13 February, UN experts expressed their “outrage” at Israel’s “ceasefire violations” and called for an immediate withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
“We are gravely concerned about the continuing toll on civilians in Lebanon. Within 60 days of the ceasefire coming into force, at least 57 civilians have been killed, and 260 properties have been destroyed,” the experts said. Two more civilians – Khadija and another girl who was wounded in a drone strike – were soon added to the tally.
In total, 59 civilians have been killed by Israeli fire since the cessation of hostilities on 27 November, including nine women and ten children, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Khadija was buried in Houla two days after she was shot, in the village where she grew up.
Back in the Atwi apartment in Beirut, Mona was preparing to leave. But before she did, she said that she did not expect to see accountability for her sister’s death.
“We’ve got used to this. We in the south, we got used to being alone, and we got used to protecting ourselves,” she said. “Of course, I demand justice … our prime minister was a judge,” she said, referring to Lebanon’s new prime minister Nawaf Salam, former president of the International Court of Justice.
“So, I certainly address him [Salam] here, as a judge, not as a political man. Where is justice for a 17-year-old child when she’s no longer alive? The law is for the protection of the strong, not the weak.”
