Can the Dead Rest? Israeli Strike on Bachoura Damages Beirut’s Historic Cemetery
An Israeli strike on a residential building nearby cracked, broke, or destroyed several tombstones in the Bachoura Cemetery. Beirut, Lebanon. October 8, 2024. (Ruwan Teodros/The Public Source)
A white flag stained with blood hangs on the first floor of a residential building in Bachoura, where Israel struck in the early hours of Thursday, October 3, 2024. The apartment, charred and eviscerated of its walls and furniture, belonged to the Islamic Health Organization’s Civil Defense crew. Nine staff members were killed, including two medics.
For many families, news of the attack was quickly followed by photos of damaged gravestones in Bachoura Cemetery — known colloquially as Jabannat al-Bachoura — where their loved ones are buried. The cemetery is located across the street from the targeted building.
Traces of Lebanon’s modernity, from centuries of Ottoman rule to the brief French Mandate, are mirrored in the mixed architectural landscape of the Bachoura neighborhood. Its densely-populated, winding streets are a stone’s throw away from the Grand Serail and the United Nations’ Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) headquarters in downtown Beirut. As Beirut grew into an eminent Ottoman trade city on the Mediterranean coast in the late nineteenth century, Bachoura was enlivened by new, flourishing businesses that benefited from its proximity to Beirut’s port and souks, according to Zeead Yaghi, a lecturer at the American University of Beirut’s History Department.
Crowded rows of marble tombstones pave the Bachoura Cemetery with familial losses and remnants of national history. Epitaphs and Qur’anic verses etched into the marble, along with the names of the deceased and the years they were laid to rest, go as far back as the nineteenth century. An Ottoman-era mausoleum houses the remains of Ahmed Hamdi Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Syria, who was briefly the Empire’s grand vizier, second-in-command after the Sultan. And in 1892, Sheikh Abdul Rahman el-Hout, Beirut’s Grand Mufti from 1905 to 1909, walled the cemetery, where he too would be buried, to protect its sanctity from the growing foot traffic, Yaghi says.
“The cemetery was also 100 meters [away] from the Green Line that once split Beirut into East and West,” Yaghi tells The Public Source. “It must have been a dangerous place, within range of snipers and gunfire. But it was still functional. Cemeteries are sacred; we don’t mess around with that. Israelis are different.”
Israel’s attack did not spare Bachoura Cemetery. It carried over piles of rubble, soil, and steel that crushed the olives and bougainvillea bracts that had fallen from the trees hanging over the cemetery’s southwest corner, where several tombstones were cracked, knocked over, broken, or destroyed in the strike. A film of glass shattered over one tombstone, and the remains of an air-conditioning compressor scattered over another.
The hollowed apartment can be seen wherever one mourns their loved ones, transforming an otherwise tranquil garden into a merciless reminder that Israel will not allow even the dead to rest in peace.
“We buried my maternal grandfather in Bachoura two months ago. I frantically forwarded the photos [of the cemetery] to the family WhatsApp group,” Omar Baadrani, a jeweler in Beirut, tells The Public Source. “My mom was barely able to type; she was in deep shock. My heart aches for her.”
Hiam Hattab, Ruwan Teodros' grandmother, commemorates her family members buried in Bachoura Cemetery. Beirut, Lebanon. October 8, 2024. (Ruwan Teodros/The Public Source)
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has deliberately targeted 19 of 60 cemeteries, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Religious Affairs. With nowhere to bury their dead, Palestinians are often forced to collect body parts or unrecognizable remains in plastic bags. If they can recover their loved ones’ bodies, they wrap them in white shrouds and lay them to rest in parking lots, courtyards, or on the side of a road — anywhere not yet targeted by Israel.
Parallels are emerging between Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its war on Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly threatened to turn Beirut into Gaza. The Israeli military appears to be employing the Gaza Doctrine in Lebanon, indiscriminately targeting and displacing civilians to “eliminate” so-called “threats” to Israel’s national security. Unlike Israel’s 2006 Dahieh Doctrine, a military strategy premised on destroying civilian infrastructure to get Hezbollah to yield, the aims of the Gaza Doctrine are embedded in genocidal tactics and ethnic cleansing.
"The Qana Massacre was my first time realizing who we are, where we are, and what we’re dealing with. I was six." - Lara A., visual artist based in New York
Over the past month, Israel has relentlessly bombarded towns and cities in the South, Bekaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, forcing over 1.2 million civilians to leave their homes, and systematically targeting health centers, medical workers, first responders, and journalists. Through these sustained attacks, Israel seeks to render these areas uninhabitable.
“The way I see it, Lebanon’s and Palestine’s fates are interconnected and always have been,” Lara A., a visual artist living in New York, tells The Public Source. “My grandfather, who was buried in Bachoura, passed away around the same time as the Qana Massacre [in 1996]. I connect his death to that massacre; it was around then that I discovered what Israel is. It was my first time realizing who we are, where we are, and what we’re dealing with. I was six.”
Although Israel’s strike did not directly target the Bachoura cemetery, its destruction likely violates the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to which Israel has been a signatory since 1954. Cemeteries are places of remembrance, where the dead embody a community’s symbolic and historical continuity. While cemeteries immortalize the past, they also provide the living with rites and rituals that tether them to the land. In Lebanon, families often share the same plot of land for generations; members of the same family are often buried on top of one another, creating a simultaneously personal and communal experience. These sacred spaces allow the bereaved to connect with their ancestors, and preserve a sense of national memory, embodying versions of the country’s past that have been maintained, neglected, or erased.
“Cultural destruction during genocidal campaigns is a dimension of genocide itself,” writes Noa Krikler, a PhD student at the London School of Economics. Her research explores the cemetery as the site of frictional interactions over nationhood in the Balkans. “[It] is evidence of the intent to completely erase the targeted group from existence. It focuses on a powerful, yet under-examined, form of cultural violence, namely the destruction of cemeteries and graveyards.”
For Tala el-Labban, a Lebanese citizen living in Michigan, the Bachoura Cemetery is where her entire paternal family is buried, including her father who passed away in 2018. Two years ago, she brought her husband, whom she met in the United States, to the cemetery and formally introduced him to her father. It has become an annual tradition for her family to spend their first day back in Beirut paying their respects at the cemetery, where Tala says the reality and magnitude of her loss were made tangible by watching other visitors commemorate and mourn their loved ones alongside her.
A cracked tombstone inside Bachoura Cemetery. Beirut, Lebanon. October 8, 2024. (Ruwan Teodros/The Public Source)
“The first thing I’m doing when I’m back [next] summer is seeing my father,” she tells The Public Source. “I don’t care what the conditions are. We don’t know if his grave is okay and I’m not going to make my uncle or cousin risk their lives to check right now. So, we’ll go ourselves and rebuild it if we need to.”
Families have been calling the cemetery’s caretaker, Hussein, nonstop to ask if their loved ones’ graves are intact, he told The Public Source. The central location of the strike has raised alarm bells over the scale and scope of Israel’s war on Lebanon, leaving many hesitant to travel outside of their neighborhoods or visit areas close to previous attack sites. But given the social and cultural significance of the grave, Hussein is hopeful that coordinated efforts for restoration will take shape in the coming weeks.
“My home is across the street from the building [they hit],” says Hussein. “It shook the ground, but the sound is worse when you’re hearing it from afar. I took my daughter and fled somewhere else, somewhere safer. But, really, what’s safe anymore?”