After recent Israeli air strikes on Lebanon this week, the Wichita State organization Students for Justice in Palestine held a vigil on Friday for the lives that were lost.
Instead of candles, students held red and white flowers. Combined with the green stem, the colors matched those of Lebanon’s flag: two horizontal red stripes with a white stripe in the middle, and a green tree on top of the white.
The flowers were placed next to a small memorial for Jawad Fadel. He was one of the people killed in Israel’s airstrikes, and he was the cousin of Banine Haidar, a student at Wichita State.
Haidar said Fadel was at the gym when it was bombed.
“Because of that, my family will never see him again,” Haidar said.
Since Monday, Israel’s airstrikes in Lebanon have killed more than 700 people.
Haidar and her family are from Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Haidar said other members of her family fled as Israel “carpet bombed” Beirut last week.
“They (Israel) started carpet bombing my city — which is the suburbs of Beirut,” Haidar said. “And that’s when my mother, before I even woke up, left me a voice message telling me she doesn’t know if she’ll be alive when I wake, up telling me that I need to take care of my dad and my sisters and to always take care of myself.”
Carpet bombing refers to indiscriminate explosions covering an entire area, similar in the way that carpet completely covers a floor.
Haidar said her family fled for their lives.
“For any of you guys who are immigrants or second generation immigrants who have been to their home country, you would know how hard this would be,” she said.
Haidar paused and laughed a little.
“Because Lebanon, for me, is very, very nostalgic. I love everything about Lebanon.”
But she said her family had a few days to mourn the death of their loved one before they had to “pack up everything and run from the city that they were born and raised in.”
Haidar said her family is considered lucky even amid their loss.
Before the recent airstrikes, thousands of hand-held pagers and walkie-talkies exploded, “near simultaneously,” across Lebanon and Syria. The first wave of attacks killed at least nine people and injured several thousand. The next day, a second wave of pagers exploded, killing at least 20 people and injuring 450 people.
The attack was carried out by Israel in an attempt to target the pagers of Hezbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary group that has fought against Israel in support of Hamas.
“Nurses and doctors have pagers,” Haidar said. “So any of the explosives on pagers went to them as well. Or, to the children, who (thought), ‘Oh, Daddy’s pager is ringing; let me go pick it up for him’ — and they became casualties as well,” Haidar said.
Abdelkarim Jibril, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine, spoke next.
“It’s a horrible and disgusting thing what Israel is doing over there in South Lebanon and Beirut, and now they’re just expanding everywhere,” Jibril said.
Hussein Sayegh, a Lebanese student at Wichita State, said he knew Jawad since he was little.
“And I’m really sorry, Banine, for your loss,” Sayegh said. “Lebanon’s getting flattened. Palestine’s gotten flattened. It needs to stop.”
Since Oct. 7, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war.
Health officials say the number of deaths could be thousands higher, as many people lie beneath the rubble of buildings crumbled by Israel’s airstrikes.
“I say, just pick up that phone. If you have anybody you know that lives in any of these countries, talk to them before it’s too late,” Sayegh said. “I open my phone everyday and I see a new person die and it’s tragic, really.”
