As a bomb descended on a multi-story apartment building in Beirut’s Tayouneh area Friday, hundreds of onlookers gathered in the street at a traffic roundabout several hundred meters (yards) away.
Among them was an Associated Press photographer. Hassan Ammar had donned his flak jacket and helmet and rushed to the scene — taking up his position at a safe distance using a long lens — after the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning with a map marking the targeted building.
The Israeli army said the building contained facilities belonging to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
However, Ammar had different associations with the building. He had grown up less than a kilometer (less than 0.6 miles) from it, and he had been there on multiple occasions.
When he was a child during the 15-year Lebanese civil war that ended in 1990, “this building was on the front line between Muslim and Christian neighborhoods,” the so-called Green Line, he recalled.
But in later years, Ammar said, he visited the building “many times.” There was a notary public on the first floor, and next door was a sports supply store where he used to shop. Next to the building was a cemetery where his family had loved ones buried.
“I know it very well,” he said.
Ammar said he even once considered renting an apartment in the building that was struck, or in the building next door — now he can’t remember which — because it had a beautiful view of the pine trees in Horsh Beirut, a large public park nearby.
When he heard the sound of the projectile overhead, Ammar had his camera already trained on the building set to a high shutter speed, and he began snapping photos immediately, capturing the bomb in mid-air and as it descended, ending with a massive explosion.
There were no immediate reports of casualties, but much of the building was reduced to rubble.
Richard Weir, a senior crisis, conflict and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch, reviewed close-up photos of Friday’s bomb to determine what type of weapon was used.
“The bomb and components visible in the photographs, including the strake, wire harness cover, and tail fin section, are consistent with a Mk-84 series 2,000-pound class general purpose bomb equipped with Boeing’s Joint Directed Attack Munition (JDAM) tail kit,” he said.
Weir added that “the use of large, air-dropped bombs, like these, that produce wide-area effects in populated areas carries significant risks to civilians and civilian objects.”
A few weeks earlier, another AP photographer, Bilal Hussein, had captured a nearly identical scene as a similar powerful bomb hit a nearby building in Beirut.
The Israeli military has maintained that it takes measures to reduce civilian casualties by issuing warnings before many of its strikes in Lebanon.
More than 3,200 people have been killed in Lebanon during 13 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah — most of them since mid-September — of whom about 27% were women and children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.