Khatoun and Mohamed Krisht at their wedding in 1978. (Credit: Family archives and AFP. Montage by Céline Bejjani/L'Orient-Le Jour)
At first, she doesn’t believe it. The TV screen shows a ravaged building, the facade torn off. Reem stares at the images. She hesitates, clings to the idea that she might be wrong. Refusing the catastrophe, just for a few more hours.On the other end of the phone, her sister is running from one hospital to the next. Maybe they’re just injured? Deep down, though, Reem already knows. The calls go unanswered, the silence. Thousands of kilometers from Beirut, alone in her house in Atlanta, she grasps the gravity of the situation. Lives stolen After fleeing Syria to escape death, Jamil Jrab was killed by Israel in Beirut "They’re gone," she screams over the phone to her husband, who’s away in another city that day. A brutal, instinctive certainty. Khatoun and Mohammad Krisht, in Tallet al-Khayat, were killed by an Israeli...
At first, she doesn’t believe it. The TV screen shows a ravaged building, the facade torn off. Reem stares at the images. She hesitates, clings to the idea that she might be wrong. Refusing the catastrophe, just for a few more hours.On the other end of the phone, her sister is running from one hospital to the next. Maybe they’re just injured? Deep down, though, Reem already knows. The calls go unanswered, the silence. Thousands of kilometers from Beirut, alone in her house in Atlanta, she grasps the gravity of the situation. Lives stolen After fleeing Syria to escape death, Jamil Jrab was killed by Israel in Beirut "They’re gone," she screams over the phone to her husband, who’s away in another city that day. A brutal, instinctive certainty. Khatoun and Mohammad Krisht, in Tallet al-Khayat, were killed by an...