"You either die with your family around you... or you die alone"

The call received from an 'Israeli" number that led to the murder of another unarmed human being in South Lebanon.

Journalist Radwan Mortada wrote (in Arabic):

“When reality is harsher than fiction.

Yesterday, in the town of Tallouseh (southern Lebanon), the martyr Ahmad Termos (62) was on a family visit. He was sitting with his wife in her brother’s house. There was the sound of a drone overhead, then another. He had barely stepped inside to sit when his phone rang. Ahmad answered.

The voice on the line was cold and clear:

“Is this Ahmad Termos?”

“Yes”, he replied.

“This is the Israeli army, Ahmad. You either die with family around you… or alone.”

Without hesitation, he answered: “Alone.”

He hung up. His face changed. His brother-in-law, Salim, looked at him and asked, “What happened, Ahmad?”

Calmly and decisively, he said: “The Israelis. Get up and leave. They say either you die with me… or I die alone.”

He did not beg. He did not shout. He asked them to leave, to survive, to let him face his fate alone. They refused at first, insisting they would not leave him, that they would die with him. He steadied them, then convinced them to go.

For a moment, he forgot he wasn’t in his own home. Then he realised it. He did not want death to come in a house that was not his. He chose to take death away from them. He asked them to stay while he left. He said goodbye. He got into his car, started the engine, drove away from the house, then parked.

Seconds passed. The drone fired two missiles.

The car burned. Ahmad’s body was torn apart. He burned… but his story remains. He is one of the heroes of our time.

Two years earlier, Ahmad had buried his son Hassan as a martyr. About a year ago, he saw him in a dream, telling him they would meet in the month of February. He told his daughter-in-law. She joked: “So the war will still be going on in a year? Maybe even five years.” He replied that his son had specified this coming February.

Someone had filmed him repeating that he would be martyred in February. Today, people in his town are circulating that video, along with the phone recording, on WhatsApp.

Lebanese journalist and PhD Marwa Osman writes:

No one knows what a person feels when they receive a call announcing the moment of their death. No one knows how life is weighed in seconds, then reduced to a choice: to die alone… or to die with those you love. What heart can bear a call that lets you choose the manner of your death and the pain of parting? What strength, what courage, what selflessness must one possess just to remain standing in such a moment?

Before Ahmad, another young man was driving with his wife beside him. He received the same call. He stopped the car. He helped his wife out. He moved her away. Then he drove on alone, toward the missile.

These are scenes that repeat themselves in the South [of Lebanon]. A phone call that separates life from death. Young men walking toward their deaths with steady steps.

I cannot help but ask: Where is our government in all this? Where is the state that claims diplomacy will protect our youth? What is it doing to stop this?

Every crime committed against these young people, day after day, reinforces one truth: the legitimacy of resistance as the only option, after all other paths have been closed.

How cruel this era is… and how clear its positions.

I hesitated before writing. I wondered whether words could matter in the face of such horror. I asked myself: is this surrender or a deeper plunge into grief we cannot ward off? Then I realised that our voices, our words, may be a form of steadfastness in the face of the Israeli killing machine.

How noble these martyrs are. Truly, dignity begins with the shattered remains of our dead.”

******

I know people are worried about the new age verification measures being introduced by Substack but please don’t just abandon the platform and the journalists you subscribe to, that is very much what they want you to do. Please do contact Substack directly to express your dissatisfaction. Only this way can we start to push back against this blanket capture of the information sphere to freeze out genuinely independent voices.