Kamal Tabaja, his two younger brothers and three sisters meet online every day and console each other.
We are mourning the sudden and violent death of our parents, 74-year-old Hussein and 69-year-old Daad Tabaja, on September 23, after celebrating their 48th wedding anniversary last April.
“They were always together,” says Kamal. “They were good people who lived by their values: generosity, humility and charity.”
Hussein and Da’ad Tabaza are among the thousands of civilians Israel has killed in another targeted attack in Lebanon over the past few weeks.
The Canadian family’s pain is still vivid. In our interview, Kamal, a Bahrain-based reinsurance broker, had to pause at times to compose himself as he answered questions about who his parents were and how they died.
There is also palpable anger aimed at the Canadian government for failing to hold Israel accountable for the murder of two Israeli citizens.
Aside from a 20-minute phone call from Foreign Minister Melanie Joly and two tweets posted to the minister’s It appears that this was allowed. that.
At the very least, Canadian officials should have gathered evidence to prove Israel’s responsibility for the killing of his parents, Kamal said, as they drove to his younger brother Jalal’s home in Aaramoun, 21 kilometers (13 miles) south of Beirut. said. It seemed like a safe haven at the time.
He believes the evidence could have been used to sue Israel and, if necessary, the Israeli pilot who fired the missile that instantly obliterated his parents.
“The foreign minister contacted me,” Kamal said. “[But] “Life can’t go on just by calling the family to offer condolences and saying, ‘I’m sorry you lost.’”
The Canadian government did just that. It just kept going. When it comes to crimes in Israel, this has been going on because Prime Minister Trudeau and company have always chosen hollow, performative acts that assume solidarity with victims rather than actual, concrete acts of responsibility.
So these are Joly’s two tweets.
Here’s her first carefully moderated tweet: Posted September 25th. Jolie used regular bromide. She said she was “deeply saddened by the killings of Hussein and Daad Tabaza in the airstrike.” Joly added: “My thoughts are about their families. Civilians must be protected.”
Of course, there was no mention of who was behind the “raid”.
second tweet, appeared A day later, Kamal spoke on behalf of his brothers and sisters, arguing that the minister should “condemn” Israel for its deadly actions.
“I condemn the killing of two innocent people fleeing violence in an IDF airstrike,” Jolie wrote. “We refuse to let civilians bear the costs of this conflict.”
And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the matter for Joly and her boss. The case was concluded satisfactorily.
It’s a pity. It’s so sad. It’s time to move on.
In an interview with CBC in late September, Jolie said: said She attempted to contact Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, possibly to raise the murder of the Canadian couple. Joly told CBC that Katz was too busy to answer the phone.
So I sent the Minister a list of questions asking if she could finally talk to Katz and what Joly and the Canadian government would do about the murders other than talk to her Israeli counterpart.
Jolie’s answer: silence.
The debt Jolie and her servile mistress owe to the Tabaza family is a shameful, bordering on obscene dereliction of duty.
Clearly the Minister needs to be reminded of the horrific details of what happened to two Canadian citizens who swore to defend and protect their interests.
On the morning of September 23, Israel began bombing Kapartibnite, the southern Lebanese town where Hussein and Dadd had spent much of their retirement. However, the couple continued to travel to Canada every year to visit their children and grandchildren.
Kamal told his parents he had to leave. They agreed.
The couple gathered their belongings and got into a small silver BMW SUV. They and half a million other civilians were trying to escape the bombings to Beirut, just 70km away along the busy coastal highway.
During his parents’ slow and arduous journey, Kamal and his siblings stayed in touch through phone calls and text messages.
The couple reassured the children that they were okay. Later, Hussein and Dadd texted their families to say they had been diverted onto a side road.
Earlier that evening, Daad left a voice message for his family reassuring them that they were approaching the city of Sidon and were safe.
That was the last time we heard from Hussein and Dadd. Cell phone records show the couple was online until 7 p.m.
At midnight, a worried Jalal Tabaja left Aaramoun to look for his parents. The family was hopeful that Hussein and Dadd would still be alive.
But Kamal feared the worst when he learned there had been bombings in the area.
“I kept my mouth shut,” he said.
Jalal went to the main hospital in Sidon on the morning of September 24. He was told there had been a bomb attack nearby and several cars had been hit, including a silver BMW X5.
He showed several bodies, or remnants of bodies.
Jalal called Kamal with painful news. Kamal told his brother to search and inspect the vehicle’s license plate number.
“Of course it was the same car,” says Kamal.
Photos of the SUV’s wreckage show a hollow, charred metal shell. It has been incinerated.
Jalal found a local civil defense officer who took his parents’ mutilated bodies out of the blackened car and took them to Sidon City Hospital.
Dad’s watch has been recovered.
Jalal was instructed not to try to identify his parents because there was nothing to do so. It was pointless. The only way to confirm that the charred and disfigured body parts were actually Hussein and Da’ad Tabaza was through DNA testing.
The results arrived later that week.
The family, especially the Tabaja daughters, collapsed in grief.
“Our parents wanted us to hold on to each other, and now we are doing that,” says Kamal.
The Tabaja siblings prepared to put their parents in an ambulance and take them to the village where they met, fell in love and got married. They were buried side by side there.
The only witnesses were the gravedigger and a few villagers who stayed behind.
Joly’s office contacted Jalal to set up a time to talk. Kamal decided to pick up the phone.
He told the minister that Israel had urged his parents and others to leave the village and kill them. He described it to me as “three taps.”
The first attack was designed to kill the civilians in the convoy, and the next two attacks were designed to wipe out everyone who came to their aid.
Kamal said Joly assured them that Ottawa was trying to negotiate a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, but that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had refused to cooperate.
Kamal is not convinced that Canada is committed to peace.
“[Netanyahu] Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to do even 1% of what I’ve done. [the West’s] “We are receiving full support,” he said.
He is right.
that “murderous rage”, Netanyahu and his extremist regime turned Gaza into a desolate, uninhabitable Mars with impunity. I have no doubt that they plan to do the same in Lebanon.
For murder to end, impunity must also end.
Kamal said that to his knowledge, Jolie and the Canadian government have done “nothing” to investigate the murder of his parents.
“After DNA, no one contacted us. [test] The results are in,” says Kamal. “They don’t care. That’s all they cared about [about] ‘Now we have made them happy by giving us their condolences,’ they said. We shut them up and tweeted something like this. They must be satisfied.’”
Kamal said the killing of his parents was a “war crime” and that the Canadian government should treat it as such. To that end, he said Canada should sue Israel in civil court to put the perpetrators in the dock.
He knows it won’t.
“The Canadian government, like the rest of the world, will not dare to confront Israel’s crimes,” Kamal said. None of them. “We saw it.”
He was right again.
Here’s the truth. The Canadian government regards Hussein and Daad Tabaja as expendable victims of Israel’s absolute “right to self-defense.”
Two tweets and a short phone call. These are all the reactions that Melanie Joly decided to make to ensure a long life and a disgusting death.
It is a stain and a shame.
The Tabaja family soldiers are doing their best with the support and love of friends from near and far.
“There was no time to really grieve,” says Kamal. “I don’t think I can feel sadness until I visit my parents’ graves. It would shock me then that they were gone.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
