'I was so scared': Teenage girl whose Snapchat video captured chaos in Beirut as Israeli strikes hit

After six weeks of relentless Israeli bombardment, there was a fragile hope that the ceasefire between the United States and Iran might ease tensions in Lebanon.

Instead, the country was plunged into one of the most devastating assaults since this war began.

In just 10 minutes, 100 Israeli strikes rained down, killing at least 357 people across the country. Residents in Beirut described a scale and intensity unlike anything they had experienced before. Entire neighbourhoods shook. Buildings collapsed.

Just before it began, on Wednesday afternoon, 13-year-old Naya Fakih was in central Beirut doing what most teenagers do - recording a playful video for her friends on Snapchat.

Then, everything changed.

"We heard something," she told me. "We didn't know what it was...and then they bombed the building in front of us."

Naya and her father ran.

"I was so scared," she said. "You never know what they could do next."

Naya has lived through bombings before. But this, she said, was different: "I've never seen a building fall in front of me. I've always known I was safe where I was."

That sense of safety is now gone.

After an explosion...the line cut

When I met her days later, she was shaken but surrounded by her supportive family. Her mother, Ghida, tells me she was at work that afternoon when her phone rang.

"It was Naya. She was shouting and crying. All I could understand was 'explosion' and 'a building'. And then the line cut off."

What followed was confusion layered with fear. Calls that would not connect. Fragments of information that did not quite make sense. Her husband eventually reached her and said they were safe. Even then, she did not fully understand what had happened.

Then Ghida said something to me which helps explain what life is like here in Beirut now.

"We disregarded it," she said of the blast she initially heard. "Because we've normalised it."

Explosions, sonic booms, the distant thud of strikes have been absorbed into daily life. But this time feels different. For so many in Beirut, it feels indiscriminate.

"I couldn't stay where I was," Ghida said. "As a mother, I had to go to my children."

But the roads were blocked. Traffic froze. Beirut, in that moment, was paralysed by fear.

It was only when she watched Naya's video that the reality fully hit. "I saw what happened," she said. "And then it started to sink in."

'No child deserves to go through this'

What the video captured, almost by accident, was terror. A child filming a social media video one moment, running for her life the next.

"I hope nothing like that ever happens again," Naya told me. "No child deserves to go through what I have gone through."

Her mother said she shared the footage as a message to the world.

"It's not about Naya," she said. "It's about childhood. About what is happening to children here."

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Israel says it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure, but the strikes hit densely populated residential areas. The dead included children, mothers, elderly couples, doctors, poets.

The scale of the attack raises serious questions about proportionality, with the Lebanese government accusing Israel not only of breaching international law, but of committing war crimes.

Beirut has known war before. It understands loss. But this time there was no warning. No evacuation order. No time to escape. What remains is a traumatised population still searching for bodies in the rubble.

Naya's video will fade from timelines, replaced by the next viral clip. But for her, and for countless children across Lebanon, this is not a moment. It is a reality that does not end when the camera stops rolling.

(c) Sky News 2026: 'I was so scared': Teenage girl whose Snapchat video captured chaos in Beirut as Israeli str