Kamal Tabaja and his two younger brothers and three sisters meet online every day to comfort one another.
Together, they are grieving the sudden, violent deaths on September 23 of their parents, 74-year-old Hussein and 69-year-old Daad Tabaja, who celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary this past April.
“They were always together,” Kamal says. “They were good people who lived by their values – generosity, humility and charity.”
Hussein and Daad Tabaja are among the thousands of civilians Israel has killed in Lebanon during the past few weeks as it turns its lethal sights on another target.
The Canadian family’s pain is still raw. During my interview with him, Kamal, a Bahrain-based reinsurance broker, had to pause from time to time to compose himself as he answered questions about who his parents were and how they died.
There is a palpable anger, too, aimed at the Canadian government for failing to hold Israel to any tangible measure of account for the killing of two of its citizens.
Beyond a 20-minute phone call from Foreign Minister Melanie Joly and two tweets posted on the minister’s X account addressing the killings, the family has been forgotten and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, it appears, allowed Israel, yet again, to get away with it.
At the least, Kamal says, Canadian officials should have gathered evidence to establish Israel’s responsibility for the killing of his parents as they headed by car to his younger brother Jalal’s home in Aaramoun – 21km (13 miles) south of Beirut – for what, at that time, seemed to be safe haven.
That evidence could then have been used, he believes, to sue Israel and, if necessary, the Israeli pilot who fired the missile that instantly obliterated his parents.
“The foreign minister did reach out to me,” Kamal says. “[But] you just can’t call a family and offer your condolences and say: ‘Sorry for your loss’ and life moves on.”
That is what the Canadian government has done. It has moved on. It has moved on because when it comes to Israel’s crimes, Prime Minister Trudeau and company have always chosen empty, performative acts of supposed solidarity with its victims rather than real, concrete acts of accountability.
Hence, Joly’s two tweets.
Her first carefully calibrated tweet was posted on September 25. Joly employed the usual bromides. She........