A 21-year-old Yazidi woman has been rescued from Gaza where she had been held captive by Hamas for years after being trafficked by ISIS.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Thursday that Fawzia Amin Sido was freed this week in an operation coordinated between Israel, the United States and other international actors.

She said that she was initially kidnapped by ISIS as a child in August 2014 when the group captured the city of Sinjar in the Nineveh Governorate of northern Iraq, executing Yazidi men and boys and committing acts of sexual violence and rape against women and girls, among other crimes.

Over the next few years, Fawzia was trafficked to different locations across several countries.

“We ended up in Al-Hol camp (in Syria) before we were smuggled to Idlib in 2019, and from there, we went to Turkey. In 2020, they arranged a passport for me in Turkey so I could fly from Istanbul to Hurghada, Egypt, and then to Gaza,” she said.

“Hamas constantly harassed me due to my Yazidi background and contact with my family, even going so far as to format my phone [erase its contents] during their investigations. After a year, they moved me to a guest house.”

When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in 2023, she was again moved around frequently – until October 1, when she said an NGO rescued her.

The IDF said that her captor was killed, “presumably during IDF strikes” in Gaza, allowing her to flee to a hideout, from where she was rescued and taken to the Kerem Shalom border crossing.

“From there, American officials took me and helped return me to Baghdad,” she said.

Israel released a video showing her reuniting with her family members, who were overcome with emotion as they embraced her.

Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said she was freed after over four months of efforts from Iraqi government agencies working with American and Jordanian authorities.

US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed that the US helped evacuate Fawzia from Gaza. He echoed Israel’s account, saying that “the recent death of her captor in Gaza allowed her to escape.”

“We were contacted by the Iraqi government, who was made aware of the fact that she escaped, that she was alive, and that she wanted to come home to her family. And the government of Iraq asked us to do whatever we could to get her out of Gaza and get her home. So over the past few weeks, we worked with a number of our partners in the region to get her out of Gaza,” Miller said at a press briefing on Thursday.

The fate of a possible successor to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is unclear following an Israeli airstrike on Beirut.

Safieddine is a maternal cousin of Nasrallah – the two studied in Iran together in the early 1980s. Just like Nasrallah, Safieddine is a staunch critic of Israel and the West, with deep alliances with the Iranian leadership.

Safieddine served as head of Hezbollah’s executive council and, until his predecessor’s death, was seen as one of the most likely heirs to the organization’s highest-ranking seat. The group has yet to name a successor to Nasrallah.

The executive council is one of five bodies that make up the Shura Council, which is the organization’s decision-making body. The executive council oversees political matters, as opposed to the Jihad Council which is the group’s military body, which Safieddine is a member of.

Safieddine has previously spoken of the “strong relationship” between Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and especially Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in US airstrike at Baghdad airport in 2020. Safieddine’s son is married to Soleimani’s daughter.

The Shiite cleric was born in 1964 in the southern Lebanese village of Deir Qanoun En Nahr. Like the late Hezbollah leader, he wears the black turban signaling that he is a “Sayyid,” a Shiite honorific title denoting descent from Prophet Mohammed.

The 60-year-old cleric has had a visible presence across Hezbollah’s political stage, especially over the past year. Throughout the Gaza war, Safieddine would make statements denouncing Israel’s actions in the enclave and on his country’s southern border.

Nasrallah “started tailoring positions for him within a variety of different councils within Lebanese Hezbollah. Some of them were more opaque than others. They’ve had him come, go out and speak,” Phillip Smyth, an expert who studies Iran-backed Shiite militias, told Reuters.

Speaking at the funeral ceremony of one of the slain Hezbollah members in May, Safieddine boasted that his group is nonetheless strong and resilient, prioritizing – along with their Iranian allies – the Palestinian cause and the need to liberate the Palestinian people.

Following the back-to-back explosions that targeted Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, Safieddine said that his organization “will not back down until the end.”

Saffiedine has long been a hawkish critic of US policy, which he sees as aiding and abetting Israel’s actions in Gaza and southern Lebanon.

In 2021, he accused Washington of “interfering” in Lebanese domestic politics, saying that “American tyranny” is “sabotaging” the region’s nations, citing Iraq and Afghanistan among examples.

The United States designated Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, and in 2017 designated Safieddine a foreign terrorist.

Yair Pinhas grew up hiking in the hills around Kiryat Shmona, his hometown in northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon.

“We always thought that the October 7 (attack) would happen here, we always talked about it,” he said, rolling a cigarette outside a hotel on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, about 40 miles from Kiryat Shmona.

Pinhas’ parents and his elderly grandmother have been living in this hotel for almost a year, ever since they were evacuated from Kiryat Shmona following the October 7 terror attacks. Pinhas spent months couch-surfing with friends in Tel Aviv before renting an apartment there; he comes regularly to see his family.

Kiryat Shmona, which sits in a pocket of Israeli land surrounded by Lebanon, just a couple of miles to the south and east from the border, sits on the opposite side of Israel to where the Hamas-led attacks took place last year. But its proximity to Lebanon makes it vulnerable to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel on a regular basis over the past year, in support of Hamas.

Israel has responded with cross-border attacks and the two sides have been engaged in a tit-for-tat escalation since October 8. Hezbollah has said it will not stop striking Israel until a ceasefire is reached in Gaza.

The city was hit multiple times in recent months, most recently by a barrage of rockets that caused heavy damage and several fires on Friday morning, according to Israeli police.

“When I was growing up, it wasn’t just sirens like now… it was someone blaring from a car, ‘everybody get to shelters! Everybody get to shelters!’ And in school, when the alarm went off, nobody was freaking out because we were used to it,” he said.

“Everybody goes into the shelter, you hear the bombs and then wait for somebody to tell you it’s safe to leave,” he explained, adding that while the locals have gotten used to attacks from the skies, there has always been the worry that Hezbollah could try to storm them from the ground.

“There was a warning some months before October 7, saying you need to know that the next war won’t be just rockets. They will come here. There are a lot of tunnels, and we need to prepare ourselves… and we didn’t. People are stupid. Until something happens, you don’t really act,” he said.

But then came the shock of the terror attacks, when Hamas and other militant groups killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and kidnapped some 250 more into Gaza.

“Everything has changed then,” Pinhas said. “We thought our army was strong and prepared and suddenly you see this, shooting everywhere. I had three friends who were at the Nova festival, one of them died, two were saved,” he said.

‘There will be a lot of deaths’

The Israeli government said the fate of people like Pinhas is among the reasons why it needs to act forcefully against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly meeting last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah had fired more than 8,000 rockets at Israel since October 8, forcing some 60,000 people to flee their homes along the border.

“Israel has been tolerating this intolerable situation for nearly a year. Well, I’ve come here today to say enough is enough. We won’t rest until our citizens can return safely to their homes,” he said.

Shortly after Netanyahu spoke at the UN, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a deadly strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut, targeting and killing Hezbollah’s long term leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Three days later, the IDF said it was launching a “limited and localized” ground operation in Lebanon. The IDF’s top spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the move was designed to prevent an October-7 style attack by Hezbollah and “to enable all 60,000 Israelis to safely return back to their homes in northern Israel.”

But at least some of the people whose fates Netanyahu invoked during his speech are questioning the decision.

“I think that it’s very dangerous for the army to go to Lebanon, because there are many, many traps… I think that we can protect the border by plane. Or go (in) and come back… But not stay (in Lebanon), it’s too dangerous,” she said.

Hatan, whose house overlooks the Lebanese border, has lived in Shtula her whole life. She said that she’s worried current warfare is much more deadly than it was in 2006, the last time Israel invaded Lebanon.

Pinhas, too, is conflicted about Israel’s decision to cross the border.

“It’s very hard. On (the) one hand, I can say, yes, you’re right, because we need to go back home and we need to bring peace to our town. So my first thought is we need to do something about it, because their (Hezbollah’s) main purpose is to kill us,” he said.

“But the other thing that I’m feeling, and everybody’s feeling that, is that this is very dangerous, and there will be a lot of deaths. Hezbollah, they know very well their territory there, this is their playground. This is not like in 2006, this is not a small group, we gave them a lot of time to prepare themselves and get a lot of ammunition,” he added, referencing the 2006 Israeli invasion into Lebanon which lasted 34 days and ended in a stalemate after killing some 1,100 people on the Lebanese side and about 170 Israelis.

The Israeli offensive is among the most intense in decades, surpassed only by its bombing of Gaza.

Standing on a hilltop in Kiryat Shmona, the scale of the bombardment becomes apparent as a steady stream of loud bangs reverberates throughout the valley. A loud boom when the artillery round gets fired, followed by a whizz overhead. A while later, a deep thud of the impact somewhere behind the border.

A city of some 22,000, Kiryat Shmona has turned into a ghost town over the past year. Signs of destruction are clearly visible throughout its streets – shrapnel holes in facades, damage caused by falling debris, destruction caused by direct hits by rockets.

On Thursday, marking the Jewish new year, the Pinhas family snuck back into Kiryat Shmona for a brief visit.

“To water the plants and feed the cats. There are many street cats in Kiryat Shmona and they need feeding,” Pinhas said.

Several rockets were fired at the city from Lebanon on Thursday but were intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense systems, the bright light of interceptor missiles popping up in the skies and chasing away the threat.

A black and white cat, meanwhile, continued to rummage through the pile of debris lying in front of a family home destroyed in an earlier rocket attack.

Israel has pummeled Lebanon with an unprecedented airstrike campaign in less than three weeks, killing over 1,400 people, injuring nearly 7,500 others and displacing more than one million people from their homes, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

The bombardment, which Israel says is targeting Hezbollah strongholds in the country, marks the world’s “most intense aerial campaign” outside of Gaza in the last two decades, according to the conflict monitoring group Airwars.

Over the course of two days, on September 24 and September 25, the Israel military said it used 2,000 munitions and carried out 3,000 strikes.

“This isn’t normal,” Tripp said of both the scale and size of Israel’s strikes on Lebanon.  While Israel’s air campaign is extremely “unusual,” Tripp said its assault on Gaza over the last year – where nearly 60% of buildings are estimated to have been damaged from Israeli strikes – have normalized such mass assaults.

Israel says it takes steps to minimize civilian harm, like making phone calls and sending text messages to residents in buildings designated for attack. Human rights groups like Amnesty International say such warnings do not absolve Israel of responsibilities under international humanitarian law to limit civilian harm.

As a result, the death toll in Lebanon continues to rise, with a fifth of its population now displaced.

Hezbollah and Israel have consistently been exchanging fire since October 8, the day after the Hamas-led attack on Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage. Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, has said that it will not stop striking Israel until a ceasefire in Gaza – where the Israeli bombardment has killed more than 41,000 people in the past year, according to the ministry of health in the territory – is reached.

The majority of the fire exchanged between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of the war has come from Israeli strikes, drones, shelling and missiles on Lebanese territory, according to data from ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), an organization that collects data on violent conflict.

Israel has launched nearly 9,000 attacks into Lebanon since October 8; Hezbollah launched 1,500 attacks in that same time frame, according to the ACLED data.

On September 25, Israel further escalated its air campaign with an intense barrage of strikes across swathes of Lebanon, marking the deadliest day for Lebanon since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war – and a turning point in the current conflict.

While most of Israel’s airstrikes over the past year have targeted southern Lebanon, Israel has also ramped up its attacks on Lebanon’s capital in recent weeks, with multiple airstrikes in southern Beirut flattening residential buildings and heavily populated civilian areas.

A rapid succession of strikes has killed at least seven high-ranking Hezbollah commanders and officials in recent weeks, dealing the most significant blow to the group since its formation in the early 1980s.

Those strikes have mostly been concentrated in the city’s southern Dahiyeh neighborhood, a densely packed residential area and Hezbollah stronghold. It was there that Israel assassinated the militant group’s leader in an air raid on his underground bunker on September 27.

But as Israel’s campaign to disarm Hezbollah continues, civilians are paying the highest price, including 127 children who have been killed in less than three weeks, according to the health ministry.

On September 23 alone, at least 558 people – including 50 children and 94 women – were killed.

Women and girls are also particularly affected by the displacement caused by the airstrikes, according to Lebanon’s country director at the humanitarian agency CARE International. Nearly half of the people in Lebanon’s emergency shelters for displaced people are children, and the facilities are operating beyond capacity, Michael Adams said.

Now, Israel is targeting central Beirut  – not its suburbs – with airstrikes for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Meanwhile, a quarter of Lebanese territory is now under Israeli military evacuation orders​ as Israel intensifies its ground operation in the south, with its inhabitants pushed more than 30 miles north of their homes.

More than 100 villages in southern Lebanon have now been issued the evacuation notices, stoking fears of an expanded ground invasion.

Residents have no idea when they might be able to return – or what they might find remaining.