Farouk Darwish, 52, survived the blast by miracle. On Tues., Aug. 4, at 6 p.m., he was in a downtown Beirut parking lot facing the port. Farouk lives in Chekka, a coastal town north of Beirut. He’d come to the city for a meeting and brought along his wife and daughter.
“We were looking at the city center and the port and we were like, ‘How beautiful Beirut is’,” says Farouk’s 16-year-old daughter Tala.
“The blast propelled me two meters above the ground … It was the apocalypse.”
The family rolled down the windows of their car to get a better view of the city, and Farouk opened the door to get out the car. And then the explosions happened.
“The blast propelled me two meters above the ground … It was the apocalypse,” he says.
“I just thank God! In the parking lot, there were other cars with people in them. Blood had gushed out of their ears. They are all dead. They had their car windows closed and it was the blast that killed them,” he says.