Salam Daher - Background

Background

Daher was born in 1967 in the predominately Christian south Lebanese town of Marjayoun and began working as a civil defense volunteer at the age of 12. In 1986, during the 1982-2000 South Lebanon conflict and Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, he joined the civil defense service of the Lebanese interior ministry as an apprentice and worked his way up the ranks. His home town was at the centre of the 1982-2000 conflict, being the headquarters of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army militia, and was repeatedly attacked by Palestinian militias during the civil war and subsequently by the Hezbollah militia during Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. He moved to the coastal city of Tyre in 1996, where the influence of Hezbollah is far weaker (the city is run by Hezbollah's secular rival Amal. By the time of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, he was working as the head of civil defense operations for Tyre and the surrounding region, including Qana.

He has described himself as a first responder, "often the one who takes the phone call alerting the civil defense to an emergency, and he is often part of the first team to reach the site." According to the Associated Press, which interviewed him, "when bombs strike, he races his ambulance along narrow country roads, digs through rubble and tries to save the living from flattened buildings".

Daher was mentioned by the media on a number of occasions prior to the July 30, 2006 airstrike on Qana. The Al Jazeera network, the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper and several other media organisations cited his casualty figures for earlier incidents in the Israeli campaign. He has previously been seen in widely-distributed photographs of the 1996 shelling of Qana in which 106 people were killed and 116 injured in an Israeli attack. On that occasion, he was photographed carrying the mutilated body of a child killed in the attack.