For 15 days they slept cramped on two foam mattresses, side by side in the living room of family friends. Zein Obeid, his mother, Nadia, his older sister, Zeinab, and his father, Ali, when he wasn’t across town working as part of a documentary crew with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.
The 2006 Israel-Lebanon War had just started, and Lebanon was under siege by bombs.
The Obeids fled their apartment in Beirut for the safety of one in the city of Jounieh shortly before a missile leveled the building next door. Zein was 7 at the time, old enough to recognize the destruction going on around him but too young to understand why.