Salam Daher
Lebanese civil defense worker
Salam Daher (Arabic: سلام ضاهر, born 1967) is a Lebanese civil defense worker who was involved in the aftermath of the Israeli airstrike on Qana on July 30, 2006, where widely published photographs showed him removing dead children from the rubble of a house struck by an Israeli attack.
Background
Daher was born in 1967 in the predominantly 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.
The public source identifies “Salam Daher” as lebanese civil defense worker. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Salam, Daher and Lebanese.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3469568. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967, 2006, 1986 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Salam Daher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.