I was north of Beirut when it happened. Along the coast, minutes before sunset, an orange autumn sky dipping into the Mediterranean’s light blue waters. The type of tranquility only visible from Lebanon’s shore. And, for the past year, a respite against the backdrop of regional war.
On my phone, I was scrolling through news feeds to keep up, like many of us here and abroad, monitoring the escalating conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. It began on Oct. 8, 2023 — a day after Hamas launched their “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” from Gaza into Israel — and was now entering a dangerous new phase.
Nearly two months of drone strikes annihilating Hezbollah’s command leadership and structure. The mid-September pager explosions set off by Israel, leaving over 1,500 Hezbollah members with maimed hands and blindness. Wider Israeli strikes across Lebanon’s south and east, more recently, and repeatedly targeting Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburb.
A shocking video emerged from Dahiyeh, showing seven bunker-buster bombs, thousands of pounds in weight, seconds apart, reducing buildings to unforgiving debris and rubble. I lowered my phone to look south, toward Beirut’s distant skyline. In the backdrop, hovering over, a familiar dust cloud slowly emerged.
Many times, political violence and destruction have shaped the course taken by Lebanon’s modern history, from the thousands of pounds of explosives set off in over a dozen attempted and successful assassinations from 2004 to 2013, to the hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate igniting Beirut’s port blast in 2020.
In the intervening years, Lebanon was forced to adjust to a paralyzing national unity under Hezbollah’s terms, with their weapons turned inward. May 2008 rendered governance impossible. The first attempt by the Lebanese state to exert authority over internal security affairs since Syria’s occupation ended in 2005 — when it deemed a parallel telecoms network used by Hezbollah to monitor its local opposition’s movements and the airport illegal, and fired an airport customs official who had bent to the group’s wishes — was met with street battles in Beirut that quickly spread to the mountains.
Both the telecoms network and the customs official quickly retained their prior status, and an agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, forced then-Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government to surrender to national unity subordinating Lebanon’s destiny (and its state) to Hezbollah’s concerns.
The 2012 Baabda Declaration by then-President Michel Sleiman, a call to disengage from the Syrian uprising-turned-war raging next door, opposed any and all Lebanese involvement in that conflict, be it in defense of a Syrian regime fighting for its survival or support for its opposition. It was an attempt at resurrecting a foreign policy of neutrality, and a consensus reached not at the behest of regional dealings, but at home.
Hezbollah accepted the declaration’s terms while sending its militia members to fight alongside Bashar al-Assad’s army. The country’s highest political authority had no means of making it do otherwise.
The judiciary, with all its limits and deficiencies, was tasked in 2020 — in the aftermath of one of the largest nonnuclear blasts in modern history — with bringing accountability and justice to the more than 200 civilians killed and the tens of thousands injured. The investigation began, and its first judge, Fadi Sawan, was removed. The second judge, Tarek Bitar, sought to interrogate a spectrum of political names, yet was threatened by Hezbollah the moment circumstantial evidence pointed their way.
Intimidation and assassinations did not stop, including the murder of an army photographer, Joe Bejjani, who had taken photos of the ammonium nitrate stored in one of the port’s warehouses, and the killing of an outspoken member of civil society, Lokman Slim, who saw Hezbollah’s indirect responsibility and was murdered for it.
The list of assassinations is much longer in both temporal directions.
My parents witnessed the beginning of Lebanon’s breakdown. In their prime, their generation inherited the ramifications of 1969’s Cairo Agreement: turning the country into a permanent battlefield for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, allowing Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat to base his group in Beirut while turning southern Lebanon into “Fatahland.”
The rest of the country soon fell to competing militias.
Like today, they smelled years of trash burning coupled with the diesel exhaust of generators that continuously hum in the absence of government power. They saw their savings become worthless with hyperinflation and a dollarized economy.
They listened to news of leaders killed, from Kamal Jumblatt to Moussa Sadr and Bachir Gemayel. Through every death, further erosion and societal implosion, including massacres of unarmed refugees, women and children.
And then it all somehow stopped, without ever actually ending.
The 1989 Taif Agreement offered a roadmap to reform, highlighting three key components: the restructuring of power-sharing governance with a new sectarian senate chamber alongside a merit-based secular parliament; the Syrian army’s withdrawal within a three-year timeframe; and the disarmament of all wartime militias.
The senate was, and remains, a pipe dream for addressing communal anxiety. The Syrian army stayed until a massive uprising against its occupation in 2005 pressured its exit from Lebanon. And Hezbollah was offered its cherished “resistance” title, allowing it to retain its arms well after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000.
There was a time, perhaps, when Hezbollah represented a form of resistance; a show of force and defiance against the region’s strongest army, one it had battled well into the 1990s as Israel retained a “security zone” that covered over 10% of Lebanon’s southern and eastern geography.
Its elimination of more liberal and leftist opposition members within the Shiite community; the kidnappings and notorious truck bombings that dominated headlines from Lebanon through the 1980s; even its growing relationship with Iran were often contextualized and pitted against Israeli bombardment, siege and occupation.
It was a raison d’etre that had ended in May 2000, with Israel’s withdrawal to the U.N.-designated 1949 armistice line, known as the Blue Line. Syria’s oversight had yet to expire.
Former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination in 2005 brought disparate groups together in solidarity against Syrian hegemony, and gave Lebanon a chance to finally turn the page on civil strife, lost sovereignty and denied independence.
Bashar al-Assad quit Lebanon. Lebanese leaders were left to forge a new path free from external occupation.
That came crashing to a halt a year later, in July 2006, when Hezbollah fighters crossed into Israel and kidnapped three Israeli soldiers. None of them survived. Their bodies were brought back across the border, initiating a monthlong war that summer that wreaked havoc across Lebanon.
The operation would later be described by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah himself as a mistake. He had not, he said, anticipated the scale of Israel’s response.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which came into effect in late August 2006, was crafted with the help of the Lebanese state. A cease-fire deal demanded Hezbollah fighters move north of the Litani River and relinquish the group’s southern infrastructure, and bolstered U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) observation troops threefold to nearly 30,000 soldiers, turning southern Lebanon into one of the world’s most militarized zones. It also offered political cover — for the first time since Lebanon’s civil war erupted — for the Lebanese army to return to the south, a condition earlier rejected by the Assad regime until 2005 and, briefly through 2006, by Hezbollah.
Nasrallah ostensibly accepted the terms of Resolution 1701, as he later did the Baabda Declaration, but thereafter pursued a policy of disregard instead. Through state subjugation and the elimination of all credible opposition from within, the state became a mirror of Hezbollah’s security concerns and, by proxy, Iran.
The Special Tribunal for Lebanon that investigated Hariri’s assassination found Hezbollah members guilty in 2021. None of them were arrested. Then, in 2023, Iran tied Lebanon’s destiny to Palestine, “unifying the arenas” (in its parlance) with Hamas and Gaza, bringing Israeli bombardment back to an already-battered country.
Over 2,000 Lebanese casualties, more than a million civilians forced to evacuate. And an ever-deteriorating economic catastrophe along with the ongoing presidential vacuum.
An increasingly ungovernable country coping through battles in 2024 far worse than 2006. A rapidly fading cosmopolitanism that once made us the region’s envy. A once-famed metropole only in name, rejecting its best and forcing hundreds of thousands abroad. Misery and despair, and a society left in disarray.
Displaced people sleeping in downtown Beirut’s Martyrs Square, fleeing the consequences of war, ironically sheltering by the tombs of leaders killed by Hassan Nasrallah.
Most nights now, Israel hits Dahiyeh. Thuds from explosions reverberate to the buzzing of drones occupying our skies, monitoring incessant fear below.
That is when I realized the sky had faded to black, already merging with darker seas below. My phone received notifications of unconfirmed reports of his fate. I thought of the last time I had seen him on television, days earlier, visibly shaken despite the determination of his group’s resistance, long robbed of any meaning and purpose.
He was exhausted at that moment. It showed. Not reassuring.
Two men who have shaped my life share no qualities other than an expression: looking up in false comfort with deep bags beneath their eyes, despite certainty of what is to come.
One of the last times I saw my father was weeks before he was assassinated. My apartment trembled and windows reverberated to a sound I knew firsthand. All of us living here know the sound. Beirut lends itself to such familiarity.
Another car bombing. This one in Dahiyeh, near the Iranian embassy. Blaring news was interrupted by knocking at my door. I opened it to find my father on his phone in an unusually tense conversation. We went to my balcony to see a vibrant red winter horizon punctured by black fumes rising from the city’s south. He cut his call abruptly, and I noticed a despair in his eyes that I had never seen before.
He encouraged me to leave the country. Eleven years later, against his wishes, I am certain of my decision. I needed to be here and witness what unfolded. To see that his killer, 14 stories beneath the city my father is buried in, would soon stop breathing.
With a country’s heart no longer beating, there is no closure, nor will there be. There are wounds that cannot heal. Respite and justice are forgotten, replaced with further violence and more war to come.
Hassan Nasrallah’s death was confirmed the following day. Screams of grief have only begun. The dust over Dahiyeh has not settled. Neither will sacrifice, paid in blood.
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