A little girl sits on a couch wringing her tiny hands in a battered building. Just moments earlier, there were a series of strikes in the Lebanese capital, not too far from where we are.
“She’s traumatized and scared,” says her uncle, who is hosting both her family and one other. “The explosions were close to them in the south, but even here we hear and feel everything. She’s barely talking.”
We drop off medication, mattresses and pillows.
“Do you know how long this will last?”
“No I’m sorry, I don’t,” I respond. Images from my trips to Gaza, the last of which was in August, come flooding back. The expanse of crumbled buildings, the deadened look on everyone’s face, the number of times I was asked that same question followed by, “Is our life not worth anything?”
Everyone has seen the videos of Gazans as they continue to livestream their own slaughter. In Lebanon, there’s a pervasive fear, one that grips every fiber of one’s being in a nation that was, in many ways, already on its knees.
This is a country that I know well. I’ve been coming regularly since 2003, when I was based in Baghdad and my parents lived in Beirut. I was based here from 2010 to 2014 as a senior correspondent for CNN. It’s where I launched my charity — International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance (INARA) — in 2015, taking on complex medical and mental health cases among children. Lebanon is also home to more than a million Syrian refugees.
Yasmin has been in INARA’s care for years. She, her brother and her cousin were living in the south. We found them in a corner of a building still under construction in Beirut.
She grips my hand in both of hers, tightly wrapping her disfigured fingers around mine. She is still deeply physically and psychologically scarred by the bomb blast in Syria that killed her father and left her with severe facial burns and mangled hands in 2014 when she was just 8 years old.
The sounds of explosions and bombs in her new home in the south sent waves of fear that reverberated in every cell of her being. She grabbed her small black backpack, stuffed it with her papers and IDs and ran out. They didn’t stop until they arrived in Beirut, walking for two days.
“I remembered everything,” she says softly, chewing her lip, squeezing my hand even harder, referring to the violence in Syria. “It all came back to me.”
Over the last five years, I’ve watched the light ebb from the eyes of the population here in Lebanon. The 2019 economic collapse saw people’s savings stolen by a corrupt political elite and inflation soar to a staggering 4,677%, a crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 Beirut post blast that sent shockwaves through the capital, killing more than 200, leaving thousands injured and causing billions of dollars in damage.
The Lebanese are often lauded for their “resilience” but it’s not a state of being that is a choice; it is one that is forced. Still, there has always been a certain “joie de vivre” here, something the Lebanese are especially proud of, despite decades of struggle, their humor molded by the years of the civil war and all that came after it, how hardship and heart, pain and laughter all intertwine to make up the complexities of what it is to be Lebanese.
But how much can a nation take?
Since the start of the Gaza war in October last year, much of the violence in Lebanon was contained to the border with Israel, mostly tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks last month shocked everyone, creating a wave of terror, but one that pales in comparison to what is happening now.
It feels like everyone is stuck in the “freeze” trauma response. You see it in everyone’s faces, the way that the light has just vanished from their eyes. In their gut, they knew it was coming. But the shock is still paralyzing.
“Will they make us like Gaza?” a woman to whom we deliver baby powder asks. She’s in the street, with her husband and 11-month-old. She’s four months pregnant, not feeling well, but the shelters are already overcrowded, no matter how many new locations the government and international and local organizations open. One million people and counting have been displaced over the last week. No one can keep up.
The majority here don’t view Israel’s attacks as a war on Hezbollah, but more as a war on everyone. It’s a view reinforced with each bomb, and by a mounting death toll that already far surpasses that of the 2006 war, which was precipitated by a Hezbollah cross-border raid that led to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and shaped Israel’s military strategy known as the “Dahiya doctrine,” named after the southern suburb of Beirut that is a Hezbollah stronghold.
It’s a military strategy that is intended to do maximum damage to civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves, with the logic that it will turn the population against the armed entity that Israel says it’s going after or act as a deterrent. It has not worked before and is not working now, and is a form of collective punishment.
Hezbollah emerged in 1982, when Israel launched what it then also called a “limited military incursion of 10 kilometers” to go after Palestinian paramilitary groups. That “limited incursion” resulted in the Israeli army reaching Beirut and occupying southern Lebanon for nearly 20 years. Hezbollah is credited with ending that occupation in 2000. Yet it’s not the case that the Lebanese collectively support Hezbollah or are unaware of the absurd contradiction of having a nonstate actor more powerful than the Lebanese armed forces themselves, which at the same time is a legitimate political party.
“You won’t find a uniform opinion. Some people, of course, support Hezbollah. Some people hate Hezbollah’s politics, but also view it as being the only deterrent to Israel stealing more of our land. Some people hate everything about it,” a friend of mine says.
But there is one thing that unites everyone; the knowledge that no matter what Israel does, the United States and the West will support it.
“Arwa, this is science fiction. It’s purgatory,” a friend texts.
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