William Christou
The Observer / September 21, 2024
The country was divided before, unsure about its approach to Hezbollah, but now people are thinking as one.
The smell of burnt rubber hung heavy over the rescue workers as they dug, painstakingly removing rubble, their shadows long and movements harsh under the burning floodlights. Onlookers watched the progress in silence, waiting for any sign of life under the building levelled by four Israeli missiles in Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, just a few hours before on Friday afternoon.
Broken glass stained with blood had been swept to the side and the area cordoned off, members of Hezbollah and the Lebanese civil defence barking orders to make sure emergency vehicles could access the area. Men with freshly bandaged hands, the product of booby-trapped pagers a few days before, milled about as women sobbed.
“My son’s best friend, his mother, his father and his three siblings. They’re all under the rubble. The eldest kid is 19, the youngest is two,” Hassan, a 40-year-old resident of Dahieh, said while watching rescue efforts.
Everyone was waiting for someone, hoping they would be found but dreading that they would emerge lifeless. People began to run towards the rescue workers as word spread that someone was found. They were alive and the ambulance sped off towards the hospital, accompanied by an escort of young men on scooters, beeping and cheering as they went.
For nearly a year, the war with Israel had remained in the south. As Israeli warplanes pounded border villages and more than 100,000 residents fled northwards, politicians in Beirut called for de-escalation to avoid a war, despite the fact that it had already began. A bloody, relentless week of attacks, however, has made the war impossible to ignore.
Thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded all over the country in a two-wave attack on Tuesday and Wednesday in a suspected Israeli operation, killing and wounding the Hezbollah members who carried them and nearby civilians.
On Friday, an Israeli airstrike levelled a residential building in Beirut. The Israeli military said the attack killed Ibrahim Aqil and 10 other leaders of the elite Hezbollah Radwan commando unit.
By the week’s end, 76 people were killed – including 12 women and children – and more than 3,000 were wounded, more than doubling the total number of casualties since the war began on 8 October last year.
The sudden, brutal nature of the attacks shattered whatever sense of safety Lebanese people felt.
“It was the first time that I felt that the war is around us, that we’re not safe anymore. We don’t know where the next Israeli attack will be, I’m avoiding gatherings or unknown areas,” Amal Cherif, a 52-year-old activist and resident of central Beirut, said.
When Tuesday’s pager attacks happened, she heard screaming and ambulances – despite the fact that her neighbourhood is not Hezbollah-affiliated.
Human rights groups condemned the pager attacks for being indiscriminate, and UN experts called the attack a “terrifying” violation of international law. “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” UN human rights experts said in a statement.
Israeli minister of defence Yoav Gallant said shortly after Friday’s airstrike on Beirut that “the sequence of actions in the new phase will continue until our goal is achieved: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes.” Earlier in the week, he announced that the Israeli military’s “centre of gravity” was shifting to confront Hezbollah in north Israel.
Israeli drones patrolled the skies over Beirut deep into the night on Friday, the whine of their engines reverberating throughout the capital for the first time since the war started.
In the south, residents refer to the Israeli MK drones as Um Kamal, comparing it to a nosy neighbour who is always snooping. In Gaza, they are referred to as “the wasp”, for their buzzing sounds. In Beirut, residents have developed neither the vocabulary nor the dark humour necessary to refer to the drones as anything but what they are, still amazed by their presence above their homes.
Cherif said she shut her windows on Friday to block out the sound, so that she could get some sleep.
In hospitals around Lebanon, hundreds of patients were adjusting to a new life, many of them now with permanent disabilities. The pager explosions resulted in many being blinded and losing a hand. The pagers had beeped twice, and then there was a pause, giving people enough time to bring them to their face before they exploded.
“Enucleation [removal of the eye] is a procedure that is rarely performed these days. One of our senior ophthalmologists was saying that he has done more enucleations in one day than he has done in his entire career,” Lebanon’s health minister, Firas Abiad, told the Observer. The CEO of LAU Medical Center-Rizk Hospital in Beirut, Sami Rizk, said that they would ask other countries to donate eye prostheses.
The series of attacks has prompted unity across Lebanon. Over the past year, the country has been divided over Hezbollah’s war with Israel, with some saying it was necessary to force a ceasefire in Gaza and others resenting Lebanon being dragged into the conflict.
It was Hezbollah that fired at Israel first on 8 October, in what it said was an act of “solidarity” with Hamas’s attack the day before.
Since then, the Lebanese group has maintained that it would not stop its attacks against north Israel until a ceasefire is achieved in Gaza. The fighting has killed more than 500 in Lebanon, more than 200 of whom are civilians, and destroyed entire villages along the Lebanon-Israel border.
After the pager explosions, criticisms of Hezbollah’s war against Israel stopped. Lines have formed outside hospitals as people come to donate blood. Officials put out a statement saying that kidney donations were not needed and that eye transplants were impossible, after a number of citizens offered their own.
“Israel is attacking us, it’s not any more against Hezbollah, it’s against civilians. Even if we are against Hezbollah, when Israel attacks Lebanon, people stand next to each other,” Cherif said.
The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, thanked the citizens of Lebanon for their solidarity during a Thursday speech, and said the week’s attacks were a “declaration of war” against Lebanon. He vowed that the group would retaliate against Israel.
“It’s clear that solidarity is increasing day after day,” Kassam Kassir, an analyst close to Hezbollah, said. Whether that support for Hezbollah lasts or evaporates as the shock of the pager attacks fades will largely be determined by what form the group’s retaliation against Israel takes.
“The reality is Hezbollah is facing a major challenge: how can it respond to Israel without going to war? This is the central question,” Kassir said.
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist
