Rania Abouzeid
The New Yorker / September 24, 2024
Air strikes across Lebanon, on the heels of last week’s pager and walkie-talkie explosions, have left the country in a state of dread.
On Monday, any doubts in Lebanon as to whether Israel was escalating its war not just with Hezbollah but with the entirety of the country were dispelled after Israeli strikes killed almost five hundred people and wounded more than sixteen hundred in less than twenty-four hours. Hezbollah also continued its attacks on Israel, launching rockets that reached as far as sixty miles south of the Lebanese border. In scenes reminiscent of the opening days of the 2006 war, cars clogged roads heading north as panicked families fled from southern Lebanon and parts of the Beqaa Valley, where most of the strikes were concentrated, seeking refuge closer to Beirut, the capital, though it, too, was targeted by Israeli warplanes, on Friday and again on Monday evening. Unlike in 2006, Lebanon’s highways, bridges, and other thoroughfares have not been destroyed. Fears that they soon might be were fuelled by Daniel Hagari, the I.D.F. spokesman, who claimed on Monday that Hezbollah has “militarized civilian infrastructure.” He also said that Hezbollah was deploying “its arms inside homes,” which many Lebanese took as a sign that nothing was off limits.
Thousands of Lebanese citizens were told by the I.D.F., via automated calls or text messages on their phones, or announcements on the radio, to evacuate. “If you are in a building where there are Hezbollah weapons, leave the village until further notice,” one message said. The office of the Minister of Information in Beirut was among those receiving the notifications.
The country was already reeling from a traumatic week of mass casualties and funerals. Video clips of Naya Ghazi, a cherub-faced preschooler with a lollipop in her hand, giggling as a hairdresser cut her wavy hair, have made the rounds on Lebanese social media and nightly news bulletins. The child and her father are among the handful of people whose bodies are still under the rubble of a multi-story apartment building in Beirut’s southern suburbs that was razed in Friday’s air strike. (An adjacent residential building was also partially destroyed.) Other children were killed as well.
Friday’s strike was the third attack in as many days, following the unprecedented, simultaneous explosions of thousands of pagers on Tuesday, and then walkie-talkies on Wednesday. The death toll from those three incidents has surpassed a hundred and is rising, with several thousand wounded.
To date, fifty-one bodies have been recovered from the apartment buildings targeted on Friday, including those of sixteen Hezbollah operatives who were reportedly meeting in an underground space at one of the structures. The dead include Ibrahim Aqil, a close adviser to Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and a senior commander who, in 2008, founded the élite Radwan Force, according to the group’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, who delivered a eulogy at Aqil’s funeral on Sunday afternoon. Many Lebanese learn details about these senior Hezbollah men, and their covert activities, only after they have been killed and the group recounts at least part of their histories.
Aqil had been a member of Hezbollah since the early eighties, when the group formed in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and its subsequent occupation of the southern part of the country. The U.S. State Department had offered a seven-million-dollar reward for information on Aqil for his alleged role in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and a Marine barracks, which together killed more than three hundred people. He is the fifth high-level Hezbollah commander to have been assassinated by Israel since October 8th of last year, when Hezbollah opened what it calls a “support front” to ease pressure on Hamas and Palestinian civilians by diverting Israeli military resources away from Gaza.
At the funeral, Qassem said that Hezbollah had entered what he called an “open-ended battle,” which involved maintaining its support front while separately seeking vengeance. “From time to time we will kill them and fight them—where they expect it and where they don’t,” he said. Of last week’s pager and walkie-talkie explosions, he said, “I won’t say that in the first hours we didn’t feel a sense of shock—we are people. But we overcame it and quickly collected ourselves.”
Although Israel hasn’t commented publicly on the communications-device attacks, it has been widely blamed for them. On Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, all but claimed responsibility. “In recent days, we have landed a series of blows on Hezbollah that it could have never imagined,” he said. “If Hezbollah did not get the message, I assure you it will get the message.”
Hezbollah’s military cadre use the devices, but so, too, do other arms of the organization, which is a long-standing part of Lebanon’s social and political fabric. It runs welfare programs, schools, and hospitals; there are thirteen Hezbollah members in the country’s parliament, and others serve as ministers in government. The devices exploded in the hands and pockets of people as they shopped in supermarkets, drove their cars, or were at home with their families. The fact that thousands of small blasts occurred across a vast swath of the country, from Beirut to southern Lebanon, and that people were killed and maimed while going about their everyday lives, not as active combatants on a battlefield, sparked outrage, fear, and solidarity among the Lebanese, who are rarely unified. The dead included women and children.
So many people rushed to donate blood to survivors of the initial blasts, including in areas that are politically hostile to Hezbollah, that as Friday’s casualties streamed into hospitals Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health issued a statement that the blood banks were full. A video circulated on social media of women visiting a hospital in a predominantly Christian neighbourhood of Beirut that is largely opposed to Hezbollah. They distributed trays of sweets to the wounded and their families. “This is the least we can do,” one woman said. “May God grant you strength,” added another.
Hezbollah, and the arsenal of weapons it maintains, is the source of a deep schism within Lebanon. The group’s domestic detractors are opposed to its arms. They fear its power and organizational capabilities, and its linchpin role in Iran’s Axis of Resistance. They denounce Hezbollah’s military participation in conflicts alongside Axis allies in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, actions that are independent of Lebanon’s foreign policy. They say that decisions of war and peace, such as reopening the front with Israel, should be made by the Lebanese state, not unilaterally by one party within it.
Last week’s attacks, however, rallied widespread support, if not for Hezbollah per se—although there was a fair amount of that—then for the victims. It brought to mind an old Arabic saying: “My brother and I will stand against my cousin, and my cousin and I will stand against the stranger.” Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, acknowledged the solidarity in a televised speech on Thursday, thanking the Lebanese in his opening remarks for putting aside their sectarian and political differences. Despite sustaining what he called “a major unprecedented blow,” Nasrallah reiterated that “Lebanon’s front will not cease before the end of aggression on Gaza. We have said this for eleven months. . . . Regardless of the sacrifices . . . the Lebanese resistance will not stop supporting Gaza and its people.”
Most of those wounded from the exploding devices suffered injuries to their faces, hands, and torsos. Some Lebanese were so moved that they offered to donate their own eyes (corneas can be transplanted, although they are usually extracted from the dead), posting their contact information and blood type on social media. One prospective donor, a taxi-driver named Hussein, explained his motivations to a local broadcaster. “How can I continue to see while they have been blinded?” he said. “The eye that I will donate will protect the nation.”
The country’s health sector, once dubbed the Hospital of the East for its top-notch facilities and expertise, has lately been weakened by a crushing economic crisis. More than a hundred hospitals treated the wounded from last week’s attacks. A number of trauma surgeons interviewed on local television stations broke down in tears recounting how many damaged limbs and eyes they had to surgically remove, and the debilitating nature of people’s injuries. Elias Jarade, an independent parliamentarian and an ophthalmologist, told Al Jazeera Arabic that the aftermath reminded him of the August, 2020, explosion at the Port of Beirut, which killed more than two hundred people and injured about seven thousand others. “I saw in every patient a piece of Lebanon,” he said, choking up, “and in every patient I tried to repair something of Lebanon.” He said he feared “what comes next. What is coming is something big.”
It is a dread shared by many Lebanese. During the previous eleven months of conflict, the violence was largely confined to the southern border. This summer, concerts and festivals took place across the country, even as airlines cancelled flights to and from Lebanon’s only airport during several particularly tense periods. But Monday’s Israeli onslaught, along with last week’s attacks, broke a psychological boundary. The latest air strikes and triple-digit daily death toll were at a scale not seen since the 2006 war. The conflict was no longer primarily confined to combatants in frontline towns and villages; it had come to grocery stores and residential city streets in what many Lebanese called acts of terrorism. People wondered what else in their hands or homes might explode. Many threw out their cell phones or disconnected the lithium batteries from solar panels after rumours suggested that the devices might also be weaponized and remotely detonated.
On Friday, Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the U.N. Security Council that he was “appalled by the breadth and impact of the attacks” on the pagers and walkie-talkies, and said that “international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby-trapped devices.” He went on, “It is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians.” The former U.S. Defense Secretary and C.I.A. director Leon Panetta said, in an interview with CBS, that he didn’t think “there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.” Calling exploding electronics “the battlefield of the future,” Panetta said, “This is a tactic that has repercussions, and we really don’t know what those repercussions are going to be.”
After the attacks on Monday, Lebanese officials sent students home early and told hospitals in the south to cancel elective surgeries and clear beds in anticipation of waves of wounded. The air strike in Beirut that evening was believed to have targeted another senior Hezbollah commander. Fears of a full-scale confrontation are mounting. Hezbollah is more powerful, better equipped, and better trained than Hamas, which Israel has yet to defeat in the besieged Gaza Strip, which is the size of a sliver of southern Lebanon. In 2000, Hezbollah ended Israel’s twenty-two-year occupation of parts of the country, dealing the I.D.F. its first military defeat at the hands of an Arab fighting force. In the 2006 war, Hezbollah thwarted Israel’s strategic goal to weaken it, and instead emerged stronger. Nasrallah has said that he commands more than a hundred thousand men, and he is believed to possess at least a hundred and fifty thousand rockets, plus other weapons. He has yet to reveal his full hand.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has made it clear that Hezbollah is now a focus. His war aims, he said on Sunday, have expanded to include the return of some sixty thousand or so Israelis who have been displaced from the north of the country by Hezbollah rocket fire. “We will take whatever action is necessary to restore security and to bring our people safely back to their homes,” he said.
Israeli troops have already been redirected from Gaza to northern Israel, heightening speculation about whether a ground invasion of Lebanon is imminent. Nasrallah has previously mocked that possibility, noting the I.D.F’s manpower shortages and Israel’s attempts to conscript the formerly exempt Haredim. On Thursday, he reiterated that he would welcome the opportunity to fight Israelis on his home turf, saying that Israeli troops entering Lebanon would face “hell.”
The rules of engagement that have defined and confined the conflict appear to be shifting, with an expanding battlefield, an escalation in both the scale and the frequency of attacks, and even more aggressive political rhetoric. Hezbollah has said that Israel’s actions will make even more of its citizens flee their homes. On Sunday, Naftali Bennett, a former Prime Minister of Israel, tweeted “Hezbollah=Lebanon,” an equation that other senior Israeli ministers and officials have repeatedly made. (He also wrote that “many Shiites in Lebanon have a unique revenue stream: in their home they have a special ‘Rocket Launcher Room.’ ”) Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has previously threatened to return Lebanon “to the Stone Age,” later warning that “what we can do in Gaza, we can do in Beirut.” On Saturday, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and combatting antisemitism, advocated not only reoccupying parts of southern Lebanon but emptying the areas of their residents.
That Israel has the ability to militarily pummel Lebanon is not in doubt, nor is the fact that Hezbollah could exact painful strikes deeper in Israel than it ever has. The predominant view in Beirut is that Israel wants to push Hezbollah into all-out war. Who or what can put the brakes on this accelerating race? Although the U.S. has said it doesn’t want a wider conflict, Axios reported that American officials agree with Israel’s “de-escalation through escalation” rationale. But wars are easier to start than they are to contain. In any case, few in Beirut pin their hopes on U.S. mediation, given that Washington’s calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and prudence in Lebanon have been coupled with continued military, political, and diplomatic support to Israel.
As the anniversary of the October 7th attack by Hamas approaches, Netanyahu has yet to achieve the “total victory” in Gaza he promised, or any of his stated war aims. There are still Israeli hostages in Gaza. Some Hamas leaders have been assassinated, but the group has not been dismantled and is still on the offensive in some parts of the territory. Nasrallah, meanwhile, has already achieved his main objective: Hezbollah’s support front has succeeded in drawing Israeli military resources away from Gaza, at a bloody price for the party, and for Lebanon.
Rania Abouzeid is a Lebanese Australian journalist who has extensively covered the war in Syria
