Michael Safi & William Christou
The Guardian / July 28, 2024
Despite the deadly rocket strike in Golan Heights, tourists still flock to resorts as cars idle in traffic jams below anti-war billboards.
The azure sky above Tyre beach looked clear as glass, but that was an illusion. “We were swimming like one hour ago and they shot a missile or something,” said Maha Mrad, pointing down the southern Lebanese coastline, stretching out in the distance towards Israel.
An Israeli jet, lurking high beyond view, had bombed a Lebanese village about 20km from the beach, the latest in a 10-month campaign of tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah that appeared closer than ever on Sunday to full-scale war.
“But it felt so – cool,” Mrad said, now face-down on a sun lounger. “Like, oh, there’s a strike. Say hi! We kept swimming.”
This is summer 2024 in Lebanon: peak tourism season, peak tensions with Israel, a war-scarred, party-loving country at the peak of its contradictions.
Many Lebanese are avoiding the south, according to Dalya Farran, the owner of a beach club on the shore. But not completely: “Some of them, instead of coming to [my club] Cloud 59 every weekend – they come every two weeks, or once a month.”
The massacres happening in Gaza are right next to us. Psychologically, you cannot just be having a party time – Dalya Farran
The club is busier than usual on Sunday afternoon, a day after a rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights killed 12 people, including several children, playing football. Israel has blamed the strike on Hezbollah and promised it will “pay a heavy price”. Hezbollah “firmly denies” targeting the village.
“It’s bizarre,” Farran admitted, to relax on sand a few kilometres from destroyed, abandoned border villages. “It takes you some time at the beginning. But you eat some good food, have some beers – or juice – and then go for a swim, and the sea washes away your worries and stress.”
Hezbollah triggered these latest tensions last October when it started firing on Israeli-held territory “in solidarity” with Palestinians, a day after Hamas’s attack on Israel and just as the obliterating war in Gaza was getting under way.
The killings in the Palestinian territory are felt deeply here. “The massacres happening in Gaza are right next to us,” Farran said. “Just nearby. Psychologically, you cannot just be having a party time.”
Clashing with Israel over the war has allowed an Islamist organization that wears many masks – Shia militia, political party, proxy of Iran – to present to the Lebanese people its best face: national defender. “Hezbollah doesn’t vibe with – this,” Mrad said, gesturing at the sunbathers behind her drinking and playing beach tennis on the sand.
“And I don’t vibe with their lifestyle, I don’t vibe with their mindset. But I trust they’re going to protect us, protect this land, because they aren’t foreigners. They’re protecting their homes, their land, their country.”
More than 7,000 Israeli rockets and missiles have landed in Lebanon since October, but life in Beirut uneasily goes on. There has been barely a dent in the planeloads of Lebanese expats making their summer pilgrimage home, according to the country’s tourism syndicate. Beachside towns such as Batroun, north of Beirut and regarded as outside the fighting arena, are booming.
Cars idle in traffic jams below anti-war billboards – reportedly funded by Lebanese businessmen in the Gulf – showing a mourning family and the words: “Enough. We’re tired. Lebanon doesn’t want a war.”
For some, the biggest inconvenience is that Google Maps regularly malfunctions – Israel is suspected of jamming the country’s GPS system to confuse Hezbollah targeting – or the Israeli warplanes that regularly shatter the sound barrier, producing shock waves that rattle doors and windows tens of thousands of feet below.
Quietly, though, preparations are under way for the worst. From her office in Beirut’s Rafik Hariri university hospital, Wahida Ghalayini watches news reports from Gaza closely, sometimes pausing to take pictures with her phone.
“We look at their emergency rooms – how much blood do they have on the floors? Just to prepare our scenarios,” she said. “In one of the cases [on TV], the nurse was doing CPR with a patient while the stretcher was moving. That’s not easy … So we did the training for that.”
Ghalayini manages a national-emergency centre that has been trying to brace 118 state hospitals across Lebanon for a war that Israel leaders have threatened would take the country “back to the stone age”. One early lesson from Gaza: people were presenting with terrible burns, not just wounds. “And we know in Lebanon we don’t have enough burn centres,” she said.
Michael Safi is an international correspondent for The Guardian, based in the Middle East
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist, focusing on human rights investigations and migration issues
