Loubna El Amine
London Review of Books / April 9, 2026
Yesterday morning, after the ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, many displaced people in Lebanon started heading back to the south. At around 2 p.m., Israel hit the country with a hundred airstrikes in less than ten minutes. It was a co-ordinated assault reminiscent of the pager attack in September 2024. Israel called it Operation Eternal Darkness. They hit locations in Beirut, the southern suburbs, Mount Lebanon and the Beqa’a Valley. A funeral was bombed near Baalbek, killing at least six people. A few hours later, a nine-storey residential building in the Tallet al-Khayat neighbourhood was hit. In all 254 people were killed and more than a thousand wounded.
I learned of the attacks through family WhatsApp groups, messages frantically exchanged to make sure everyone was safe. One cousin sent a short video showing plumes of smoke rising over Beirut. One explosion was so close to my aunt’s house that all she could see from her balcony was smoke. One of her friends, a poet, who called to check on her, was later killed in Tallet el Khayat.
The footage, photos and accounts on social media have been harrowing: children pulled out from under the rubble; buildings collapsing on rescuers; people in the wrong place at the wrong time, killed on a day when the world was meant to give them a respite from war. Some of the lost children whose photos people were circulating were found wounded in hospitals; others had been killed in the carnage.
Israel claims that the strikes were targeting Hizbullah operatives. This is how it justifies killing 1739 people in Lebanon in five weeks, wounding 5873, and displacing 1.2 million, around 20 per cent of the population. Avichay Adraee, the IDF spokesperson who issues evacuation orders, posting maps on X with unsafe zones coloured in red, shared a map with all of Lebanon red. He said that Hizbullah had been positioning itself outside the southern suburbs, in the north of Beirut and in mixed areas.
The plan is clear: Israel will hit anywhere in the country and any casualties will be blamed on Hizbullah. This is a familiar argument that the state of Israel uses to absolve itself of responsibility for the deaths of innocent civilians. This is how it has justified killing more than seventy thousand people in Gaza since October 2023, and its allies accept the logic.
Whenever people have asked me about my family in Lebanon, I have said that they are safe where they are, mostly in central and northern areas of Beirut, some having been displaced from their homes in the south and in the southern suburbs. The strikes yesterday shattered this modicum of reassurance. I had been feeling guilty for worrying about our house in the south. It was just a house, I kept reminding myself. My friends and relatives were safe where they were – my parents in the apartment where they have lived in central Beirut for almost fifty years. Yesterday, I was not so sure anymore. And they were not either. The thought was so distressing and I felt so helpless that I had to tell myself just not to think about it. The sun was out in London and people were going about their daily lives as if all was well in the world. In Lebanon, meanwhile, people went to sleep to the smell of smoke and woke up to the sound of drones.
Loubna El Amine teaches political theory at King’s College London; Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation was published by Princeton in 2015
