William Christou
The Guardian / August 4, 2024
Assassinations have led to escalating fears of full-scale conflict, though some Lebanese say they are ‘ready for any confrontation with Israel’
At a high-end Beirut seaside resort, guests lathered themselves with sun cream and children splashed in the water as their parents watched from sunbeds. “Here in Lebanon, we like to live our lives,” said Emad, a 60-year-old retiree and Beirut resident, over the sound of techno music.
“There are always wars, every two to three years this happens, it’s nothing new. If you live in Lebanon, you get used to it,” Emad said with a shrug.
While sunbathers sipped cocktails poolside, embassy staff have quietly been making calls to the resort’s front desk, asking if its marina accommodates a very different kind of request – evacuations. The hotel’s harbour, currently used to dock wealthy Lebanese yachts, is being scoped out as one possible evacuation site in the case of a full-scale war in Lebanon, a staff member said.
Hezbollah first fired rockets at Israel on 8 October “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack on Israel the day before – kicking off 10 months of tit-for-tat fighting, mainly along the Lebanon-Israel border.
But over the past week, fears that a full-scale war may break out have heightened, after the back-to-back assassinations of the top Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas’s political head, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in the week after the killing of 12 children in a rocket strike on the town of Majd al-Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Israel blamed Iranian ally Hezbollah for the attack, which the Lebanese militia denies, and killed Shukr in response. Israel has refused to officially comment on Haniyeh’s death, but its responsibility is widely acknowledged inside the country and beyond.
Hezbollah and Iran have promised a “serious” response to Israel. US and Israeli officials have said this could involve a wide-ranging missile attack against Israel, similar to Iran’s drone barrage in April.
In Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp 5km from the beach resort, residents said they were impatiently awaiting Hezbollah and Iran’s retaliation.
People gathered on Friday in the camp to pay tribute to Haniyeh as he was buried in Qatar. An empty coffin draped in Hamas’s bright green flag was paraded through the streets by unarmed members of the group’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades as supporters wearing keffiyehs chanted for Palestinian liberation.
“Many of us welcome an expansion of the war if it is to alleviate the suffering of our people in Gaza and the West Bank. We want Iran and Hezbollah to retaliate for what happened,” one of those watching, Wafaa Issa, said, adding that if needed she and her son would join the fight to defend Lebanon.
Further away from Beirut, fighters were preparing themselves. “We are ready for any confrontation with Israel,” said Maj Gen Mounir al-Miqdah, the leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah faction that has fought alongside Hezbollah. Diplomats have been scrambling to try to prevent the simmering conflict from boiling over into a regional war.
On Saturday, David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, spoke with his US counterpart, Antony Blinken. They reaffirmed the need to “de-escalate rising tensions in the Middle East and prevent the conflict from spreading,” said the US state department’s spokesperson, Matthew Miller.
In Lebanon, however, calls from the west could be ignored. Hezbollah-affiliated media has accused the US mediator Amos Hochstein of leading a “campaign of diplomatic deception” for, they claimed, misleading them about the nature of Israel’s strike.
It further called on Lebanese officials to stop meeting with Hochstein who, until now, has been seen as the main facilitator for a diplomatic solution between Israel and Hezbollah.
With no clear route to de-escalation, many Lebanese are despairing at the prospect of another war. Billboards have sprung up across Lebanon, showing bombed-out buildings, with the slogan, “Don’t repeat the past, Lebanon does not want a war”. Rents in the mountains surrounding Beirut have skyrocketed, as families seek a plan B in the historical safe haven.
Critics of Hezbollah have said it should be the state, rather than the Lebanese party, that should be deciding the fate of the country.
“There’s a major role for diplomacy, which the Lebanese government has not played since the beginning, it’s been completely absent,” Michel Helou, the secretary general of the National Bloc political party, said, adding that there was “no justification for Lebanon being dragged into a regional war”.
Hezbollah has consistently said its rocket fire on Israel is designed to lessen the pressure on its ally Hamas, and pull Israeli resources from Gaza. For some in Lebanon, despite overwhelming sympathy for the high humanitarian toll in Gaza, the cost of Hezbollah’s intervention could be too high to bear.
“How have Hezbollah rockets helped the Palestinian population since October 8? Did it slow the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, did we gain anything as Lebanese?” Helou added.
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist, focusing on human rights investigations and migration issues
