Ruth Michaelson
The Guardian / October 6, 2024
The exclusive Skybar welcomed in 400 Lebanese people made homeless in the ever-widening war.
Beirut – Inside the cavernous black walls of Beirut’s most exclusive after-hours club, two people are asleep on sofas tucked under the DJ booth. Beds fill the section normally used for bottle service, and piles of blankets are piled high on tables around the dancefloor.
Outside the guest entrance to the hulking venue is a family who fled rural southern Lebanon camps. Now their goat is chewing leaves from a tree branch that supports a washing line and a makeshift kitchen.
Ali Ahmed sits outside the backstage entrance with 11 members of his family, smiling when he talks about the warm welcome they received at Beirut’s best-known nightclub, one he’d only ever heard about before on local television.
His expression grows darker when he describes fleeing Beirut’s southern suburbs last week amid a fierce Israeli bombing campaign. The family slept in the open in the capital’s Martyr’s Square, he says, describing their first night in the shadow of the imposing cobalt blue domes of the Mohammed al-Amin mosque.
“The mosque kept its doors closed. But this nightclub opened its doors to us when the mosque didn’t,” he says.
Ahmed considers his family lucky – not only were they able to claim a spot in the club’s VIP area but staying at the nightclub has meant food delivery, clean bathrooms and privacy that those in many of Lebanon’s makeshift shelters lack.
Some 400 people displaced by Israeli bombardments across southern Lebanon and the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut are currently sheltering inside Skybar, which until recently welcomed guests to sip champagne on the top floor with a view of the Mediterranean and then party until the early hours in the Skin club below.
The families sleeping on the black-and-white floor of the club entrance, around the mirrored bars and beneath the plush black upholstered balconies of the nightclub are just some of the 1.2 million people now displaced in Lebanon. UN officials said late last week that almost 900 shelters set up by the government were full.
Staff at the nightclub, who are now coordinating its day-to-day operations as a shelter, said that the owner of the venue was moved to open it up after seeing displaced families sleeping on the streets outside.
In less than two weeks, the country of just 5 million people has witnessed a mass displacement crisis, mounting Israeli airstrikes and a troop invasion in its south.
More than 1,000 people were killed over 10 days in late September and hundreds more in the period since as Israeli forces repeatedly struck a swathe of Beirut’s suburbs and southern Lebanon.
Whole communities have fled to the mountains around the capital while those with the necessary means have crammed on to the dwindling numbers of flights leaving Beirut airport on the lone national airline still running. At least one plane from the Lebanese national carrier was seen landing at the airport as fierce Israeli bombardments struck nearby last week, sending columns of smoke and fire into the air over southern Beirut.
Israel’s battle against Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, began when the group declared its support for Hamas’s attack on Israel in October last year.
After months of Hezbollah launching rocket salvoes into Israeli territory and Israel responding with airstrikes deep into Lebanese territory, recent weeks have seen a dramatic escalation, including the assassination of Hezbollah’s long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a subterranean bunker under Dahiyeh.
Every night last week, Israeli forces pummelled the area and issued mass evacuation orders for much of southern Lebanon in what they say is an effort to target members of Hezbollah or infrastructure employed by the group.
A particularly powerful wave of airstrikes on Dahiyeh late in the week shook the ground across southern Beirut, reportedly targeting Nasrallah’s potential successor Hashem Safieddine.
Israeli forces also launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, sparking fierce fighting that has so far seen at least eight Israeli soldiers killed in battles that Hezbollah and its supporters said would provide their strongest chance of a decisive victory against their oldest enemy.
“You have won a few rounds through your air raids and assassinations, but the war continues, and we will prevail,” Hezbollah spokesperson Mohammad Afif declared, addressing Israeli forces during a media tour of the destruction in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Entire neighbourhoods were deserted, the few signs of life being the young men on motorbikes carrying posters of Nasrallah, which were also affixed to the towering and sometimes smouldering piles of rubble from Israeli airstrikes.
Those now sheltering at the nightclub are pinning their hopes on a Hezbollah victory in southern Lebanon as a way for them to eventually return to their homes.
Nada Hammoud, a teacher who fled strikes on the Chiyah neighbourhood of southern Beirut for a bed on the edge of the dancefloor at Skin, says she is hopeful that the war will be quick, maybe lasting even less than a week.
Others say they are prepared to spend a year living at the club if necessary to help clinch a victory on Lebanon’s southern border.
“This country doesn’t deserve this. But we support Hezbollah – they will win this. This is our country, our land: there is no place for Israel in the south,” says Hammoud.
Lebanon’s underfunded and often highly constrained military, she adds, “isn’t allowed to carry a single bullet, so we need Hezbollah”.
As Lebanon struggles to weather a displacement crisis, the fighting between Israel and Tehran’s proxies that has upended relations across the surrounding region now threatens to grow into an increasingly direct conflict with Iran.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly weighing a response to the salvo of 180 ballistic missiles that rained down over Israeli territory last week in response to Nasrallah’s killing. In a visit to Beirut to meet the caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati – and the increasingly powerful speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri of the Shia Amal movement – the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that Tehran still backed a ceasefire – provided that it occurred simultaneously with a halt to fighting in Gaza.
Any ceasefire, he added, must also be accepted by Hezbollah. “We support efforts for a ceasefire, provided that, first, the rights of the Lebanese people are respected and it is accepted by the resistance,” he said, in reference to the group.
The promise of a Hezbollah victory is not lost on Ahmed and his family either.
“We are powerful and we are winning,” he says cheerfully, sitting next to his elderly mother who chimes in to share her support for the group.
For now, Ahmed and 10 members of his family are enjoying their position in the VIP area of the nightclub, a place that normally requires a crisp $100 bill to enter, and where people often make even pricier bids for a table. They were only the second family to enter the nightclub, he explained, so they were able to pick a prime spot.
“You’re behind the DJ booth!” bouncer Mohammed Ali tells him, laughing as he opens the black backstage door for some children who want to run into the outdoor area and play.
Ali, more used to working the night shift and dealing with rowdy partygoers, says he takes pride in making sure everyone inside the nightclub was being given three meals a day and medical care if they need it.
“Be careful, don’t rush,” he gently tells the three children as they clamour at his legs while pushing through the nightclub door.
Ruth Michaelson is a journalist based in Istanbul
