Anna Conkling
New Lines Magazine / September 16, 2024
The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah shows little sign of abating, shattering the lives of civilians caught in the crossfire.
An isolated village in southern Lebanon sat empty on a hot day in the middle of August. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and the village, Kfar Kila, should have been filled with the bustle of cars driving through the streets and people shopping at local stores. For children, it was supposed to be their summer vacation from school, but no civilians walked the streets, save members of Hezbollah, who drove past us on scooters, casting a watchful eye on us as we took pictures of destroyed residential buildings next to our parked car marked “press.”
The only other signs of life were two United Nations peacekeepers who were dressed in camouflage as well as blue ballistic helmets and flak jackets, showing that they are members of the intergovernmental organization and should not be targeted in any strikes by the Israeli military. Since 1978, peacekeepers have patrolled villages in southern Lebanon like Kfar Kila, which is situated next to the Blue Line border between the country and Israel.
Despite its close proximity to the border, residents in Kfar Kila and nearby villages once found a sense of normalcy. Over the past 11 months, however, the village has been decimated by the escalation of tensions as yet another conflict between Lebanon and Israel looms.
Soon after Israel began its military campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Hezbollah started launching attacks on Israel in what it described as a form of solidarity. Since then, southern Lebanon has been under frequent fire from the Israeli military, which has launched drone and rocket attacks at perceived Hezbollah locations as well as an assassination campaign against the group’s leaders. The sounds of drones and airplanes flying over southern Lebanon and the loud rumble of attacks have become constant.
For one week in August, my colleague, photojournalist Vasily Krestyaninov, and I stayed in southern Lebanon, where we visited Muslim and Christian villages, spoke with Syrian refugees and attended funerals for recently assassinated Hezbollah fighters. Kfar Kila was the first location in the south that we visited, where we saw the large gray Blue Line border wall between Israel and Lebanon. After just 15 minutes in Kfar Kila, we were asked by Hezbollah members to leave the village.
“It’s too dangerous,” one man told our driver, Ali, three words that would be repeated to us every day in the south as fears of a regional war in the Middle East reached new heights.
Being an outsider in southern Lebanon feels like something in an old Western movie: “Around here, these are Hezbollah’s parts.” Throughout the entire region, yellow and green Hezbollah flags flutter from buildings, billboards of the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah are on display and posters of dead fighters line the streets. The trip to the south was accented by the sonic booms created by Israeli warplanes, the daunting hums of Israeli drones, incoming and outgoing artillery, and funerals of Hezbollah soldiers — a normal week for the civilians living there.
Since Israel assassinated the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut on July 30, the world has been bracing for an expanding regional war. Some in Beirut feel confident that there will not be another war like 2006, but just a few hours’ drive to the south, the feeling is that the war is already present, and will only get worse.
After we left Kfar Kila, we drove to Khiam, a nearby Muslim village that was filled with young men driving on their scooters or in black cars, as Hezbollah flags waved from buildings above them. Life in Khiam, for the most part, carries on as usual, but the streets are more or less quiet. Outside an empty bakery, Ahmed, a Syrian refugee, stood with his two employees as they waited for customers. The workers were both teenage boys, and in tow was a girl no older than 3, with long, dark, brown curls and large dark eyes.
“There are still people and families here, and we are still working well, thankfully,” Ahmed said.
Many families throughout the south are leaving, but Ahmed said that his family, which includes three children and a pregnant wife, does not currently have plans to leave.
“There is no reason for us to leave,” Ahmed said. “The situation is a bit normal, and there are still a few families here, four or five. We do not have anywhere else to go.”
Lebanon has faced an economic crisis since 2019. Some 80% of the population is currently living under the poverty line; 36% are below the “extreme poverty line,” earning less than $2.15 a day. Ahmed’s is just one of the countless families who are living in poverty in the south. But their financial situation makes it nearly impossible for them to find accommodation elsewhere.
Despite hoping for a de-escalation in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, Ahmed admitted that he is afraid that tensions might continue to rise.
“It’s something to be normally worried about, but for now, it is still manageable, so we will cross that bridge when we get to it,” he said.
An added fear for Ahmed is the health of his wife, Aliya. She is five months pregnant, and inside their home just a few feet away from the bakery, she spoke of the stresses of expecting a child in the current situation in Khiam.
“I obviously get stressed and anxious when I hear bomb sounds,” said Aliya, as her three children — Maya, 4, Mona, 6 and Saeid, 3 — jumped around and tried to get their mother’s attention.
“Sometimes it worries [me] living in such circumstances. I even woke up screaming during one night. A raid happened nearby at [midnight] that day about a month ago. The windows were shattered and everyone in the neighborhood got scared.”
For Aliya, everything about being pregnant in Khiam is difficult — a lack of food and medication stores in the village requires the family to travel to nearby towns to get their necessities, and they need to find transportation in order to get there. The refugee family worries about what they will do if they are forced to evacuate.
“This situation is forced upon us because we do not have any other safe place to go. But if we did, that would have been better than living this horror with the children,” she said. “I used to tell them that it is thunder whenever we hear something. But with time, they became aware that it is a bombing or a plane. My son got scared and he developed a stutter. We just pray that this war ends and that our lives go back to normal.”
Aliya and her family had managed to build a life for themselves, with a business and an apartment of their own. But the U.N. has estimated that, as of 2024, there are some 1.5 million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, approximately 815,000 of whom are registered with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
The camp I visited was made up of tents and sat on the top of a small dirt hill outside of Khiam, isolated from any stores or other signs of life. Residents of the camp live in complete poverty and, for the men, work has been slow or impossible to find since the start of the Gaza war. The families in the camp are all refugees from Syria who fled during that country’s civil war, living without electricity and not enough clean drinking water. They eat just one or two meals a day.
The camp is operated by the U.N., but its residents feel that they have been forgotten by the organization that is supposed to make their lives as refugees in a second country bearable.
“A foundation used to come before the war a lot, but because of the situation, it has decreased. Maybe once a month, a mobile clinic comes,” said Raja, the head of the camp. Raja, his wife and their four children have lived at the camp since they fled Syria in 2012. “We manage as best as we can, but it’s very challenging. We rely on what little aid we get and try to make do.”
Life at the camp has always been hard, Raja explained, but since last October, the situation has become dire, and the refugees said they are struggling to survive. With only tents for shelter, they live in the open under frequent attacks, which at times remind them of the trauma of life in Syria.
“The sounds of rockets are terrifying. People become very anxious, and the children cry. It’s a constant state of fear,” Raja said. “People are scared, especially the children, who hide under furniture when they hear explosions. The stress is affecting everyone.”
Before the start of the Gaza war, children at the refugee camp attended a nearby school, but since then, education facilities in parts of the south have closed down. “The future is uncertain. We are hopeful that things will improve, but right now it’s very difficult. We are just trying to survive day by day. We hope to return to Syria once it’s safe, or at least find a better place to live. Our main hope is to provide a stable future for our children,” Raja said.
Vasily and I stayed a while in Marjaayoun. Although it is a small Christian village that is meant to be safe, one nevertheless hears sounds of war every day. Still, locals stress that the town is more or less safe, even though the events of a few days earlier appeared to prove otherwise. An Israeli drone struck a car where two Hezbollah fighters sat outside a restaurant in the center of the village, leaving the staff of the restaurant working to clean up the shattered glass from their large windows that had been destroyed, while a man sprayed a hose at the cobbled road to remove the blood of the two men killed at the scene.
At times, the Christian villages do seem safer, but in other instances, they are just as vulnerable to Israeli attacks as the Muslim ones, although no Hezbollah fighters are based in them. In Qlayaa, a village less than 3 miles from the Israeli border, a father named Elias said that Israel was targeting civilian infrastructure in his village. “It’s not safe at all. We are living in a war, we don’t know how it will end. We don’t know what to do here when the bombs are striking us all the time. We have kids, I have to let them be safe. We don’t have anywhere to go,” he said.
Last month, Elias said that an Israeli missile attacked a nearby building and the explosion shattered the windows of his home. “My son was in the house. The glass came to him, and everything was destroyed. All of the time, we are not in the mood to have life. We are not living. I’m afraid for my kids,” he said as his wife held one of their sons.
Much of the week in Lebanon was spent speaking to the residents and attending Hezbollah funerals, where masses of the organization’s supporters meet in a wake to bid farewell to their fallen soldiers. Hezbollah funerals occur in the towns and villages that the fighters lived in, where chants of “We will always be with Hezbollah, we will always stand with Nasrallah” can often be heard echoing through the mourning rites.
The heat of the Lebanese sun seeped through the fabric of my black hijab as I walked alongside mourners attending the wake of Hezbollah fighter Abbas Badii Milhim, 34, who was killed in an Israeli strike the day before. It was Aug. 20, and the wake began with a ceremony for Milhim at a park in Majdal Selm. The entire village seemed to have shown up, and the men stood at the center of the ceremony, which was closed off from the women. Milhim’s coffin was first carried to the front of the park, where his father was waiting; he kneeled on the ground with his hands thrown up in the air with a look of despair on his face for the fate of his son.
Behind him was a large banner depicting his son; it was accompanied by the Hezbollah logo, decorated with a hand reaching for an assault rifle. Many of the parents of fallen Hezbollah fighters whom I met said that they would offer more young men in their family if they could, believing that their sons died for a greater cause. For many, after decades of being at war, it seems that Hezbollah is their only hope.
Anna Conkling is a Berlin-based American journalist whose work focuses on war and conflict, human rights violations and the environment
