In Beirut

We were at my parents’ house in central Beirut, watching the last minutes of the Olympic football match between Argentina and Ukraine on television, when my aunt, who lives a few hundred metres from the site of the explosion, received a phone call about it. We flipped between the Lebanese channels for more information. They showed the same image of a collapsed façade and repeated the same news: a residential building in Haret Hreiq, in south Beirut, had been hit by an Israeli airstrike.

The details emerged piecemeal. It was a targeted assassination of a Hizbullah commander, whose name kept changing as time passed, until the news anchors settled on Fouad Shukur, also known as Hajj Mohsen, whom the US blames for an attack on its Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. The toll in Beirut rose to four dead, including two children, and 74 wounded. Shukur’s body was found under the rubble the following day.

My aunt’s phone kept ringing; after a few calls, she barely waited to hear from the caller to say that she was at her brother’s house. Some of the calls came from the US and Canada, where her sons live with their families. It is over, it is fine, she eventually said, I am tired of answering the phone.

Another aunt who lives not far from the blast, in an area known as the ‘American neighbourhood’ because American embassy employees lived there in the 1950s, said that she had heard two loud explosions. She rushed inside from the balcony. Maybe it will end here, they usually concentrate on that area – Haret Hreiq – may it not happen again, she said in a voice message to the family WhatsApp group.

We had planned an extended family gathering at my parents’ house as my brothers and I were visiting from the US and the UK. My aunt was the only one to show up. The mood in the city had been tense since a rocket strike on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday, 27 July, which killed twelve, and which Israel blamed on Hizbullah. Haret Hreiq is in the southern suburb of al-Dahiya, where both my parents grew up. Much of my extended family still lives there. In the 1950s, the area was home to leftist, socialist and Arab nationalist parties, giving way in the 1970s and 1980s, especially after the Israeli occupation of Beirut in 1982, to Shiite political movements. Hizbullah led the liberation of southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000.

My father’s sister was married to my mother’s brother, who died a few years ago. My aunt now lives alone in their third-floor apartment on the main street of Haret Hreiq, a wide and busy road. We would have to drive back and forth in search of a parking spot and then squeeze between the cars to make it to their building. We gathered there for parties, bringing together both sides of my extended family. Their small balcony faced many like it, lined up next to another, covered with curtains of different colours and linked to electricity poles by hundreds of intertwined power cables. Some people smoked on their balconies, others hung laundry, fanned themselves in the summer heat, watched television, observed the street below, or sat together talking.

In July 2006, Israel attacked al-Dahiya, dropping bombs from the air that destroyed many residential buildings. It also bombed the airport, which is close by. The attack and its justification by Israeli commanders gave rise to what is known as the ‘Dahiya doctrine’, which involves the destruction of civilian infrastructure as a form of collective punishment. It is the strategy that Israel seems to be deploying in its war on Gaza.

We had resolved, on arriving to Lebanon, to avoid the southern suburbs of Beirut and the south of the country, where we normally go in the summer, entirely. Since the attack on Haret Hreiq and the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, the flow of people arriving in Lebanon for the summer has reversed even as many commercial flights have been cancelled. The governments of the US, the UK, France and other states have advised their citizens to leave immediately ‘on any ticket available to them’. We bought the first available tickets we could afford, leaving in five long days. I remember watching in July 2006 as everyone with a foreign passport was being evacuated. I now find myself on the other side of that dividing line, trying to escape with my family and leaving my parents, relatives and friends behind amid fears of an all-out war.