Two Weeks in Beirut

On 19 September, in what turned out to be his final speech, Seyed Hassan Nasrallah repeated the message he had been sending to Israel’s leaders for almost a year: ‘You will not be able to return the northern residents to the north … the only way is to end the aggression and war on the people of Gaza.’ But something seemed off. Nasrallah looked and sounded despondent. It was widely rumoured that Hizbullah had been penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Nasrallah seemed to acknowledge as much. He called the pager and walkie-talkie attacks of the previous days ‘unprecedented’. They demanded ‘just retribution’, he said, but for the moment he would ‘leave the matter be’: ‘We will settle scores. Their nature, scale, how, where? This, for sure, we will keep to ourselves, and within our narrowest circles.’

As Nasrallah spoke, Israeli jets flew low over Beirut, breaking the sound barrier. The sonic boom sounds like a bomb exploding in the sky over your head. It was a common occurrence in Beirut in the 1990s, and never really stopped in south Lebanon. Since 8 October 2023 it has once again become frequent over Beirut, but it had never been this loud before. The windows shook. In south Lebanon, Israel launched more than twenty airstrikes. Nasrallah continued: ‘But since this battle has had invisible aspects, allow me to change approach today. I will not talk of time, or form, or place, or date. Leave the matter be. The news is what you see, not what you hear.’

A week later, on Friday, 27 September, we felt the whole of Beirut shake. A huge plume of smoke was visible across the city. Israeli jets had dropped more than eighty bombs, flattening six apartment buildings in Haret Hreik without warning. Their target was one man. The rest of the still uncounted dead – many hundreds incinerated – were collateral damage. The Western press described it as a ‘targeted strike’. The US president and vice-president called it a ‘measure of justice’.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had just finished giving his own speech to the UN General Assembly. He had repeated a claim made two days earlier in an address to the Lebanese people: Hizbullah had ‘placed rockets in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings, and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon. They endanger their own people. They put a missile in every kitchen. A rocket in every garage.’ The Lebanese, he claimed, were being turned into ‘human shields’. The discourse was hair-raisingly familiar from a year of carpet-bombing Gaza. There’s an Arabic phrase for this kind of threatening talk: ‘legalising blood’.

As Netanyahu finished his speech to the half-empty general assembly, the blasts shook Beirut. Images published later showed Netanyahu ordering the strike from a hotel room in New York. It’s hard to imagine another foreign leader brazenly broadcasting that they had ordered such a strike from US soil. It’s also hard to imagine a US administration more pliant to Israeli policy. Reuters later reported that munitions used by Israel to kill one man by destroying six apartment buildings were made and supplied by the US. The day before, Israel announced that it had secured its latest military aid package from the US, worth $8.7 billion. This was the brute reality undermining the empty talk of a Biden-Macron ceasefire plan at the UN.

Nasrallah had made it clear he intended to continue the policy of support (isnad) for Gaza through border skirmishes. Though Israel launched four airstrikes for every Hizbullah rocket, there was some kind of parity. Israelis and Lebanese living within five kilometres of the border were forcibly displaced. Hizbullah’s aims were plainly stated and limited in scale: to force Israel to divert troops from Gaza.

For a year, many in Lebanon asked when the war would start. For a year, I thought the border skirmishes were the war. Nasrallah seemed to have forged as close to a consensus as is possible in this fractured country. Not everyone supported his position: there were billboards in Beirut demanding the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006, which calls for a ‘full cessation of hostilities’ between Hizbullah and Israel. This has been a favourite talking point of the politicians in the bloc opposed to Hizbullah, such as the right-wing Christian former warlord Samir Geagea. And it wasn’t uncommon to hear people grumble that Lebanon was being dragged into a war against our choosing at the behest of Iran. On the other hand, Hizbullah’s limited response had left them open to criticism – from the 250,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon as well as among their Shia base – that they weren’t doing enough. Broadly speaking, until last week, the so-called tawāzun al-ra‘b (‘balance of terror’) seemed to hold.

In engaging on 8 October 2023, Hizbullah was fulfilling its raison d’être as a resistance movement. As the Lebanese political scientist Nadim Shehadi has argued, since 2000, when Hizbullah forced Israel to withdraw from the territory it had occupied in southern Lebanon since 1982, Hizbullah has been a resistance movement in search of an occupation. The war of July 2006, with its so-called ‘divine victory’, marked a momentary high. But the intervention in Syria to prop up a brutal dictator eroded Hizbullah’s support. Hizbullah used its ‘resistance’ arsenal to besiege, starve, rape, kill and displace Syrians who had risen up against the Assad regime. Hizbullah’s resistance discourse was like a stopped clock; the world turned to realign with it last October.

Israel’s escalation began with the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on 17 and 18 September. If everyday electronics in Europe or the US were laced with undetectable amounts of explosives, there would be media outrage. But the Western press lauded the attacks in Lebanon as ‘innovative’ and ‘audacious’, extolling the spycraft behind the explosions that killed dozens and maimed thousands. I went to visit a friend recovering from pneumonia in hospital on 19 September and was advised not to bring my daughter because the injuries she would have encountered on the ward were too gruesome. Many have lost one or two eyes or three fingers. A nurse described the ordeal of changing the bandages, so painful that the wounded, including children, pass out from the pain.

Some commentators, such as Marwan Bishara, have cast the fight between Hizbullah and Israel as one between ideology and technology. As I write, a drone is buzzing overhead. It has been there incessantly for the last week, turning Beirut into terabytes of data to be crunched in Israel and transformed into targets for airstrikes. The sound of the drone is meant to remind us that resistance is futile, that we must live with the injustice of Israel’s longstanding dispensation in Palestine and, by all signs, its renewed dispensation in Lebanon.

On Monday, 23 September, Israel’s military spokesman Daniel Hagari released a video warning to Lebanese citizens, a sequel to his viral content from Gaza, such as his tour through the basement of al-Rantisi Hospital, where he claimed that an elevator shaft was the entrance to a Hamas tunnel, a baby bottle suspicious evidence, a hospital rota a hostage list, and the days of the week written in Arabic ‘the names of terrorists’. Now, to the Lebanese, he said: ‘This is a village in southern Lebanon.’ He didn’t specify which village. The visuals showed a 3D mock-up, possibly produced by AI. As he spoke, the houses turned hollow, revealing ‘cruise missiles, rockets, launchers, UAVs inside civilian homes, hidden behind the Lebanese population living in the village’. On cue, the computer-generated weaponry turned red. Military vehicles reversed out of garages, pointing their weapons at the viewer.

The Israeli airstrikes began soon afterwards. According to the New York Times it was one of the heaviest days of aerial bombardment in contemporary warfare. Israel launched 1600 airstrikes, killing over 551 people in a single day, half the total number killed in the month-long 2006 war. There were 1300 strikes on the first day of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, where it took 13 days for the death toll to reach 500. Among the dead in Lebanon were 94 women and 50 children. But why not count the men? Unless you accept Israel’s logic that all men in Lebanon are potential terrorists, legalising our blood.

On Tuesday, 24 September in Joun, one such ‘village in southern Lebanon’, where my family comes from, an Israeli airstrike hit a house on the outskirts, killing eleven people, including three Syrian refugees and a Lebanese mother, father and child.

In the hours following Israel’s assassination of Nasrallah, they ‘eliminated’ at least eighteen other senior Hizbullah leaders. Rumours spread in Beirut that Iran had betrayed the group for the sake of a nuclear deal or sanctions relief. The Iranian missiles launched at Israel on 1 October imply otherwise. In any case, the politics of assassination must be condemned. Hizbullah itself is no stranger to it. Its members have been tried and found guilty of killing Lebanese leaders such as Rafik al-Hariri, and are accused of killing the likes of Lokman Slim. It is senseless and self-defeating to celebrate the ‘elimination’ of one’s enemies and grieve the assassination of one’s friends.

As Israeli commandos trudge into southern Lebanon, it feels as if we are returning to 1982, when the Israelis also sought to establish a so-called ‘buffer zone’ and hubris, mission creep and the desire to shape a ‘new Middle East’ took Ariel Sharon all the way to Lebanon’s capital. After the Sabra and Shatila massacres he became known as the ‘Butcher of Beirut’. If history must repeat, then Hizbullah, a resistance movement formed in 1982 which has spent the last 24 years in search of an occupation, will be given a new lease of life.

Clearly, Hizbullah has made grave mistakes since 2000. As the FT reports, propping up Assad exposed it to the notoriously corrupt Syrian secret services. All the while, Israel was gathering data on the group. But Nasrallah’s last broadcast may yet be proved right: ‘This fool,’ he said, with his disarming speech impediment and his alarming index finger raised, ‘the commander of the north, is suggesting to establish a “buffer zone” inside Lebanese territory … This “buffer zone” will turn into a swamp, a trap, an ambush, an abyss, hell.’

Since Israel, in the hubris of a fortnight of victories, refuses to learn from the history of its defeats in Lebanon, I cling to the distant hope that Hizbullah, in the humility of these defeats, will remember to hand over its weapons to the Lebanese state and disband itself when the coming years of struggle against Israel’s invasion and occupation at last come to an end.

The Lebanese caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said that a million Lebanese have been displaced in the space of a week. The streets of Beirut are filled with people who have been forced to leave their homes with only the clothes on their backs. They sleep on thin bits of foam in the open air. It’s still warm, but it rained the night of the ground invasion. They faced the ‘humanitarian’ choice proffered by Israel’s ‘most moral army’: leave your homes immediately or you will die. Some received a call or text message at 1 a.m., two hours before their homes were bombed. The residents of the six apartment buildings in Haret Hreik received no call. Nor did the residents of the apartment building in Ain el-Delb, where an Israeli airstrike killed at least 37 on Sunday 29 September.

If the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah had failed, it’s doubtful Israel would have dared invade Lebanon. It isn’t surprising that his killing leaves many Lebanese feeling more exposed, not less. On Saturday, 29 September, in a small shop up the hill from the Corniche, the shopkeeper described the efforts she had taken to house people in abandoned apartments and buildings. No matter how much she did, she felt she hadn’t done enough. So many are still out on the streets. ‘If I were a house,’ she said, ‘I would have slept them all inside of me.’