Loubna El Amine

As the two coffins were driven through the crowd, a deep, sorrowful voice came from the loudspeakers. The sound of a violin rose as the voice of the man receded. I texted people in Beirut to confirm that the music was playing at the funeral, not being added by the television broadcasters.

The death toll in Lebanon has now risen past three thousand with more than thirteen thousand wounded. Schools have been turned into shelters, making it difficult to resume the school year even in areas considered relatively safe. Yet even the schools cannot hold enough people; tents and makeshift homes have been built on the corniche and in the public square in central Beirut. You would not recognise the city, my friends there tell me.

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.

Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli occupation in 2000. The Israeli army had entered Lebanon in June 1982 in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reaching as far north as Beirut, and had retreated to the south by 1985, where it remained for fifteen years until it was forced out by Hizbullah fighters. There was no celebration this year. The strip of formerly occupied villages has been heavily bombed since October. Most of the residents have left.

Samir Ayoub pulled his sister out of the burning car where her three daughters, Remas, Taleen and Layan, aged fourteen, twelve and ten, together with their grandmother, burned to death. The family had been driving to Beirut from their house in Blida, a village close to Lebanon’s border with Israel. They had gone back to pick up additional belongings for what now promised to be a long stay in Beirut. An Israeli airstrike hit their car as they drove through the village of Aynata. Ayoub, a local journalist, was driving ahead.