‘I don’t know where to go’: Lebanon residents try to flee — again

Just a short walk from the Iranian and Palestinian embassies in Beirut, a ten-storey residential building above shops in the middle-class suburb of Jnah was burning.

A large crowd gathered to watch as smoke once again billowed across the city, many wondering who had been targeted in what Israel described as one of two “precise strikes”. Among those watching were militia with their weapons drawn.

A sense of nervous anticipation has settled in this nation well-versed in war, even infecting its capital, a cosmopolitan melting pot of contradictions, where Hezbollah boasts strongholds in southern districts only a stone’s throw from bars and discos.

“They’re hitting us like this everyday now,” said one passer-by who stopped on his moped. “Every day it’s like two, three, four strikes.”

Although the Lebanese military has not contested Israel’s ground incursion, in effect declaring that this is not their fight, there is little doubt that Hezbollah’s existential battle for survival could impact millions of Lebanese.

Just before 11pm on Monday night, Israel’s Defence Forces published a message on social media, listing three targets in Beirut’s southern suburbs it intended to hit, including one a short distance away from the airport.

Shortly after midnight, the city was rocked by a huge explosion that could be heard right down at the seafront where Abdel Rahman Hani was sleeping.

He had already fled once. He left Iraq and moved to Turkey, a welcoming place for the refugees of the region, before more and more people began turning against the Arab migrants.

So he moved to Beirut last month and within three weeks an Israeli airstrike flattened the building next to his. Hani, 23, now stays near the beach of the Lebanese capital. He has seen enough war to think he will make it through this one, but “it definitely has an effect on you”.

“It’s the children I worry about,” he said, pointing at children running around the beach. Hani had taken an apartment in Dahiyeh, the southern suburb that also served as a stronghold to the militant group, and where an airstrike on Friday killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

 

 

From Beirut south to the Israeli border, tens of thousands of Lebanese are packing their bags — often involuntarily.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military advised residents of almost 30 villages stretching up past the southern cities of Tyre and Sidon to leave their homes, saying Hezbollah was using the areas.

About a million Lebanese have already been displaced, according to government estimates, and the invasion, announced on Monday night, has not gone into full swing yet.

“I don’t know where I’m going to go,” said Bassam Abdou, his arms shaking, as he tightened a rope around mattresses on top of his van in Rashidieh, one of the towns listed by the Israeli military for evacuation. “I’m going to have a heart attack.”

His son, Khaled, helped secure more belongings. Khaled said they would head to Tripoli in the north, where it would be safer.

The cars, packed with people fleeing to the north, drove past ambulances, some carrying dead or wounded. Every so often, a truck would stop to load another mother and her children, placed next to mattresses, chairs and the odd washing machine.

The city of Tyre was a ghost town. At a petrol station, on the road out of the city, young men on scooters argued around the only working pump.

In Sayroubiyeh, on the outskirts of Saida, the local imam directed men as they lined up the dead after 45 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the town of Ain el-Deleb on Monday, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Two residential buildings collapsed, injuring at least 70 inhabitants. One of those killed was Julia Ramadan. Her 62-year-old father Abdul-Hamid sat on a plastic chair and raged at the war that had torn apart his family.

He said that he had been working until he was 62 “so I can say I sacrificed myself for my kids”. He said: “My wife has now gone and so has my daughter Julia, who was the laughter in our house.”