Wisps of gray smoke were still rising from the depths of smoldering craters in Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs. Days earlier, Israeli air strikes had obliterated six adjacent residential towers there. What remained was a flattened wasteland of scattered cinder blocks, twisted rebar, and slabs of concrete jutting out of debris at awkward angles. The September 27th blitz, which was carried out with two-thousand-pound, bunker-busting bombs, also penetrated deep underground, where it decapitated Hezbollah, the powerful paramilitary and political party. The group’s secretary-general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, was killed, as was Ali Karaki, its top commander in southern Lebanon, and Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, a senior commander of operations in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
A heavy silence hung over the perimeter of the site, disturbed only by the incessant buzzing of an Israeli drone overhead. Deeper amid the rubble, several yellow-vested first responders stood by as an excavator rumbled toward them. There was no urgency to their efforts. The official toll, released by the Ministry of Public Health soon after the attack, was six dead and ninety-one wounded, a clear undercount that has not been updated. Neither the ministry nor Hezbollah’s media office responded to requests for clarification regarding the figures.
The calm at the site belied the violence and seismic magnitude of what happened here. Nasrallah was a towering figure not only in Lebanon but in a Middle East that will not be the same without him. In his thirty-two years at the helm of Hezbollah, he transformed it from a small armed Shiite group resisting—and, in 2000, ending—Israel’s occupation of most of southern Lebanon into the region’s strongest non-state actor, an organization with powerful military, political, and social-services arms. Hezbollah became the linchpin in Iran’s Axis of Resistance; its fighters and military advisers were present on battlefields in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.
The force of the blast that killed Nasrallah was so ferocious that hundreds of thousands of people in the Dahieh, the collective name for the capital’s southern suburbs, fled their homes in the middle of the night, transforming the area into a ghost town. When I paid a visit, two days after the strike, men on motorbikes whizzed through empty streets. One man had returned to check on his dog. “They sold him for an onion skin,” he said, of Nasrallah, to a neighbor who’d come back to retrieve a pet bird. (Across Beirut, there was speculation that Nasrallah had been betrayed by an insider or a foreign ally.) Even after Hezbollah confirmed its leader’s death, many supporters refused to believe it. Others wailed in grief and fury, mourning a man who often addressed them as “the most honorable people.” They had, over the years, reverently endured tremendous loss—their homes, their limbs, their children—as “sacrifices for the sayyed.”
The newly displaced flooded Beirut’s squares and streets. Forty-eight-year-old Mustafa Mazloum lay on a piece of cardboard under the shade of a tree in the grassy median along the city’s famed seaside corniche. It was a Saturday morning, when the wide boulevard is usually full of people exercising. Mazloum’s mother, Elham, sat on a plastic chair nearby. She and Mazloum’s sister had fled the Dahieh immediately after the air strikes and had spent the night in their van. “I came with the clothes I am wearing,” Elham told me. A plastic bag of medications lay at her feet, near several bottles of water. “They are dropping missiles that shake homes,” Mazloum said. “It is terrifying. Terrifying! America makes the bombs it then gives to Israel to test on us.”
Some in Lebanon have questioned Hezbollah’s decision to reopen the Lebanese-Israeli front, which it did last October, in solidarity with Gaza, and the price Lebanon is paying. But not Mazloum or his mother. “They protect our land, our honor, everything,” she said. “For those who blame the resistance—if there was no occupation there would be no resistance,” Mazloum added, referring to Hezbollah.
As we spoke, a young man, a graphic designer named Hadi, approached the family and placed a box of palm-size date cookies and a large pack of wet wipes on the grass. “What do you need, just tell me,” he said.
“You are so considerate, habibi,” Elham replied.
“What sort of fruit would you like?” Hadi asked.
“Habibi, nothing,” Mazloum said. “I thank you with all my heart.”
“May God reward him, but I am a man whose dignity doesn’t allow me to accept help,” Mazloum told me after Hadi had left. “I reluctantly took it from him.”
There were many like Hadi who had stepped up to donate food, clothing, and other necessities. Some posted their contact details on social media along with how many people they could accommodate in their homes. Authorities turned more than a thousand facilities across the country, including some seven hundred schools and educational facilities, into shelters. Mosques and churches opened their doors. So, too, did Skinn, a waterfront night club catering to Beirut’s élite that is now home to about five hundred displaced Lebanese. Chafic el-Khazen, the co-owner, told me that he felt compelled to help after he’d noticed one of the security guards in his apartment building crying. “He told me, ‘All of my family is on the street. They just bombed our house in Dahieh and there’s nowhere they can go,’ ” Khazen said. “I told him, ‘Let’s go and get them.’ ” Along the way to the night club Khazen saw elderly people and women with children crowding the streets. “I couldn’t ignore them,” he said. “I started telling them to come with me.” Eighty people walked into Skinn that first night. Khazen, an atheist from an aristocratic Christian family, is funding the effort with help from friends. His political views, he told me, are “fanatically anti-Hezbollah” but “there’s a certain threshold in Lebanon, and when you cross it, the Lebanese DNA takes over and nothing else matters.”
What began as a simmering tit-for-tat has erupted into full-blown conflict—Israeli air strikes, Hezbollah rocket volleys—with Israeli ground troops having advanced a few hundred metres inside Lebanese territory, where they are facing fierce resistance. In the span of just two weeks, more than a million people fled southern Lebanon, Baalbek, the Bekaa Valley, and the Dahieh. By many estimates, a fifth of the country’s citizens have now left their homes. I met families who’d been displaced multiple times during the past eleven months. The Lebanese government, which even in peacetime can’t be relied on to provide basics, such as electricity and water, has been overwhelmed.
Before this war with Israel, Lebanon was already dealing with a years-long refugee crisis. It hosts some two million Syrians, who fled to escape their country’s ongoing civil war, in addition to almost half a million Palestinians. In the last week of September, a reverse migration took place: more than three hundred thousand Syrians—and some hundred thousand Lebanese people—fled into neighboring Syria. Last Friday, Israeli air strikes hit Masnaa, the main border crossing between the two countries, rendering it impassable. Many roads have been bombed, too, trapping people in situ. Lebanon’s only airport, meanwhile, has been abandoned by most airlines except M.E.A., the national carrier, which continues service in and out of Beirut. Some people are leaving by chartering boats to Cyprus and Turkey.
Late last week, I met Bachir Khodr, the governor of Baalbek-Hermel, one of Lebanon’s eight governorates, at his home in the hills of Baabda, overlooking a Beirut shrouded in plumes of smoke. He’d come to the capital for meetings with the Prime Minister and to secure aid, including from private donors. His personal vehicle was stuffed with food rations and other items. The week before, he said, he’d struggled to find a driver willing to risk the route from Beirut to Baalbek to deliver two hundred hygiene kits provided by a French N.G.O. He paid the three-hundred-dollar fee out of his own pocket. “I can do this once, twice, but not every day,” he said. Baalbek-Hermel, which is northeast of Beirut, had become a war zone, worse than in the 2006 war with Israel, Khodr said. Before this conflict, the number of Syrian refugees in Baalbek had exceeded the Lebanese population there. Khodr was concerned about rising tensions between the two communities competing for limited aid, and opened separate shelters to avoid quarrels; fifty-nine for Lebanese and five for Syrians. (In Beirut, meanwhile, Syrians were largely left to fend for themselves; the government said that the burden to care for them was primarily on the United Nations.)
Khodr was frustrated with a government that had failed to act on requests he’d made months earlier to prepare contingency plans for an Israeli escalation, including establishing warehouses to stockpile strategic reserves in non-Shiite areas—which would be less likely to come under attack. “I told the Prime Minister yesterday in the meeting, ‘It’s like you’re sending a soldier to war without weapons.’ ” Khodr said. “The government should’ve been ready for these issues. We can’t be surprised every single time when something that is very expected happens.”
Khodr, who is not affiliated with Hezbollah or any political party, told me that he’d noticed a recent change in Israel’s targeting in his area. Prior to the latest escalation, the raids were typically against “things connected to Hezbollah—a truck close to the border transporting something, a center that they used to hide things in.” But now, he said, “most of the strikes are hitting places that are not connected to Hezbollah.” To him, it felt like a “form of collective punishment.”
Beirut has become a muted city but for the wailing sirens and omnipresent Israeli drones, and not just in its deserted southern suburbs. Its skyline is obscured by vertical clouds of concrete dust. Many stores are shuttered; normal life is paralyzed. Across the country, double-digit daily death tolls have become the norm. Since the fighting began last year, more than twenty-one hundred people have been killed, according to the Lebanese government, close to fourteen hundred of whom died in September, in the span of two weeks.
Israel’s evacuation orders, initially limited to areas near the border, south of the Litani River, are racing northward and now reach to within sixty kilometres of the capital. Israel appears to be trying to create new boundaries inside Lebanon, ordering a hundred and thirty towns and villages, and the entire city of Nabatieh, a provincial capital, to be emptied, as well as about a third of the Lebanese coastline. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, had previously said that his war was with Hezbollah, not the Lebanese people, but on Tuesday he threatened the country with “the abyss of a long war … of destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” unless citizens “free” themselves of Hezbollah—what was widely interpreted within Lebanon as an incitement to civil strife. His address was posted on X on the same day that footage circulated of Israeli soldiers briefly raising their flag in a Lebanese border village, fuelling Lebanese fears that Israel intends to occupy territory, not just attempt to beat back Hezbollah. The group’s rocket attacks continue unabated on northern Israel, extending to the city of Haifa. (Fifty-three Israelis have been killed in such attacks, according to Israeli authorities; more than sixty thousand have fled their homes.) On Thursday, the U.N.’s peacekeeping mission in Lebanon said its positions and personnel along the border had come under Israeli fire.
Nasrallah has been temporarily buried; the risk of a proper, public funeral is too great for party supporters and officials alike. A successor has yet to be elected by the organization. There are two likely candidates: Sheikh Naim Qassem, Nasrallah’s deputy, and Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s cousin, who heads the party’s Executive Council. Last week, Israeli strikes on the Dahieh reportedly targeted Safieddine, whose fate is unknown. A spokesman for the Lebanese Civil Defense told a local news channel that his units near Dahieh received a phone call that night from Israeli forces warning them not to deploy to the site of the strikes. They were told, “nobody interfere, nobody approach,” he said. “If you were in my place, would you take the risk and challenge them?”
This past Thursday, at a press conference, Firas Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, said that he intends to file a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, concerning assaults on nine hospitals and forty-five medical centers across the country. At least a hundred and two health workers have been killed. “International laws are clear in protecting these people,” he said. More than a hundred fire engines and ambulances have also come under attack. Some hospitals have closed after being bombed. (Israel says it only attacks military targets.)
Abiad spoke on the same day that the Lebanese Red Cross announced that four of its paramedics working to evacuate people from the south were wounded in an Israeli strike, which killed a Lebanese Army soldier who was accompanying the convoy. The Red Cross said that it had coördinated the mission with U.N. peacekeepers. Just after midnight that morning, an Israeli air strike hit an apartment that since 2016 had been used as a clearly designated medical center in a residential building a short walk from Parliament, in the heart of Beirut. (The tower, though damaged, remained standing.) Nine paramedics belonging to the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Authority were killed. Kamal Zhour, an administrator in the Islamic Health Authority’s operation center, was present at the scene early the next morning. He told me that there had been no Israeli warning ahead of the attack and that his organization was part of the local humanitarian response effort, coördinating with the Red Cross and others. The strike that killed the paramedics “directly targeted their bedroom,” he said.
In the month of September, there were more than seventeen hundred Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to data collected by ACLED, a conflict-analysis and crisis-mapping initiative. Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars, a British conflict monitor, told the Washington Post that, aside from Gaza, Israel’s offensive in Lebanon was “the most intense aerial campaign that we know of in the last twenty years.”
In the aftermath of the 2006 war, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot, then the I.D.F.’s chief of staff, told Haaretz, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases.” He added, “This is a plan that has already been authorized.” The plan became known as the Dahieh Doctrine, and many in Lebanon see the widespread bombing campaign of the past few weeks as an example of it. But Israel is not just targeting Shiite areas that are home to presumed Hezbollah partisans. Last week, Israel struck locations in Rmaych and Ibl el-Saqi, two Christian villages in the south that are predominantly anti-Hezbollah, and ordered residents of a third, Ain Ebel, to evacuate. (Sectarian groups are not political monoliths; some Christians are pro-Hezbollah.)
Amal Saad, a Hezbollah expert and lecturer in politics and international relations at Cardiff University, told me that she thinks Israel’s attacks are “Dahieh Doctrine plus,” not only because of their greater intensity and scope but because of the tactics, such as the mass detonation of communication devices. She and other analysts also see an Israeli bid to foment intra-Shiite and inter-sectarian tensions, reinforced by Netanyahu’s comments, aimed at not only turning “the resistance community”—Hezbollah’s base of supporters—“against Hezbollah but also turning other communities against the Shiites,” she said. “We are seeing attempts at intimidating people in communities that host the displaced and trying to get them to expel Shiites” based on fears that the men might be Hezbollah and thus targeted by Israel. “This has become commonplace,” she said. Still, she doesn’t expect Hezbollah’s base to turn against it. “What happens to the resistance community is whenever Israel aggresses against Lebanon, they become much, much more steadfast in their political views,” Saad said. They’re also watching what’s happening in Gaza and “noting how this could be replicated against them.”
There was less than thirty seconds between two volleys of Israeli missiles that demolished a six-story apartment building in Ain al-Delb, a sleepy village in the hills above the city of Sidon, some forty-five kilometres south of Beirut. Abu Malek, an active-duty soldier stationed in the south who was home on leave, saw and heard the projectiles whoosh above him as he rode his motorbike to his parents’ home behind a nearby mosque. It was not quite 4 P.M. on September 29th, a Sunday afternoon. After relaying urgent pleas for help via WhatsApp groups, Abu Malek—a pseudonym, because he was not authorized to speak to the media—rushed to rescue people from the pancaked structure. “My neighbors, friends, people I used to play with as a child were killed in front of me,” he said. He rescued two women, but he said that “otherwise I didn’t remove anybody alive. They were mainly body parts. There was a child of about seven we retrieved in pieces. I put him in a bag.”
By the time Abu Malek went home, twelve hours later, the death toll was fifty-three. It would climb to seventy-one, with fifty-eight wounded, one of the highest single-event death tolls of the conflict so far. I stood by Abu Malek the following morning as he watched teams of rescuers working with heavy machinery. There were units from the national Civil Defense and fire brigade, the Red Cross, rescue outfits affiliated with political parties, and a team of Palestinians from the nearby Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. “This is our Lebanon,” Abu Malek proudly told me.
Anxious neighbors milled around. Three middle-aged women sat in the car park of an adjacent building, waiting for news of a relative who’d been invited to her uncle’s home for lunch. “Her husband’s phone is ringing. There is no answer,” one of the women told me. Rumors swirled about why the building, which is situated in an area home to many different sects, was targeted, and whether there were any Hezbollah members inside. It was also providing temporary shelter to citizens displaced from elsewhere. The Israelis “are trying to create conflict among the Lebanese, but by God’s grace we are one hand, whether Shiite, Sunni, Christian, or Druze,” Abu Malek said.
A few days later, I returned to Sidon to meet Achraf Ramadan and his father, Abdelhamid, who were receiving condolences. Ramadan’s twenty-eight-year-old sister, Julia, and his mother, Jenan, had been killed. They’d lived on the fourth floor.
The day of the strike, Ramadan, a thirty-four-year-old fitness coach, and his sister, a public-relations specialist and psychology graduate, had just returned home after distributing meals they’d prepared for the displaced. It was the fourth day of their endeavor, using the resources of their small family business, 961Lunch Box, a food-delivery service, plus donations solicited through social media. Julia was visiting from Beirut where she was studying for a master’s degree. When the first missiles struck, Ramadan thought the Israelis were just trying to scare them into evacuating. The family was in the lounge room. Julia was afraid and crying. Abdelhamid tried to calm her while Ramadan went into the kitchen to get her a glass of water. Then the second volley of missiles shook the apartment, and the building began to slide and fragment. “I said, ‘Run, run!’ ” Ramadan recounted.
Then Ramadan “heard people screaming, yelling out, asking where we were.” He shouted back, and his father told him, “Stop yelling, don’t use up your energy.” He couldn’t hear or see Julia through the dust and debris, but his father said that he could hear her voice, though it was faint. Ramadan was covered in rubble from the waist down. His chest and arms were free. His father was trapped between a cabinet and an overturned couch. After about half an hour, Ramadan said, “somebody called and told me that they’d retrieved my mother and that she was being taken to the hospital. That soothed my heart.” He didn’t yet know that she was dead.
Ramadan was rescued after about two and a half hours, his father after eight. Julia’s body was retrieved at midnight. She had suffocated. Her last post on Facebook, made at 3:44 P.M., moments before the strike, was a plea to “people of goodwill” to help a family of eighteen who had been displaced. “Can we possibly do something for them?” she wrote. The family business, now renamed Julia’s Fist, is continuing its relief efforts. On the day I met Ramadan, four days after the bombing, despite having six stitches in his left foot, cuts all over his body, and an injured knee, he’d helped distribute more than a hundred items of clothing. He invoked a metaphor that had taken on a searingly literal meaning: “The blow that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he said, “and if we started strong, then what are we now?”
He doesn’t know why his building was destroyed. It wasn’t struck in the 2006 war and the same people were living in it then and now. A Sunni, Ramadan told me that he doesn’t have any political affiliations, and Hezbollah does not speak for him, but “our voices are one united against this Israeli enemy.”
His father, a retired soldier, recalled that a neighbor on the ground floor had been part of Hezbollah, that he’d fought in Syria, where he was disabled about a decade ago, but that he had been idle ever since. The man was hosting five displaced families alongside his four children and his wife. His two sons, who weren’t in the building at the time, were the only surviving members of his family. “I don’t think he was such a criminal that he wouldn’t worry about the safety of his family and his guests,” Abdelhamid said. “Does a person bring guests to his home to kill them? It doesn’t make sense.”
Like his son, Abdelhamid said that he’ll forever resent Israel for what happened in Ain al-Delb—and America for arming it. “If I tell you, don’t hit somebody, why would I then give you a gun or a stick?” he said. “You’re insulting people’s intelligence.” He doesn’t blame Hezbollah for dragging Lebanon into a war but thinks that the group erred after Israel’s attacks on its communications network. “If they sensed that their security was compromised, why hold a meeting of senior commanders in an operations room in the area where you are hounded?” he said. Hezbollah was no longer the underground armed group it had once been. “They have become institutions, part of the state. Their activities are very open,” he added, “and Israel got to them.”
Israel also got to Julia, Jenan, and seventeen of their neighbors in life who remain their neighbors in death. At a Sunni cemetery in Sidon overlooking a calm Mediterranean, vertically placed cinder blocks, some with A4-size death notices taped to them, identified their freshly covered graves. Wreaths wilted in the warm October sun. In an adjacent plot, twenty holes gaped in the earth like craters, four rows by five, ready to receive more new neighbors. ♦