On the quay of the old port of Sour, fishermen kill time. The Indian summer continues this month of October in the port city of southern Lebanon. Life is slowing down around the few cafes and grocery stores that remain open for a few thousand residents and displaced people. The war raging between the Israeli army and the Shiite Hezbollah party has caused forty thousand residents of Sour to flee. Unmoved by the dull sound of bombings falling at regular intervals on the edge of the town, a fisherman repairs his nets. Two brothers, displaced from the suburbs of Al-Bass, wait for the fish to take the bait.
The fishing boats are at the dock. “The Lebanese army forbids us from going out to sea because we risk being shot by the Israelis”says Hamzi Najdi, a 46-year-old fisherman. On October 7, the Israeli army declared the entire Lebanese coast from Naqoura, near the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel, to Saida, 60 kilometers further north, a no-go zone. Few fishermen have yet put to sea since September 23, when Israel launched an intensive campaign of strikes on the south and east of Lebanon, as well as on the southern suburbs of Beirut, which has already left 1,200 dead.
That day, Hamzi Najdi left Al-Bass, a suburb of Sour, with his wife and three children, for fear of bombings. A fisherman friend, who left for Beirut, left him the keys to his house in the old city of Sour. He lives there with 31 members of his family, entirely dependent on aid from the municipality. “God only knows how long we’re going to stay here”laments the fisherman. He knows the inhabitants of the old town well, where he has always worked, but for other displaced people, cohabitation is not as easy.
“We don’t sleep at night”
“Men sent their wives and children north and stayed to guard the houses because people enter empty houses breaking doors and windows”explains Clémence Jouné, a resident of the Christian quarter. From the terrace of a café, the 29-year-old Lebanese woman keeps an eye on her 8-year-old son, who is fishing with a neighbor. Her husband, a soldier, is stationed on the Sour base. « Hiiiiiii, she shouts suddenly, frightened by a bombing in the distance. We are afraid that it will become like Gaza here. We don’t sleep at night. We have nothing to do with this war. »
In the summer of 2006, the war had not reached the old city of Sour. The Christian quarter is still spared today. Not the adjoining Shiite neighborhood. In a narrow alley, several old houses collapsed in early October after an Israeli strike. Nine members of the Samra family, from grandparents to grandchildren, were killed. A neighbor assures that all were civilians and the father, a soldier. 200 meters away, an apartment was also targeted with an entire family inside. “They were Hezbollah sympathizers but nothing more. After the bombing, the rest of the family was even more convinced to support the party.said a resident of the street.
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