in the Bekaa region, target of Israeli strikes, “how is it that the whole world can do nothing for us?” – Liberation

Several tens of thousands of Lebanese have already left Baalbek, a large city in the Bekaa plain and a stronghold of Hezbollah, to escape regular Israeli raids. In Zahlé, a neighboring town, residents are organizing to welcome and help displaced populations.

All the curtains are drawn down in Baalbek. Shops and much of the housing on both sides of the Bekaa capital’s main thoroughfare have closed. Few cars drive in the middle of the morning under the gaze of turbaned portraits of Khomeini, Khamenei, Nasrallah and others “leaders, heroes or martyrs of the resistance” whose portraits hang on each lamppost all along the central road.

Baalbek is Hezbollah’s first stronghold, where it was established in 1982 with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It is located in the Bekaa, the only large fertile plain in mountainous Lebanon, backed by Syria and populated mainly by Shiites, which remains a strategic region under the domination of Hezbollah. Without a direct border with Israeli territory like South Lebanon, it is an obligatory passage for arms convoys coming from Iran through Syria and a place of storage and manufacturing of the power’s arsenal.