Au 417e day of the war on its soil, Lebanon and in particular the inhabitants of Beirut will have known no respite. The violent bombings – at least 200 – followed one another crescendo from the south to the north of the country all day Tuesday, November 26 and until the entry into force, at 4 a.m., of the ceasefire marking the suspension , theoretical, for 60 days of hostilities between Israel and the Hezbollah movement.
The most spectacular strike took place during the afternoon. It was around 3:15 p.m. when eight Israeli fighter planes appeared in waves in the skies over Beirut, the capital, to drop a carpet of bombs on around twenty buildings in the Dahiyé neighborhoods, in the southern suburbs.
A few seconds later, after dull detonations, mushrooms of smoke rose here and there before merging then spreading like a baleful veil, which stagnated for a long time above the Lebanese capital, accentuating this palpable atmosphere of endless tragedy.
The Israeli military later said it had targeted what it identified as Hezbollah’s military and financial “infrastructure.”
“It’s obvious that Israel is going to bomb us intensely until the ceasefire, like in the summer of 2006,” predicted a few hours earlier the taxi driver who was driving me through Beirut. He was tapping on his phone, with anxiety mixed with resignation, looking for videos from Dahiyé. His family has run a small restaurant there since 1975 located in a block of buildings that had just been hit. “We closed it on September 26 and I only went back five days ago to see, but it was too dangerous. »
If the southern suburbs, bastion of the pro-Iranian Shiite movement, have been specially targeted since the end of September – having, among other things, suffered a massive bombing during which its emblematic secretary general Hassan Nasrallah was killed -, several sectors of the heart of Beirut have not not been spared — even those close to official buildings, in particular the Serail, seat of government.
Other explosions were heard until very early Wednesday, including in Hamra, a busy shopping district. Unheard of since the civil war of the 1980s and that of the summer of 2006.
As if to send a final message of warning to a Lebanese population already at the end of its tether, fighter planes also flew over the capital at low altitude around three in the morning, before the truce.
By the end of the afternoon, many roads were completely paralyzed by the vehicles of residents desperately fleeing these central neighborhoods, which were now the subject of several evacuation orders. These were launched on the X network by the Arabic-speaking spokesperson for the Israeli army.
Hundreds of Beirut residents preferred to find refuge in the street alongside the American University or in the establishment itself, which had opened its doors to students and their loved ones. The annoying buzz of Israeli surveillance drones circling incessantly in the sky drowned out the noise of the traffic.
Everyone feared, rightly, the repetition of a scenario already seen over the last two weeks, when the Hebrew State targeted buildings in areas that were considered safe.
The deadliest attack occurred in Basta al-Fouqa, a popular neighborhood, on Saturday, November 23. That morning, around 4 a.m., five missiles with penetrating charges “ bunker buster » (anti-bunker) literally perforated and flattened an eight-story residential building to the ground, creating a huge crater and killing in a fraction of a second during their sleep around thirty residents, including children, and injuring dozens of others. others, according to a still provisional assessment.
According to Israel, it housed a Hezbollah command center.
Four days later, this Tuesday, men were busy pulling a large black cable at the foot of a mountain of concrete debris and pieces of scrap metal, mixed with clothing and the wreckage of dislocated automobiles. And probably also to pieces of bodies pulverized during this attack which startled all the inhabitants of the city – notably some who can never be found or identified.
Some residents and merchants in the immediate vicinity, still taken aback, observed this scene of desolation.
Among them, a fifty-year-old professor expresses covertly her anger against Israel, which “never pulls punches”, but also against Hezbollah, which she accuses of having settled in historically Sunni-majority neighborhoods and of having “taken the inhabitants hostage”. A speech heard on a few occasions during the day.
All around, around ten other heavily damaged buildings, with blackened facades, are now emptied of their residents. Only a few businesses have reopened their doors after makeshift repairs.
A little further on, another gaping scar borders the small muddy street cluttered with wrecked cars, an excavator and ambulances. Here again, a building disappeared under Israeli bombs on the evening of October 10, during a so-called “targeted” strike, in military jargon. This targeted Wafiq Safa, senior official in Hezbollah’s security branch. Results: 22 dead and around a hundred injured. Safa reportedly survived this assassination attempt, but was very seriously injured.
In striking contrast, while Beirut holds its breath between two bombings, life has already timidly resumed in other sectors also targeted in recent days. Some are still prohibited from entering, guarded by Hezbollah militiamen. Others are being renovated.
In the Mar Elias district, Wissam, a household linen seller, welcomes his customers again in his store of a few square meters, and just rebuilt and repainted, located on the ground floor of a commercial building affected on Sunday November 17. On the floor above, workers are busy amid charred concrete walls.
The man says the strike occurred around 7:30 p.m. when he had just returned home, about a hundred meters away, after closing his store. When he rushed outside, he saw a scene of chaos. The massive five-story concrete building was in flames, as were cars parked along the sidewalk.
“There were four dead and some injured, but the toll could have been higher if they had bombed during the week, when it was crowded with people. »
Wissam lost nearly US$70,000 worth of goods on the day of the attack. However, he considers himself lucky to still be alive, “thanks to God”. “Let there be a ceasefire. We are tired of all this,” he says, discouraged.
His neighbor Mosleh, who owns a convenience store, also had a narrow escape. He was sitting outside chatting quietly with his two daughters when the missiles fell on an electronics store and an apartment facing one of the two side facades of the building, on the perpendicular street. The three, unharmed, first rushed inside their business before fleeing “in the middle of the street and the flames”.
Wednesday morning, five hours after the truce came into force, while columns of smoke still rose above the south of the capital, displaced people were already piling their bags, suitcases and mattresses in their cars, mostly registered in the border regions of Israel and the eastern Bekaa Valley. Everyone seemed eager to return home despite the Israeli army’s threatening bans on approaching its positions.
In the Hamra district, where families who have fled the areas of the fiercest fighting have been piling up for weeks, workers are still busy cleaning up the damage from a bombing that targeted a currency exchange office early in the night. located a few steps from the Ministries of Tourism and Interior.
The final vestiges among many others of a 14-month war having caused, according to a provisional assessment, around 3,900 dead and 15,000 wounded, mainly civilians, and nearly eight billion US dollars in damage and economic losses. Yet another tragedy for a small country now “on the verge of collapse”, to use the recent words of Josep Borrell, head of European diplomacy.
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