Israeli strikes in Lebanon | Beirut suburbs now “ghost town” after repeated attacks

The densely populated and bustling southern suburbs of Beirut have become a ghost town where many destroyed buildings still smoke and rubble clutters the streets, according to AFP photographers and eyewitness accounts.

On Wednesday morning, thick smoke rose from buildings hit by Israeli strikes in this bastion of the Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah, after a night of particularly violent raids which lit up the sky over the Lebanese capital.

A few young people passed by on motorbikes in the almost empty neighborhoods, and residents came scurrying to grab some things from their abandoned apartments.

“For several days, the neighborhood has become a ghost town,” says Mohammad Cheaïto, one of the diehards who decided to stay.

This 31-year-old driver asked his parents, sister and nephews, who had already fled southern Lebanon and taken refuge in his home, to leave for a safer area.

Like them, the majority of the population has fled in recent days after intensive strikes and evacuation orders from the Israeli army relayed on social networks.

Some have taken shelter with relatives or in schools made available to them by the authorities, but others are still sleeping in the open air in the streets of Beirut.

It was in the southern suburbs that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a spectacular airstrike on Friday. Since then, the raids have not stopped.

“The earth shook”

This escalation comes after a year of war in the Gaza Strip, triggered by Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and cross-border exchanges of fire with Hezbollah, Hamas’s ally.

“Last night the earth shook, and the sky lit up,” said Mohammad Cheaïto.

He remembers with nostalgia the life before. “We sat down at the café, the elderly people played backgammon […]the neighborhood was teeming with people.”

Today, “everything is closed, the shops, the restaurants, even the pharmacies,” he assures, saying he has to “leave the suburbs” to buy food.

Hezbollah organized a media tour on Wednesday in the area where its main institutions are based.

“All the buildings that were targeted in the suburbs are civilian buildings and do not host military activity,” assured the head of Hezbollah’s information department, Mohommad Afif, in front of a destroyed building on which was hoisted a portrait of Nasrallah.

In a suburban neighborhood, rescuers search the rubble of a residential complex made up of four large, completely flattened buildings, looking for survivors.

In another devastated neighborhood, a woman carries a cat in her arms in front of a building that is still burning. The streets are littered with rubble and many charred cars are visible.

“There is no more life”

Residents who came hastily to gather things left by car, loaded with mattresses.

“I came quickly to take our identity papers and some things,” a resident of the suburb who refused to give his name told AFP.

He discovered that the eight-building residential complex behind his house had been completely destroyed.

The neighborhood is no longer habitable according to him: there is no more power, because the neighborhood generator has stopped working, there is no more water, the stores are closed, as are the stations. ‘essence.

“Our apartment is full of dust, and there is a strange smell, I left very quickly before I was asphyxiated,” he said.

“I only saw one or two people along the way, there is no more life.”