On the pier of the old port of Sour, fishermen kill time. The Indian summer continues this October in the southern port city of Lebanon. Life is slowing down in the few cafes and grocery stores that remain open for a few thousand residents and displaced people. The war between the Israeli army and the Shiite party Hezbollah has caused forty thousand residents of Sour to flee. Unperturbed by the dull sound of shelling that falls at regular intervals on the outskirts of the city, 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 prohibits us from going out to sea because we run the risk of 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 Naqura, near the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel, to Saida, 60 kilometers further north, an exclusion zone. Few fishermen have gone to sea since September 23, when Israel launched an intense campaign of attacks in southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as in 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, fearing bombing. A fisherman friend, who left for Beirut, left him the keys to his house in the ancient city of Sour. He lives there with 31 members of his family and depends entirely on help from the municipality. “Only God knows how long we will be here”laments the fisherman. He knows the inhabitants of the old town well, where he has always worked, but for other displaced people, coexistence is not so easy.
“We don’t sleep at night”
“The men sent their wives and children to the north and stayed to watch the houses because people enter empty houses by breaking doors and windows”explains Clémence Jouné, a resident of the Christian neighborhood. From the terrace of a cafe, this 29-year-old Lebanese woman watches her 8-year-old son, who is fishing with a neighbor. Her husband, a soldier, is stationed at the Sour base. “Hiiiiiii, she screams suddenly, frightened by a bombing in the distance. We fear this will become like Gaza. 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 ancient city of Sour. The Christian neighborhood is still preserved today. Not the adjacent Shiite neighborhood. In a narrow alley, several old houses collapsed in early October following an Israeli attack. Nine members of the Samra family, from grandparents to grandchildren, were killed. A neighbor assures that they were all civilians and the father, a military man. 200 meters away, an apartment containing an entire family was also attacked. “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 neighbor down the street.
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