The road that connects southern Lebanon to the capital now has only one direction. Cars heading for Beirut occupy both directions of the highway, and even if there were six additional lanes, the road would still be congested. On Monday, dozens of thousands of people have fled of a region that announces the next war scenario. At six thirty in the morning, Israel launches the first missiles of an offensive that will devastate the south and east of a country as big as Navarre. The bombing of hundreds of villages continued at noon with explosions on the side of the road and ended during the night with the demolition of a building in Beirut.
The Lebanese have not experienced such a bloody day since the 1975 civil war. In the last 24 hours, Israeli attacks have left nearly 500 dead. That’s half the number of people killed in the entire 2006 war, and more than double the number killed in the Beirut port explosion four years ago. Many displaced people on this Black Monday can think of only one mirror in which to reflect themselves: Loop.
“I feel like I’m living what they would have lived at the beginning of the war,” says Doha, a young official in the Nabatiye municipality. “They will tell us to leave our cities, “They will bomb our houses and on the way to safety they will kill us.”fear.
Doha’s suspicions were confirmed in the afternoon. On the way to Beirut, the Israeli army shelled the highway near Ghazieh. Other displaced people fleeing Tyre, further south, reported being attacked as they passed through the roadside town of Sarafand. “I hope I’m wrong, but like in Gaza, they’re going to come in with their tanks,” she added before embarking on her journey to Beirut with her parents, sister and nieces. “It’s going to be an all-out war”he supposes.
In Gemmayzeh, the central district of the capital, the telephone number of a hotel shop It doesn’t last all afternoon. “When we saw what happened this morning, we decided to put our rooms at a symbolic price for families from the south. We’ve been getting calls all day and we have almost no beds left,” explains one of the owners. Even the rest of the city’s accommodation is full, and some owners are speculating on the drama by increasing the price of their rental apartments.
A family in a van heads from the coastal city of Sidon to northern Lebanon.
Reuters
In the Hamra neighborhood, a family sits waiting at the reception of a hotel. It is 8:30 p.m. Although they left Nabatiye in the morning, the traffic jams to get to Beirut have turned a two-hour journey into a nine-hour one. The two children sit and play with their own iPads, the mother compulsively sends WhatsApp audios, and two nanis The African women remain silent, fear in their eyes. The father pays out wads of very devalued currency to pay, for the moment, for a week’s stay.
For those who cannot afford housing in the capital, social media and word of mouth have secured free accommodation. In a country where the state is withering away, it has been It is civil society that has woven a communication network against time to leave no one homeless.. Monday’s experience refutes the idea that Lebanon remains a kingdom of taifas. Christians, Sunni Muslims and Druze from across the country have offered sanctuary to their southern neighbors, the vast majority of whom are Shiites. In Baalbek, the capital of the eastern Bekaa region, the St. John Maronite Church welcomes Muslim women and their children. “This is the church I went to as a child, it brings tears to my eyes,” one user wrote on X.
No one knows whether what is happening in Lebanon can still be called a war. Of course, the government cannot afford more days of mourning and has all schools and universities in the country closed until further notice. The health minister urged doctors in the affected regions not to acknowledge missing cases and to focus on the injured with a chance of survival. On the street, shops closed early.
With the night comes the reminder that it was only one day. The first. A taxi driver drives through the city where, even at midnight, thousands of cars have failed to enter. Like many of his compatriots, the driver boasts of not being afraid despite the pain. “My faith is stronger,” he says, not interested in revealing his creed. He points to the god in the rearview mirror and, after a inshala sincere, he deprives his camp and that of his enemy of any relevance. The fate of his people, he defends, is written by those at the top. And with his hand on the image, he predicts: “He will make us win.”
