Soha Bsat is still trying to make sense of what happened.
When Israel bombarded the Lebanese capital of Beirut on Wednesday, Bsat – like many others – was traumatised by the sudden and intense onslaught of violence unleashed on the city where she lives. “We thought all of Beirut was going to collapse on our heads,” she said.
Bsat, a 55-year-old lawyer, was at her office in the residential neighbourhood of Ramlet al-Bayda. She believed the area – which is close to the residence of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri – was safe.
The first explosion rang out just 50 metres away from her office. It was followed by a second, a third and a fourth. “It was all around us. We could see black smoke everywhere through the windows. When we turned on the television, it was chaos.”
Israel later said that it bombed Lebanon more than 100 times in less than 10 minutes. Several civilian areas in the heart of Beirut were targeted. The strikes occurred just 48 hours after Tehran and Washington called a ceasefire, when many in the country believed they were safe.
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Scenes of chaos
A few streets away, 22-year-old student Dana Sabeh Ayoun experienced a similar shock. At around 2:15pm she heard the sound of missiles whistling overhead. “Then the strikes came. It was very loud; I didn’t understand what was happening.”
She could see a thick column of smoke rise into the sky from her family’s apartment near Beirut’s Corniche el-Mazraa neighbourhood. She filmed the scene from her balcony and immediately called her father, in tears. “I was so scared.”
Dana’s father, Saed Sabeh Ayoun, tried to reassure her on the other end of the line. He was in the suburbs of Dora, northeast of Beirut. “It was chaotic. I could hear my daughter crying; she was in shock. I was very worried … I waited for things to calm down before going home.”
Meanwhile, Lebanese authorities called on residents to clear the traffic-clogged roads and allow much-needed ambulances to circulate in the city. Israel bombed Lebanon in the middle of the day, when people were at work and schools, as residents went about what they thought was a regular day. Beirut was already teeming with displaced people who had fled the southern parts of the country, where Hezbollah strongholds were regularly targeted by Israel.
After a brief lull, Bsat decided to make her way back to the Tallet el-Khayat neighbourhood where she lived. But the respite was short-lived: in the early evening, another building just 150 metres from her home was struck by a missile. “That was the final straw,” she said bitterly. “We were already exhausted and on edge.”
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The building, which collapsed, was where Israel claimed the nephew of Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem was killed. Bsat said the announcement came as a shock. “It’s a very residential neighbourhood. We weren’t expecting this at all.”
Locals were worried that Hezbollah members were infiltrating areas that were previously considered safe. Bsat says people are taking new precautions. “We don’t let just anyone into the building anymore,” she says. Residents of her building even told their landlord not to rent out one of the apartments to a family they did not know, out of a new sense of fear. “We do everything we can … but you never know who’s in the neighbouring building.”
After the second wave of strikes in the early evening, Bsat decided she had had enough. She left her apartment, along with her family.
“I didn’t even take my ID. My daughter was crying, my husband too. We just left like that – without changing our clothes, with just a little money.”
She says dust choked the streets and black smoke filled the air. “I thought to myself: if the building collapses, so be it. If not, I’ll come back tomorrow.” She realised, like many others in Beirut, that no neighbourhood was off-limits.
“All we can do is pray. We want it to stop once and for all.”
The ‘reflex of war’
Claude Abou Chedid, a professor at the ESA Business School in the Clemenceau district of Beirut, was in the university cafeteria when she heard the shrill whine of missiles. She says her body responded immediately. “It was an old reflex, ingrained in me since childhood, since the war.” The Lebanese civil war lasted from 1975 to 1990.
Chedid jumped up and moved away from the glass door, seconds before the explosion in the neighbouring Ain el-Mreisseh district.
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Her attention quickly turned to her peers. “I mainly wanted to know if my colleagues were OK,” she said. After making sure everyone was uninjured, Chedid and her colleagues checked on their families. At the time, she says, everyone managed to keep calm.
However, underneath her cool-headedness, Chedid was simmering with anger. “Strikes are normally preceded by a warning to prepare, flee, and protect oneself. But this time – nothing.” She says the expectedness and intensity of the attacks reminded her of the horrors of the Beirut port explosion in 2020, which destroyed entire neighbourhoods of the capital.
Some 75 kilometres away in southern Lebanon, rescuers were caught in a race against time. “Everything was calm when suddenly, a lot of bombs and missiles started striking the area. We were surprised,” says Fayez Gaber, an ambulance driver in Nabatieh.
Gaber and his team started working immediately to check on civilians. “There was a lot of damage and a lot of people who died.”
He says the strikes were unusually relentless – his team would barely finish at one site before they’d have to rush to tend to another freshly hit location. “Usually, it’s four to six strikes a day or even less. It’s never like this… it’s not easy to witness.”
Mona Abozeid, director of the Nabatieh Hospital, describes an “unimaginable” situation. In the span of a few hours, her facility received 37 wounded people and 10 bodies, including two children.
“A 16-year-old girl has burns covering 50 percent of her body. She is still fighting for her life.”
Bodies ‘riddled with shrapnel’
Even further south, in the ancient city of Tyre, emergency physician Thienminh Dinh from Doctors Without Borders describes scenes of extreme violence: ” We treated nuns whose bodies were riddled with shrapnel. There was a 7-year-old girl with gaping wounds in her face who was cold, crying, wailing – calling out for her mum and dad.”
“Bombs have continued to fall around us and rattle the walls of the hospital. Bodies continued to pour in. It was becoming increasingly clear that there was no safe place for the civilians of Lebanon,” Dinh says.
Vincent Gelot, director of the Lebanese wing of French non-profit Œuvre d’Orient, was also present in southern Lebanon at the time of the strikes. He heard the explosions from the village of Qlayaa, south of the Litani River, during a religious ceremony. He says he felt the blasts.
On his way back to Beirut, Gelot saw rows of cars driving away from the capital and plumes of smoke across the horizon. “It was a bloody day, unacceptable. No military argument can justify such bombings.”
Two days after the strikes, rescue workers in Lebanon are still searching for bodies in the rubble in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon that were targeted by Israel. Residents are still reeling from the shock and worry there will be more unannounced bombings in the future.
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“I want to leave Beirut for a while. We thought we were safe before, but I realise now that no one is,” says Ayoun, the young student.
Bsat echoes that sentiment and says she’s even considering leaving the country. “If this doesn’t end with complete peace, I won’t stay. We can’t live like this anymore.”
But not everyone has the option of leaving Lebanon for safer areas. “My children and I have French passports, we have a solution,” says Bsat. “But many other people – even members of my family – don’t have that choice. We just want to live.”
The future is uncertain and frightening for many in Lebanon’s wounded cities and towns. But Chedid believes in having hope through it all.
“Deep down, the Lebanese remain convinced that there is a way out – that one day, it will be possible to live together differently, to live normally, to live in peace.
This article was translated from the original in French.
