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30-11-2024
BEIRUT: The family of four stood in the middle of the street in front of the pile of twisted metal and broken concrete, struggling to comprehend the devastation they were seeing.
The building had been destroyed by a recent Israeli air strike and smoke was still rising from the rubble. The next building to the right had partially collapsed; the one behind it had a huge hole at the top.
They continued walking to the building where they used to live, in Tyre in southern Lebanon. The displaced family was back, hours after a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah had come into effect. Nobody seemed to have stayed in their home.
As there was no electricity they took the stairs to the sixth floor, helped by the torches on their phones.
Mohamad Marouf led his wife and two sons. He struggled to open the main door. When he finally got in, he instantly realized that his home as he knew it was, for now, gone.
“I’m so sad, it’s a nice and decent house,” said Marouf, a car dealer. “There’s just so much damage.”
Panels had fallen from the ceiling. Windows, doors and furniture were destroyed. In the kitchen, cups and plates lie broken on the floor. There was dust and debris everywhere. Room by room, he mourned objects that were now beyond repair, and celebrated those that somehow had remained intact.
The destruction, Marouf said, had been caused by an attack on a residential building nearby. It was so powerful that his building, too, was heavily damaged.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. They were living with his brother, and did not know when they would be able to move back.
On Tyre’s beachfront, a yellow banner with a Hezbollah logo was put up next to one of many residential buildings hit. It said, “Made in USA”, in reference to the bombs that were probably used in the attack.
As the pause in the fighting held, residents returned to badly damaged homes. All day Wednesday a constant flow of cars arrived, packed with families, bags and mattresses.
Some people waved Hezbollah flags; in the distance, there was the sporadic sound of celebratory gunfire. Many supporters say the ceasefire is a sign of the group’s victory. The “resistance”, as they often refer to Hezbollah, stopped the Israeli military’s advances on the ground, they contend, and Israel failed to achieve its objectives in Lebanon.
It is a narrative that will find very little if any support elsewhere.
Hezbollah has been weakened, large parts of the country lie in ruins, and many, including those who had accused the group of dragging Lebanon to a conflict that was not in its interests, say the war has only led to death and destruction.
Nearly 4,000 people were killed and more than 16,000 injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
However, for most of the people of Lebanon, a ceasefire could not come quickly enough. A leading Lebanese analyst at a conference on the Middle East that I’m attending in Rome said she couldn’t sleep as the appointed hour for the ceasefire came closer.
“It was like the night before Christmas when you’re a kid. I couldn’t wait for it to happen.”
You can see why there’s relief. More than 3,500 citizens of Lebanon have been killed in Israeli strikes. Displaced people packed their cars before dawn to try to get back to whatever remains of their homes. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
