I type my words with hesitation. Is this another essay about how bad things got, or will I try to draw a conclusion? As a researcher and journalist, I ask questions and construct answers to report the closest image of the moment's truth. But at this moment in history, the image is blurry, and looking at it makes me delirious.
I find questions difficult to formulate and answers even harder to obtain. However, we are in a war that is unfolding before our eyes in real time. The moment happens all the time, a lot and nothing, all at once.
So how can I, in the middle of an unending war, make sense of a reality of layers of pain and loss, witnessed, experienced, and inherited?
Like thousands, when the first escalation, which lasted sixty-six days, started in September 2024, I was terrified. War is my worst fear, having grown up with stories of the Lebanese Civil War. I learned that the damage that war brings has no limit. Both my mother and father had a political consciousness shaped by 15 years that stole their youth and dreams. Their memories are maimed by war, and their future was stillborn. My mother confesses that a few years into the war, she realized all sides were fighting only to win and dominate, so she stopped supporting any of them. My father, who fought with the Lebanese Communist Party in his early twenties, lost his father, my grandfather, to a forced disappearance in 1976. He was never seen again. In a desperate revolt, my father left for Europe and lived there for two decades until he returned to Lebanon in 1995, married my mother, and had me. Everyone wanted to forget and bury history. Everyone wanted to see if life after war was possible. My generation is now enduring a lot of the same since 7 October 2023. Days go on as we slide further into grief and paralysis, trying to make sense of it.
I was in Horsh Beirut on September 17, 2024. I had decided to take a break from work and go for a walk. It was a Tuesday afternoon. At 3:30 p.m., a friend sent a message on our WhatsApp group: "What is happening in Dahieh?" Another friend responded: "It's not just in Dahieh, it's everywhere." It sounded like the first sentences in a high-budget, poor-quality American zombie apocalypse movie. I wanted to joke that maybe the end of days is finally here, but I refrained. Beirut had been getting bombarded by sonic booms for weeks before that day, and the anticipation of an all-out war was high. Everyone was on edge. My joke could wait.
Nearly 3,000 people- men, women, children, and the elderly- were the victims of the pager attack. Whoever pressed "OK" when the device rang lost either their fingers or eyes. For some, the pagers exploded in their pockets or at their waists. 12 people died. It was a major defeat for Hezbollah and one of the first times they acknowledged it, with many of their operatives injured. Communication with the military wing left them paralyzed and in the dark.
A week later, on 23 September 2024, Israel started bombing the south relentlessly in the early hours of the morning, marking the start of a full-scale bombing campaign that put an end to almost a year of tit-for-tat with Hezbollah. On that day, at least 550 people were killed, and around 1,800 were injured. It was a bloodbath. Thousands queued in their cars on roads and highways trying to flee from southern villages and cities to safer areas. Hundreds were stuck in their homes surrounded by falling airstrikes.
A few days later, at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, 27 September 2024, I sat down with a bowl of salad between my hands, about to eat, when I heard more than ten loud strikes that shook the building. My two cats sprinted under my bed, and the neighborhood dogs barked incessantly. They bombed Dahieh with 80 tons of US-made bunker-buster munitions that penetrated deep underground. I sat on the floor next to my bed, looking at my terrified cats, my hands shaking while I fetched my phone to check the news. The group chat was hysterical. They killed Hassan Nasrallah, leaving large craters at the heart of one of the most densely populated areas in Lebanon. My panic turned into survival, and I started packing a small bag to flee with my cats. The Israelis have gone rogue, and they will start carpet bombing the entire country.
Two months later, a ceasefire went into effect at the dawn of 27 November 2024, but Israel kept bombing southern villages and it stayed positioned at five points on the border. This went on for 15 months until Hezbollah responded with six rockets in the early hours of 2 March 2026, avenging the assassination of Khamenei. A second full-scale war started, and Israeli forces advanced deeper into southern Lebanon, announcing a buffer zone marked by a yellow line. Israeli tanks continue to advance in southern border villages just as I sit on my couch in my living room, and just as thousands wait in the suffocating classrooms of school shelters.
It is well-known by now that Israel’s preferred negotiation tactic is indiscriminate spikes of violence. On 8 April, Israeli warplanes dropped more than 100 bombs within 10 minutes across Lebanon, on central Beirut, Dahieh, and southern Lebanon, on a day now known as Black Wednesday. At least 350 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. Direct negotiations began weeks later that instituted a parodistic arrangement: neutralizing Dahieh and Beirut, and incessant bombing in southern Lebanon along with the razing and occupation of more and more southern villages at the border.
Time and space are now suspended as we confront the erosion and erasure of our land. Life is stuck between landmark dates of unimaginable violence and the dispirited waiting for an end to this war, an end to the occupation, and the return of the residents of the south.
This is what I can gather from the reality I and thousands are living. Every day is a mosaic of rubble, smoke, drones, detonations, white phosphorus shells, and the laundry of displaced families hung at the edge of classroom windows. The image that I report today is bleak, and it stands frozen.