Lebanon may be no stranger to conflict. But Monday was the deadliest day the country has seen in a generation.
Israel’s aerial bombardment killed nearly 500 people, including at least 35 children and 58 women, according to Lebanese authorities.
That’s nearly half the number killed throughout the entire 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
That conflict was savage. I still remember the stench of victims decomposing in refrigerator trucks because it was too dangerous to transport bodies out while Israeli attack drones and fighter jets patrolled overhead.
When the fighting finally stopped, around 1,100 Lebanese people had been killed. On the Israeli side, 21 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians were killed.
Fighting in the shadows: On the battlefield, Hezbollah’s fighters must be an infuriating enemy. They fought an Israeli ground incursion to a standstill in 2006. But throughout the war, I didn’t see a single armed Hezbollah fighter, such is their ability to blend in.
The Iran-backed group operates as a “state within a state” in a bitterly divided country with a borderline bankrupt government that has no president, where neighborhoods still bear the scars of a 15-year civil war.
Lebanese civilians know all too well how frightening the Israeli military’s attempts to target Hezbollah can be.
On Friday, Israeli jets carried out an airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, in which they killed several senior Hezbollah commanders. But the missiles also destroyed a nine-story building in a densely populated neighborhood, killing 45 people, including women and children.
The Israeli military accuses Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields.
Families flee: But that is little consolation to Lebanese citizens like my mother-in-law, who was a block and a half away from the building the Israeli jets destroyed. For several hours, my family struggled to evacuate my wife’s grandmother — a stroke victim who could not walk out of her apartment.
Like the exodus of panicked civilians who fled the Israeli bombardment of southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, my in-laws have taken shelter in another neighborhood.
Four generations are now gathered in a single apartment, including a week-old newborn, aunts and uncles who work as teachers and building contractors. They have no connection whatsoever with Hezbollah.
We hope and pray that their neighborhood will not be bombed.