Loubna El Amine

Yesterday morning, after the ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, many displaced people in Lebanon started heading back to the south. At around 2 p.m., Israel hit the country with a hundred airstrikes in less than ten minutes. It was a co-ordinated assault reminiscent of the pager attack in September 2024. Israel called it Operation Eternal Darkness. They hit locations in Beirut, the southern suburbs, Mount Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. A funeral was bombed near Baalbek, killing at least six people. A few hours later, a nine-storey residential building in the Tallet el Khayat neighbourhood was hit. In all 254 people were killed and more than a thousand wounded.

On Wednesday, 4 March, the Israel Defence Forces issued an evacuation order for the southern part of Lebanon – the entire area, around eight hundred square kilometres, south of the Litani river. On Thursday, 5 March, the IDF issued an evacuation order for almost the whole of the Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut – home to nearly a million people, more than the city itself.

As the two coffins were driven through the crowd, a deep, sorrowful voice came from the loudspeakers. The sound of a violin rose as the voice of the man receded. I texted people in Beirut to confirm that the music was playing at the funeral, not being added by the television broadcasters.

The death toll in Lebanon has now risen past three thousand with more than thirteen thousand wounded. Schools have been turned into shelters, making it difficult to resume the school year even in areas considered relatively safe. Yet even the schools cannot hold enough people; tents and makeshift homes have been built on the corniche and in the public square in central Beirut. You would not recognise the city, my friends there tell me.

We were at my parents’ house in central Beirut, watching the last minutes of the Olympic football match between Argentina and Ukraine on television, when my aunt, who lives a few hundred metres from the site of the explosion, received a phone call about it. We flipped between the Lebanese channels for more information. They showed the same image of a collapsed façade and repeated the same news: a residential building in Haret Hreiq, in south Beirut, had been hit by an Israeli airstrike.

Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli occupation in 2000. The Israeli army had entered Lebanon in June 1982 in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, reaching as far north as Beirut, and had retreated to the south by 1985, where it remained for fifteen years until it was forced out by Hizbullah fighters. There was no celebration this year. The strip of formerly occupied villages has been heavily bombed since October. Most of the residents have left.

Samir Ayoub pulled his sister out of the burning car where her three daughters, Remas, Taleen and Layan, aged fourteen, twelve and ten, together with their grandmother, burned to death. The family had been driving to Beirut from their house in Blida, a village close to Lebanon’s border with Israel. They had gone back to pick up additional belongings for what now promised to be a long stay in Beirut. An Israeli airstrike hit their car as they drove through the village of Aynata. Ayoub, a local journalist, was driving ahead.

We had been in Beirut for barely two days when the concierge told us we had only half a tank of water left to use in the apartment. At ten the next morning, he knocked on the door to say we were almost out. The water delivery truck was arriving a bit later, he said, and asked if I wanted to pay him in advance the 500,000 Lebanese liras (slightly more than five US dollars). We had not been at home much since we arrived and, when we were, had been consumed by the challenge of not overloading the power circuit. The concierge had made his disgruntlement clear the second time we asked him to flip the disjoncteur which he alone had access to, as demanded by the private generator company that provided most of our electricity. Now he was telling us we were nearly out of water.

‘Instead of it being 7 p.m. let’s keep it at 6 p.m.,’ the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, told the caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, in a private meeting last week, a video of which was shared on social media. ‘Just until the end of Ramadan. I do not want to burden you.’

‘It cannot be done,’ Mikati said. ‘There are flights, people, problems.’

‘What flights?’

Mikati submitted, postponing the onset of daylight saving time less than three days before it was meant to take effect.

One morning soon after we arrived in Beirut this summer the state-supplied electricity came on at seven and stayed on. It was still on at eight, still on at nine, still on at ten, still on at eleven. We did a few rounds of laundry; we even ran the dryer. We turned on the air conditioners and could not bring ourselves to turn them off even when the house got cold. The electricity was still on when we left at noon. It was out by the time we returned from lunch and never came back for more than an hour a day in the weeks that followed.