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.