The three women sat in the darkened living room. The electricity had cut out and there was a problem with the neighbourhood generator. On a low table between them was a large rakwe coffee pot, small cups and an ashtray brimming with cigarettes butts.
Lubban* poured the black coffee into the cups of her elderly mother and their visiting friend. Their flat is above a noisy restaurant.
“I’m so scared, I can’t fall asleep. I stay awake watching the news until dawn,” says Lubban, nodding towards the aged TV set, which is nestled between shelves displaying porcelain dishes.
For the past two weeks, Lebanese citizens have been asking themselves and their neighbours: will there be a war?
Skirmishes of attrition have been going on along the Lebanese-Israeli de-facto boundary, a UN blue line. Hezbollah fighters have fired a number of rockets at Israeli military positions and settlements, while Israel has fired missiles and sent armed drones to target Hezbollah fighters. The group says 40 people have died in the past two weeks.
The tempo of the attacks and counterattacks has escalated sharply in the past few days, and Hezbollah has threatened to back Hamas if Israel launches its promised ground war in Gaza. The fears of a wider regional conflict have been preoccupying people in Lebanon since the first news broke of the Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October.
During the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, in the densely populated Dhahiye neighbourhood – Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut’s suburbs – Israeli jets turned whole residential blocks into piles of concrete, twisted metal and broken furniture. Hundreds of people were killed, and most residents fled, seeking refuge in neighbouring Syria or in other parts of Lebanon.
Lubban’s mother, a survivor of five decades of wars, pointed towards the window where the setting sun’s rays and the noises of the Dhahiye street below filter through.
“Over there, in the parallel street, there was a huge airstrike,” she says. “We had left Dhahiye by then, but when I came back and saw the rubble of the buildings, I couldn’t stop crying.”
She won’t leave this time. “Everyone in Lebanon is in financial hardship,” she says. “I can’t go and burden other people. If I die, I die in dignity at home.”
With Syria shattered by its own civil war and the rents being charged in “safe” areas doubling in the past week, it’s hard for people in Dhahiye to evacuate their families to places perceived as safer in case of a new war. Many cannot afford to move; the Lebanese economy is in shreds and the cost of living has soared.
Abu Qassem lives in Beirut. His two sisters and their children, his daughter and her family, have just arrived from the south, part of an exodus of about 13,000 people that has emptied towns and villages. Abu Qassem was keen to stress that the men had stayed behind and had not abandoned the villages.
“Some of the men are with the ‘resistance’. The others stay in the area to give them support,” says Abu Qassem.
He is defiant in his support for Hezbollah. “I’m too old to fight myself, but if war breaks out, I will go to the village to cook or wash their clothes; for us people of the south, after God, we only have faith in the resistance.”
In 2006, much of his home village was destroyed, including the house that he and his brother were building.
“It was the work of our lives. We had borrowed so much money to finish it,” he says. “Then, one day, my brother called and said, laughing, ‘You can forget the house, it’s now a pile of rubble.’”
A few days later, the brother was killed firing rockets at Israeli positions.
On his phone, Abu Qassem showed a picture of his late brother, a middle-aged man with a square-shaped black beard. He swiped the phone to show more pictures of “martyrs”.
“In total, 17 of his friends and relatives died in the last war. Eight of them were with the resistance, but the rest were civilians,” he says.
He says it was thanks to those who died that a lot has changed in southern Lebanon. “Before 2006, Israel had a free hand in the south. We used to say they could occupy five villages with a single military music band. The war changed that. It’s because of that war and the resistance that we can now stand tall in our villages.
“For 20 years, we couldn’t go to our lands; the settlers and the [Israeli] soldiers would harass us, fire at us, or detain and humiliate us,” he says. “Now my olive trees and tobacco crops stretch to 10 metres from the boundary, we farm and harvest. I can see the enemy, and they don’t dare do anything because they know in the hills fighters are watching. The war established a rule: you kill one of us, we kill one of you.”
Even if Dhahiye was destroyed again, the “resistance” would not abandon them, just as they hadn’t abandoned them last time, he says. After 2006, he received money to rent somewhere while his family rebuilt the destroyed house. His nephew, then seven years old, followed in his late father’s footsteps.
“Now he is a member of the resistance himself. He fought the Takfiris in Syria. He is in the south now,” says Abu Qassem.
Near where Abu Qassem lives, down a narrow street of dangling electrical cables, Abbas works in his car repair shop. His arms, like the walls, are stained with engine oil, Abbas repeated the stock phrases about the “resistance” before admitting reality is more complicated.
“Of course, there are people with the party whatever happens, and that is their choice, but then there are people who are unable to feed their kids, can’t afford milk or schooling,” he says. “They will be devastated in the case of war.”
The impact of another conflict on the economy is incomprehensible. The collapse of the Lebanese pound has already driven government employees to take second or a third jobs to survive. Stockpiling food or other necessities is a luxury a few can afford.
Abbas has phoned his father every day for the past fortnight, pleading with him to come north to Beirut. “I tell him, ‘Our house was bombed in the last war. What are you doing there?’” says Abbas. “But he refuses to leave, staying with my mother, who is in a wheelchair.”
Abbas said his father is still bitter about how people treated him after they fled their village in 2006. “He says, ‘If something costs $1, they’d sell it to us for $20.’”
By “they”, Abbas means other religious sects. To him, whether his father was overcharged because he was Shia and held responsible for the war, or because war made everything expensive, was irrelevant.
“My father tells me it’s the season to harvest the olives, and ‘I won’t leave my trees, and I will die on my lands,’” Abbas says.
On the upper floor of a glass-roofed mall in Beirut’s Ashrafiya neighbourhood, Hani sits on the terrace.
“I’m not scared of war,” he says. “I know I will survive, and society will survive, just as we survived the last one and the one before that.
“Look around you,” he says. “Do you think anyone sitting here cares? We have been through this many times before. The banks and the politicians stole our money, and we said ‘fine’. The same politicians caused a huge explosion that destroyed thousands of houses and killed hundreds, and we said ‘fine’. Now a war will come, and people will say ‘fine’ again.”
Hani* is one of the thousands who have come together across Lebanon’s sectarian divides, organising food parcels, baby milk and medicines.
“People who had fresh dollars, who worked for foreign companies or NGOs, and the diaspora, gave us money, sometimes we collected up to US$10,000,” he says.
“The same people who caused the financial crisis – the politicians – were themselves the beneficiaries of the hidden market. We went around buying from the same government officials the supplies that they said were not available to the people.
“Those same people are now welcoming the prospect of a new war. War will make them wealthy.”
In Dhahiye, Lubban lit a cigarette and passed it to her mother before lighting her own.
“If I had money, I would have left,” she says. “Gone to Istanbul or Tbilisi, or anywhere where I don’t need a visa,. Or at least rent an apartment somewhere else in Beirut: Hamra, next to the American university or Ashrafiya, where there are foreign embassies. They didn’t hit these areas in the last war, right?”
* Names have been changed
