The funeral was over almost as soon as it began. Women did not linger in their lamentations but marched directly alongside the pallbearers to bury the body. An overzealous Hezbollah staff member did not wait for them to finish before pulling the picture of their fallen comrade off the martyr’s shrine, eager to pack up. Ten minutes later, the crowd dispersed, filtering out past the ad hoc army checkpoints set up for the occasion in the southern Beirut neighbourhood.
The funeral – a far cry from the usual 90-minute long ceremonies to honour the Shia militia’s deceased – was one of dozens held across Lebanon on Thursday. One after the other, Hezbollah had issued a steady stream of funerary announcements as the death toll mounted from the operation, probably Israeli in origin, that blew up pagers and walkie-talkies on Tuesday and Wednesday. In total, 42 were killed and almost 3,500 wounded by the blasts, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health.
Attenders who came out to honour the dead did so warily, the explosions that interrupted another Beirut funeral just the day before still fresh in their minds.
“My friend’s father lost his eyes in the blasts. We’ve never seen an attack like this, everyone was shocked,” Saeed, a 25-year-old driving instructor, said. He had been just metres away from an explosion at a funeral in Beirut a day prior.
An hour after the burial, Hassan Nasrallah, spoke, his first appearance since the pager attacks. Israeli warplanes carried out a series of airstrikes in Lebanon’s south, targeting what the Israeli military said were “Hezbollah targets”.
The leader appeared tired and his tone was soft – a sharp contrast to his last appearance on 25 August, when he claimed victory for the group’s wide-ranging drone and missile barrage on northern Israel.
“There is no doubt that we have been exposed to a major security and humanitarian blow that is unprecedented in the history of the resistance in Lebanon,” Nasrallah said during his Thursday speech. However, he insisted the attack “would not bring us down” and vowed to continue fighting until a ceasefire in Gaza was achieved.
As Nasrallah spoke, a rumbling grew steadily louder, starting in the country’s south before bursting into a roar over Beirut. The sound brought some residents of the Achrafieh district in east Beirut out on to their balconies and the streets, their necks craned to the sky.
Israeli fighter jets were conducting a mock air raid over Beirut, throwing out flares that lingered over the capital city and producing two sonic booms, rattling windowpanes. The planes were flying at the lowest altitude over the city yet since fighting between Hezbollah and Israel broke out on 8 October.
“I will not talk about a time, place or form, but … the reckoning will come,” Nasrallah continued, unaffected by the jets flying overhead.
In Rmeish, a Christian town on the Lebanese-Israeli border about 72 miles (116km) from Beirut, the sound of Israeli airstrikes was uncomfortably close. Rmeish sits between Aita al-Shaab and Yaroun – two of the most frequently targeted towns in Lebanon – but itself has been mostly spared by Israeli fire.
“There is shelling around us from every angle, they were very violent and produced a huge amount of smoke. Planes are everywhere,” Father Najib al-Amil, a local priest, said over the phone.
Father Amil is a community leader for Christian villages in southern Lebanon and has worked to strike a balance between maintaining a cordial relationship with Hezbollah and ensuring Christian villages are not used as staging grounds for attacks against Israel.
“Until now, [Rmeish] is OK, but we don’t know what will happen. We are isolated, tired and scared,” the priest continued.
The attacks in Lebanon and the anticipation of retaliation from Hezbollah have become part of a familiar, but still stressful, routine in the country. Just three weeks prior, Nasrallah said that Lebanon “can take a breath and relax” after the group’s retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s military chief of staff, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut.
That period of relaxation proved brief, as Tuesday’s attacks plunged Lebanon back into uncertainty.
The attacks were accompanied by comments from Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, that the war was entering a new phase. Pictures of tanks being transported to northern Israel were widely shared across social media in Lebanon amid furtive speculation as to whether Israel was about to launch a full-scale war.
Nonetheless, Hezbollah’s supporters said they trusted Nasrallah and were ready for whatever might come.
“Our leadership is wise and they will choose what the retaliation will be. It doesn’t have to happen now,” Saaed said, adding that the attacks over the past week were “something one must pass through to achieve victory”.
