A month ago, the streets of the large southern outskirts of Beirut were full of life, with children playing in the streets and many people in cafes and shops. But now silence reigns in this stronghold of the Hezbollahwhere you can only hear the explosion of Israeli bombs.
Despite the bad smell emanating from the rubble accumulated on the corners, groups of young people on motorcycles, dressed in civilian clothes, guard the area, to ensure that only residents who want to check if their houses are still standing and remove some belongings can enter.
Distrust dominates the area. The Israeli bombings, which began on September 23, turned into an open war with Hezbollah.
The leader of the Shiite Islamist movement, Hassan Nasrallahdied on September 27 after unprecedented bombings, which reduced several buildings to rubble.
Mohamed, 32, who had lived on the southern outskirts for 25 years, visited the area to collect his clothes. He is unable to buy new clothes because prices have skyrocketed with the economic crisis that has paralyzed the country since 2019.
“The young people told me not to take too long because there are drones constantly flying and they could attack at any time,” he told the AFPwithout revealing his surname.
Mohamed is staying with relatives in Beirut, but despite the danger, he wanted to return to the apartment he fled on September 27, the day Nasrallah was murdered.
“We left without putting on our shoes and thought we would never see our house again,” he recalls, a situation similar to that of many neighbors.
More than 300 buildings destroyed
Muhammad’s building is still standing, but since the end of September “almost 320 buildings have been destroyed in Beirut and its suburbs,” said Mona Fawaz, planner at the ‘Beirut Urban Lab’.
The destruction exceeds that of 2006, during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah which lasted 33 days.
At the time, in an area of 20 square kilometers, “1,332 buildings suffered serious damage and 281 were reduced to craters, which forced the displacement of 100,000 people”, says the urban planner.
Now, the southern periphery is full of loose asphalt slabs and broken pipes, as well as destroyed telephone and internet infrastructure.
Unlike in 2006, Israeli aviation “deliberately targets everything that keeps life going,” such as facilities that “are not Hezbollah infrastructure” and, moreover, “in a larger perimeter,” Fawaz said.
Hassan, 37, grew up in Mreijeh, in the south of Beiruttarget of bombings targeting Hashem Safieddine, possible successor to Nasrallah.
He still remembers “his friends, his children’s games, the smell of bread in the morning, the neighbors’ fights, the Ramadan festivities.”
However, the supermarket, internet cafes and football pitches of your adolescence no longer exist.
“We are afraid of returning after the war and discovering that our friends have died, as happened in 2006”, he laments.
