Ali looks at the rubble of the building bombed the night before. The force of the shock wave knocked him to the ground when he was on the railing of an adjacent building. He is angry, but less with whoever did it (the Israeli army) than with Hezbollah, for “having brought” to the heart of the capital a war that, he says, he cannot win. “This is what happens when you play with the devil,” he protests quietly, aware that around him only the “treacherous Zionist enemy” (as Israel is often called) can be blamed for the deadliest attack of the war in Beirut. : 22 dead and 139 injured. “What did you expect?” he says. “This is a war and they have F-16s, troops and tanks; and we, nothing […] It’s time for you to sign that paper. It’s time.” It refers to Hezbollah committing to fulfill its part of UN resolution 1701 (not having militiamen or weapons south of the Litani River) that ended the 2006 war and has ended in a dead letter, due to the non-compliance of both Israel as well as Lebanon.
Ali has a common name among Shiites, but he, he emphasizes, is a Sunni. Both communities live together in the Basta neighborhood, which had not been attacked in two decades and it is enough to listen to both of them in recent weeks to verify that the poorly hidden Israeli intention to stoke divisions in a country with a complicated balance of identity and 15 years of civil war behind us is bearing fruit. Many Sunnis and Christians are quick to bring up their fear: it is impossible to know who among the hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Shiite areas are in Israel’s sights. And, if they share a building, all the neighbors are, without knowing it, on death row.
This is exactly what worries 68-year-old Mona. “I’m angry. We already know the Zionists, I don’t expect anything from them. But the others (Hezbollah) know they are targets, so they don’t have to be close to the people. They come here, with their suspicious cars with tinted windows… Today, any area where there are displaced people is not safe. I used to know who all my neighbors were. Not anymore. And, of course, I’m afraid. Let them stay in their areas. “There, yes, not here,” he says, pointing to the other building attacked last night, in the nearby neighborhood of Ras al Nabaa, where the destruction affects three buildings: the target and two in which the electrical generators exploded, explains a soldier.
It is precisely people like Nona or Ali that Hezbollah’s communications officer, Muhammad Afif, indirectly addressed this Friday, pointing out at a press conference in Beirut: “Always remember that Israelis never work for you, but only for their own interests.”
The presence of incognito militiamen is the new obsession of those who distrust (or directly hate) Hezbollah. Or those who hate Israel, but believe that launching thousands of rockets and drones at it to force it to stop bombing Gaza is a miscalculation that will end up destroying a Lebanon already caught in its grip. They also tend to assume that if the river sounds, it carries water. That is to say, Israel doesn’t care about taking out dozens of civilians, but if it bombs a specific building, there will be a reason. Like, in the case of this Thursday, killing the head of Hezbollah’s Liaison and Coordination unit, Wafiq Safa, according to Israeli media. It was, in fact, the first question from journalists to Hezbollah deputy Amin Sherri when he visited the site of the bombing this Friday. “There were absolutely no resistance leaders [Hezbolá]. In neither of the two buildings,” he insisted. “Our duty is to fight in the south, not to be among the people. Hezbollah people have their own means of monitoring displacement and shelters. And Hezbollah commanders, at all levels, have their place facing the enemy.”
Fear and division strategy
Sherri sees it this way: Israel bombs residential buildings to kill civilians on purpose, as a strategy to provoke fear and division, given its inability to advance on the border. “The combat is in the south, but the killings are throughout the country,” he summarizes. And the Lebanese people will not fall into the trap, because they are “united” in their support for the resistance. The deputy defined Beirut as an “Islamic city” that “has expelled the enemy since 1982” (when Israel surrounded it), despite the fact that it welcomes different confessions and opinions about Hezbollah can change 180 degrees between one street and the parallel.
In Basta, where the attack has left a huge hole in which three teenagers collect personal belongings, the Shiite victims use a similar tone. Like Ali Hamadeh, 48, who was surprised by the explosion inside his car, waiting for his family to come down the stairs. Friends and acquaintances come over to joke that the car has been destroyed by the blast wave and he only has one swollen wrist. So does he. “I’m a living martyr,” he says, laughing.
He takes his junk to a nearby school-shelter, because, he says, his house has been damaged and he has no money to repair it. But he is very clear why he doesn’t care: “Everything that happens to us is a sacrifice for Sayyed Hassan,” the honorary treatment that Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah received. Or Ali Hamud, who tries unsuccessfully to contain his tears over the death of his uncle and two of his nephews. “They came here from the south thinking they would be safe. “The whole planet has realized what Israel is like, now without masks,” he says, holding a photo of his uncle.
If, for some, the new obsession is the neighbors arriving from the south, for the sympathizers of Hezbollah and the other Shiite faction, Amal (with less care and trust), it is another: spies. Particularly if they are foreigners. Or Syrian refugees: some have escaped from the south in recent months, when they began to be collectively pointed out as a Trojan horse of the Mossad.
constant suspicion
The permanent suspicion already existed before Israel and Hezbollah got involved in the crossfire, on October 8, 2023. But the double detonation by Mossad last month of the thousands of searches and walkie talkies that Hezbollah had commissioned has reinforced those who saw the hand of the Israeli secret services everywhere. The subsequent sequence of murders of party-militia leaders – mainly from Nasrallah, with an aura of untouchability – and the confirmation of the immense level of infiltration (human and technological) have turned it into a psychosis.
Some videos reflect the nature of the situation. They began to circulate on the networks shortly after the double bombing the day before. Two people are seen receiving insults on the ground with bloody faces. They have just been beaten by a group of young people, convinced that they have just been caught red-handed passing information to the enemy. They had videos of the bombing site on their phone, before and after, and it seems to them proof that they did it so that the Mossad can verify the result of the attack on the ground.
Suspicion extends to foreign journalists. It has always been difficult to spend many minutes in a Shiite fiefdom without young people in black coming up to investigate or surreptitiously taking photos and sharing them in a WhatsApp group. Now it is easier for things to end with an interrogation in a basement, after several turns in the car to disorient, and an inspection of the cell phone and computer.
Last week, a group of men beat a journalist from the Belgian television channel VTM, Robin Ramaekers, and shot his cameraman, Stijn De Smet, in the leg. They accused them of working for Israel. Distrust is not limited to those who have a foreign passport: a Lebanese photographer, Pierre Mouzannar, was released this Friday after spending the night interrogated and detained for taking photos alone in a sensitive area of the capital.