Lebanese felt a collective sense of deja vu on Monday as thousands of displaced people from the south and parts of Beirut slept on pavements, in cars and in government shelters as Israeli strikes rained from the sky over their homes and villages.
“The same thing is happening all over again,” Joumanah Abdallah, 40, told The National in frustrated resignation. She fled during the night, when explosions shook her building, filling her flat with dust and debris. “The war was supposed to be over. We thought we were safe,” she said.
An Israeli drone buzzed overhead at low altitude as she spoke from a corner of a car park where she and her family had slept in downtown Beirut.
It took Mrs Abdallah three hours to travel from Dahiyeh to central Beirut with her six children, a journey that would normally take 10 minutes, as roads quickly filled with thousands of residents fleeing the bombardment.
Hezbollah’s sudden entry into a regional war – between the US and Israel on one side, and Iran on the other – has cemented fears that the war would spill over into Lebanon despite official efforts to keep the country out.
The Iran-backed group, severely depleted from its last war with Israel and partially disarmed, had signalled restraint in the event of a broader confrontation. But it also indicated that any attack on Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be a red line for them. Still, when Hezbollah took responsibility for launching a barrage of rockets and drones into Israel – an act which did little to harm its sworn enemy – shock and outrage rippled throughout a frail country on the edge of collapse.
“The fact that Hezbollah launched this now will put them on fire internally in Lebanon,” said Mohannad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut and an analyst on Iran’s proxies.
The death of Mr Khamenei and a cadre of top Iranian commanders and officials has shaken Hezbollah, which relies on Iran for financial, logistical, and military support, he said. The prospect of the Iranian regime’s elimination at the hands of the US and Israel has forced Hezbollah to go into “existential mode”.
“It was inevitable for them to engage and hold on for the last thread of hope,” Mr Hage Ali told The National. If Iran’s regime falls, he argued, Hezbollah – already struggling – would find survival difficult.
“It's selfish and it's brutal,” he said. “But that’s the reality.”
Yet the very effort to preserve itself may also spell Hezbollah’s demise.
A harsh and sweeping Israeli retaliation across south Lebanon and the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh has so far killed at least 31 people and caused mass displacement – continuing unabated. Apart from its opening barrage of strikes, Hezbollah has not responded, leaving many – including some from their own support base – questioning their strategy.
‘There is no future’
Displacement centres are already at capacity. In the Furn el Chebbak neighbourhood, a few kilometres away from the southern suburb, dozens of displaced people were waiting in the yard of a local school. An elderly woman in a wheelchair, young mothers, children running around; none of them knew where they would sleep or whether the centre would have enough space to shelter them.
Nada Hamza, who also fled Dahieh, brought nothing but the red robe tied around her waist and her bird, Coucou. She was only able to secure a place in the centre because her husband works in the municipality.
This second displacement in less than two years left her feeling hopeless. “What future? There is no future,” she said, inspecting an empty classroom with nothing but children’s drawings still on the wall.
“The past is repeating itself. It’s even worse this time, we were not even given a warning or anything to prepare ourselves.”
Mr Hage Ali said the country’s Shiite sect – Hezbollah’s primary base of support – stood to lose the most from what he described as an indecipherable and strategically costly attack.
“For the Shiites of Lebanon it’s a lose-lose situation. If Israel occupies the south and they lose their homeland they will become another wave of Palestine refugees in the making,” he said.
Even if the Iranian regime were to survive, Lebanon’s Shiite sect would face a painful toll.
The Israeli army already occupies at least five points of Lebanese territory despite a 2024 ceasefire that stipulates its complete withdrawal.
It has also reinforced its military presence along the border in preparation for a potential air and ground operation on Lebanon, Israeli media reported on Monday.
For the last two and a half years since the ceasefire, Israel has continued to conduct daily but limited strikes on south Lebanon, claiming it is targeting Hezbollah members and infrastructure. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, partially disarmed, continues to face external and internal and pressure to do so fully.
According to Mr Hage Ali, by breaking a fragile and one-sided ceasefire, Hezbollah’s intervention has emboldened Israel to launch yet another harsh military offensive on the group that would further depopulate southern Lebanon as it seeks to establish a buffer zone.
Facing losses at home either way, Hezbollah has chosen to go out fighting.
But their decision has left Hezbollah supporters divided. “Hezbollah stopped the war, but [Israel] never did,” said 30-year-old Hezbollah supporter Awsaf Al Omar. “Israel was never going to stop. The south is still in tatters, and they’re not allowing reconstruction.” Self-defence is “our right,” she added.
But, standing beside her, another Hezbollah supporter, visibly exhausted, muttered quietly: “Lebanon also has the right to rest.”
