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The commotion and turmoil of Beirut city life did not cease as people avoided fallen debris and sifted through the smouldering wreckage of their belongings on Wednesday, after a wave of Israeli attacks struck the centre of the capital. Death and displacement have become a common affair.
At least 12 people were killed in the expansive Israeli strikes on central Beirut, some of which hit without warning, and 41 were injured. But as if it were an ordinary Wednesday, shops and businesses opened directly below a building in which, hours earlier, a journalist and his wife were apparently deliberately struck on the eighth floor of a luxury high-rise block.
At another building – the seventh and eighth floors of which are now a gaping hole – a groundskeeper, Ahmad, stood guard to prevent looters from entering.
Overnight, he had carried his nine-months-pregnant wife out of their ground-floor apartment as it wobbled from the force of the missile impact, and walked until he found an ambulance for her. By morning, he was back at work, as if he were returning from a routine evening.
Mohamad, who works in a small corner shop just next to the building, said he saw human remains flung from the windows. “They’re still cleaning now,” he added, pointing at workers clearing the debris, while customers bustled behind him.
In Bachoura, where Israel annihilated a high-end building, locals told The National they did not know why the site was a target. Neighbours sat on the reserve of a busy road, smoking cigarettes and greeting each other. Others sifted through the rubble, searching for their belongings inside the mountain of debris that was once their 60-apartment building.
“The building wasn’t safe to live in any more,” said Ahmad Baalbaki, a marketing agent. It was hit three times last week. The fourth strike, on Wednesday morning, finally brought it down.
The Israeli army issued an order before it struck, forcing residents to leave. No one was inside, and no secondary explosions were observed that could indicate the presence of a weapons arsenal, leaving many wondering what the purpose of the attack was.
“They have nothing better to do,” said a man who identified himself as Hassan Abu Ali. “That building was already destroyed last week.”
Israel’s extensive – and unusual – bombing on central Beirut did not have any clear military targets.
“I think they've run out of identifiable, high-value targets,” said Nadim Houry, the head of the Arab Reform Initiative. Instead, Israel has expanded the attacks to kill civilians such as journalist Mohamed Sherri, who worked for a Hezbollah-affiliated broadcaster, and struck an empty building four times, which the military said last week, without evidence, stored “millions of dollars” in cash for Hezbollah.
It appeared to be an illogical reason to destroy a building, considering that Israel’s strike warnings – with six days between each wave – would have given ample time to remove money from the building.
Under the laws of war, none of these constitutes a legitimate military target, Mr Houry said. Journalists, especially, are protected regardless of their political affiliation.
“So much of it has been war crimes,” he said. “You're dealing with a much more aggressive Israel at a particularly weak moment for international law.”
Mr Houry said Israeli strikes on Beirut, against vague or low-level targets, follow a strategy of “collective punishment”. “They want to punish the Shia community and raise the cost of war on them,” while increasing pressure on the Lebanese government to act against Hezbollah.
Israel is behaving as “an agent of chaos”, he said, to force the whole of the Lebanese society to turn against Hezbollah. “Even if that pressure ends up leading to more local tensions, they would take that as a win.”
'No weapons, no fighters here'
Ali, who preferred not to share his last name, stared at the remains of the home he moved into four years ago with his family. The building is in a bustling neighbourhood near the Lebanese parliament.
“There were no weapons, no fighters, nothing strange. It’s just a residential building,” he said. “We knew our neighbours. They were people from the diaspora, doctors, professors, lawyers.”
US citizen Haytham Kaafarani, a renowned surgeon, and his brother, Bilal, a university professor, said they had a summer flat there, a dream home “reduced to rubble, with American weapons, paid by my taxes”.
“They just want to scare people,” Ali said. He had to leave his house at 3am after the Israeli army published a bombing map flagging his building as a target. He fled in the middle of the night with his three children and his wife, without taking any of their belongings with them.
“It’s the only clothes I could take,” he said. His family has been staying at the beachfront: they have nowhere else to go.
His despair mixed with the sardonic laughter of his neighbours. They had gathered helplessly in the early morning hours with nothing but the most important of their belongings to watch their building collapse – but with characteristic Lebanese flair, they filmed the incident and made jokes as it fell.
In the bustling neighbourhood of Zuqaq Al Blat, where journalist Shari and his wife were killed in one of the strikes, life continued as usual. Cars honked in traffic as people commuted to work. Shopkeepers returned change to their customers.
A pharmacist across from the buildings shrugged. “What could they possibly want with him?” he asked, referring to Mr Shari. “He was a journalist. An old man. They just want us to be afraid.”
