Lebanon may be no stranger to conflict, but Monday marked the country’s deadliest day in a generation.
Lebanese officials said the Israeli airstrikes killed around 500 people, including at least 35 children and 58 women.
That’s nearly half the number killed in the entire 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
The conflict was brutal, and I still remember the stench of victims decomposing in refrigerated trucks because it was too dangerous to remove the bodies with Israeli attack drones and fighter jets patrolling the skies.
When the fighting finally stopped, some 1,100 Lebanese had been killed. On the Israeli side, 21 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians were killed.
Fighting in the Shadows: On the battlefield, Hezbollah fighters can be a frustrating foe. They fought until they thwarted an Israeli ground invasion in 2006. Yet not a single armed Hezbollah fighter was seen during the war, such is their ability to blend in with their surroundings.
The Iran-backed group operates as a “state within a state” in a bitterly divided country with a presidentless, bankrupt government and areas still scarred by 15 years of civil war.
Lebanese civilians know all too well how frightening it is that Israeli forces are targeting Hezbollah.
Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes on Beirut’s southern outskirts on Friday, killing several Hezbollah leaders, but missiles also destroyed a nine-story building in a densely populated area, killing 45 people, including women and children.
The Israeli military has accused Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields.
Families flee: But that’s little comfort to Lebanese nationals like my mother-in-law, who lived a block and a half away from the building Israeli jets destroyed. For hours, my family struggled to evacuate my wife’s grandmother, who had suffered a stroke and was unable to even walk out of her apartment.
My parents-in-law were among those who fled their homes in a panic following Israeli bombings of southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, fleeing to another neighborhood.
Four generations now live in one apartment, including a one-week-old baby and aunts and uncles who work as teachers and building contractors. They have no ties to Hezbollah.
We hope and pray that their neighborhoods will not be bombed.
