Dwarfed by destruction, Imad Shami, 60, a Lebanese barber, stoops to feed an injured cat: an absurd snapshot of life against the graveyard of obliterated buildings around him.
The smashed landscape of the heavily populated Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut – largely under the control of Hezbollah – shows it was the focus of Israel’s ferocious bombardment.
Behind the father-of-five, civilians looking to salvage belongings scramble through the skeleton of a half-destroyed tower block, which tilts into the ground at an alarming 45-degree angle.
In front of him, the ash covers a moonscape of bomb craters.
Imad was one of a handful of civilians who stayed during the near-14 months of bloody conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, because he wanted to feed the 70 or so stray cats in the surrounding streets. He remained even during the final hours before the ceasefire, when Israel pounded these streets into oblivion. The truce has since silenced the explosions, but Imad worries it won’t end the crisis.
“Lebanon and the Lebanese don’t have a future; we jump from catastrophe to catastrophe,” he says bleakly, emptying cans of cat food next to a tangle of concrete that was, until Monday night, a seven-storey building housing multiple families.
A family photo album, dentistry exam papers in English, and a child’s neon backpack are among the only signs that humans lived here.
“I am 60 years old. When I was a kid, my mum showed me the tracer fire and lines of bullets. All my life has been like this,” says Imad. “Every 10 years, we have war or catastrophe – we try to stand up, and we get crushed.”
Lebanon, he says, has lurched from civil war and conflicts with Israel in the 2000s to an unprecedented financial collapse a few years ago, a vast explosion at the port of Beirut, and now this.
“We try to work hard and to keep safe. We were working hard, and trying to make our life normal, when this war came and took us back 20 years.”
As the dust settles on some of the hardest-hit areas of the country, Lebanese civilians have been returning to their bombed-out homes, facing a still uncertain future. A ceasefire brokered by the US and France ended more than a year of violence that saw Israeli strikes kill nearly 3,800 people in Lebanon and displace some 1.2 million more. More than 70 people in Israel – more than half of them civilians – were also killed, along with dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon faces the brunt of the impact, with the World Bank estimating that the war has caused at least $8.5bn (£6.7bn) worth of damage and losses.
The NGO Mercy Corps also warned that Lebanon’s economy has suffered a “staggering blow”, saying this week that the country’s GDP had contracted by an estimated 6.4 per cent (equivalent to $1.15bn) during the escalation of the conflict, from mid-September – when Israel launched a ground invasion on top of its airstrikes – to late November alone.
Even now that the active conflict has ended, the problems may just be beginning, says Laila Al Amine, Mercy Corps’ country director for Lebanon.
“With over half the population now living below the poverty line, resources growing scarce, and more than 1 million displaced people enduring the bitter cold of winter without adequate shelter or supplies, the worst civilian impacts could still be ahead,” she adds.
And just two days in, the fragile US-brokered truce is under huge strain.
On Thursday, the Israeli military bombed Lebanon for the first time since the ceasefire took hold, firing on the south after claiming it had detected Hezbollah activity at a rocket storage facility.
Two people were also reported to have been wounded in separate Israeli gunfire, according to Lebanese media. The Israeli military said it had fired on people trying to return to certain areas in southern Lebanon, which it claimed violated the ceasefire agreement, without providing details.
The back-to-back incidents have ignited concerns about the agreement, which includes an initial 60-day cessation of hostilities. Under the deal, Hezbollah militants are to withdraw north of the Litani River, and Israeli forces are to return to their side of the border. The buffer zone will be patrolled by Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers.
Families on both sides of the border are expected to return. But in the destroyed neighbourhoods of Lebanon, what are people returning to?
“We don’t 100 per cent trust that anything is going to hold,” says Hassan Kollaylat, 60, as he sweeps up the wreckage of his family’s sports shoe business in Chiyah, southwest of Beirut, which was damaged in an Israeli airstrike last week.
He has decided not to rebuild the glass storefront, which would cost $5,000, as “we don’t know when it will be bombed again”.
“We don’t have the money to rebuild Lebanon – who is going to pay for this? Our government, international aid? Of course not,” he says.
Back in Dahiyeh, Manal Najjar, 44, walks in a daze around the remains of her destroyed neighbourhood. She had hoped to rescue some belongings, but found her apartment block was about to collapse and it was too unsafe to enter.
“We have no idea how we will rebuild, but we did in 2006 after the war. Right now, though, we were already in a financial crisis,” she says. “We need a miracle.”
Some in the neighbourhood are more optimistic, and cite the fact that Lebanon has risen from the ashes so many times as proof that it will all work out.
Imad, however, says there is “no hope”, as he tends to his cats.
“Every 10 years, the same thing happens. There is no solution for Lebanon.”
