The army checkpoints at the entrance of Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut where airstrikes have frequently hit what Israel claimed to be Hezbollah targets, were left unmanned. The soldiers that usually stood guard were nowhere to be seen, though there were no cars passing through for them to check anyway.
On its largely empty streets it seemed as if residents had left in a hurry. An orange juice seller’s cart stood abandoned on the side of the road, a pile of soot-covered oranges left to rot. Aluminium shutters had been pulled down over shopfronts lining the neighbourhood’s main thoroughfare.
A district that usually teems with life was silent, as the acrid smoke hung over it.
Almost all of the nearly half a million residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs have fled since last week, escaping Israeli bombing. Lebanese authorities say that nearly 1 million people have been displaced by the bombing over the last two weeks.
“Israel is hitting the civilian population because they think it will break their will. But people don’t want Israel to win, so they are saying that their will won’t break,” said Dr Ali Ahmad, a professor at the Lebanese University and a Dahiyeh resident who had accompanied international journalists on the Hezbollah-organised tour of the Beirut suburb.
Though there was no guarantee of safety as Israeli drones buzzed overhead, many took advantage of the presence of international reporters to check on their homes. One resident, a dental assistant who was displaced to east Beirut by Israeli strikes, said she was hoping to catch a glimpse of her apartment building to see if it was still standing.
Ahmad spoke as he stood at the foot of a building that had housed a Lebanese TV station, al-Sirat TV, levelled in an Israeli airstrike on Monday. Staffers at the channel said they were ordered to evacuate by Israel, which said it was being used to store Hezbollah weapons. Hezbollah’s head of media relations, Mohammad Afif, speaking to the journalists, denied the claims.
Israeli bombing of Dahiyeh has been an almost nightly occurrence since Friday, when dozens of 2,000lb bunker-busters used in airstrikes that killed the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and flattened a city block signalled the intensified campaign.
Israel’s military has in the last few days periodically published maps of Dahiyeh that pinpoint what it said were Hezbollah facilities and ordered people who lived within a 500-metre radius to evacuate. The first time it did so, on Friday night, droves of people fled in panic. On Tuesday night, it published another set of coordinates to be evacuated, but there was almost no one left in the area anyway.
“They don’t give you more than 10 or 15 minutes before they start bombing the area. They don’t give the people who live here any time to leave,” Hussein Zein, a 52-year-old resident of Dahiyeh who was displaced a week earlier, said while standing at the foot of an apartment building that had been bombed the previous night. As Zein spoke, he was buffeted by plumes of smoke emanating from the collapsed building, the fires beneath the rubble re-ignited by the afternoon breeze.
“The bombing, it’s random. If there is really a [Hezbollah] weapons depot here, show us. Bring experts to look, there’s nothing here,” Zein said.
Israel has also begun issuing evacuation orders in southern Lebanon, announcing on Tuesday and Wednesday that residents in more than 30 villages needed to leave and head past the Awali River, north of the city of Sidon.
The orders came after Israel announced on Monday it would be carrying out “limited” ground incursions into Lebanon that it said had the aim of dismantling Hezbollah’s ability to conduct cross-border raids into Israel. The approach of Israeli troops was preceded by a heavy bombing campaign, with Israeli warplanes hitting more than a dozen villages.
In the first significant Israeli casualties since its announcement of the ground incursion, eight soldiers were confirmed killed in a gun battle along the border. Hezbollah also claimed in a statement to have destroyed three Israeli Merkava tanks.
The fighting in the south and Israeli evacuation orders prompted even further displacement. In Martyr’s Square in central Beirut, the numbers of families sleeping rough are growing. People crowded on the steps of the Blue Mosque near the square on Tuesday evening, seeking shelter from the spits of rain as night fell.
Israeli strikes within the capital city have slowly expanded past Dahiyeh over the past week, with two strikes on Jnah, an upper-class neighbourhood on Tuesday night, and a strike on Cola intersection in central Beirut early on Monday morning. Old rules of which areas of Beirut were safe seemed to be slowly eroding.
Despite the loss of a sense of safety and the shocking sight of bombed-out buildings amid the cityscape, residents of Dahiyeh said they would return. “Even if they occupy Lebanon, we will resist. We defeated them in 2000 and we will defeat them again,” Ahmad said.
