‘The Slow Bleeding Out of a Country’

Once again Lebanon’s inhabitants are living through—and dying in—a conflict they are powerless to end. Western leaders like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer talk of pulling “back from the brink,” as though doing so were still possible. But what is this if not war? Since last October, when Hezbollah and Israel began exchanging cross-border fire in the aftermath of Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood attacks, more than 2,800 people have died in Lebanon. Over 13,000 more have been injured. The Lebanese government estimates that 1.3 million people—over a fifth of the population—have fled their homes, in what the caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, described as possibly “the largest displacement” in the country’s history. Of these, more than 500,000 have crossed the border into Bashar al-Asad’s empire of ruins. 

Each day and each night bring more bombardments, more deaths. After months of border fighting, Israel escalated matters on July 30, assassinating the Hezbollah military leader Fuad Shukr—who the IDF blamed for a missile strike on the occupied Golan Heights—in an air strike on the southern Beirut suburb of Haret Hreik. But the tipping point came on September 17 and 18, when Israel detonated explosives installed in Hezbollah members’ telecommunication devices. On September 23 it launched Operation Northern Arrows, subjecting much of Lebanon to relentless aerial bombardment. On September 30 it began a ground offensive into the country’s south. These operations have not just taken a heavy civilian toll—at least 1,552 have died since September 23—but also decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, killing its long-serving secretary-general, Hasan Nasrallah, and his presumptive successor, Hashem Safieddine. Sensing that the movement is now “degraded,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned the Lebanese people to “save” their country from Hezbollah “before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”

In truth, Lebanon is already free-falling. A year of war has further compounded the effects of multiple, intersecting crises: the breakdown of the banking sector, which in 2019 precipitated what the World Bank describes as one of the worst economic crises of the past 150 years; the lasting trauma of the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, one of the largest nonnuclear detonations ever recorded; and the institutional atrophy caused by its politicians’ endless prevarication and jockeying for power.

The ravages wrought by Lebanon’s economic collapse are evident in the health care sector, which once drew medical tourists from Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the Arab world. Starting in 2019, as foreign currency became scarce, hospitals ran out of medicine, diagnostic equipment, and even energy. In August 2021 the American University of Beirut’s medical center, one of the country’s best-equipped hospitals, shut its doors because of fuel shortages, warning that doing so could lead to patient deaths. With the collapse of the Lebanese lira, average salaries for experienced nurses fell to $75.

Now this sector has to cope with what the United Nations describes as Israel’s continuing “destruction of health infrastructure.” The World Health Organization estimates that, since September 17, at least seventy-two health care workers have been killed. Almost half of dispensaries and primary care clinics in the areas worst affected by Israeli bombardment, like southern Beirut and south and east Lebanon, have had to close. Ten hospitals have been evacuated partially or entirely. In Beirut administrators speak openly of their concerns that medical facilities will, just as in Gaza, be “specifically targeted.” Here, in microcosm, is the predicament facing Lebanon—the fear that war will, once again, render the very conditions of life impossible and hasten the country’s disintegration. 

Since the late 1960s, when Palestinian militant groups began using Lebanon as a rear base, the IDF has launched six large-scale incursions into the country. It always insists it is targeting terrorist organizations, not the Lebanese state or civilians: Palestinian armed factions in 1978 and 1982, Hezbollah in 1993, 1996, 2006, and today. But the invasions have all exacted a heavy toll on civilian life. Some 1,100 were killed during Operation Litani in 1978, which Israel undertook to expel Palestinian fighters after the “coastal road massacre,” in which Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) militants entered Israel by sea and killed thirty-five civilians. Four years later more than 19,000 died and another 30,000 were wounded, according to the Lebanese government, as Israel besieged West Beirut, occupied the south, and gave a free hand to its allies on the Lebanese right, who massacred between eight hundred and three thousand Palestinians and Lebanese in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.¹

The siege of Beirut foreshadowed Israel’s recent wars on Gaza. For eleven weeks in 1982, the IDF “indiscriminately” shelled densely populated neighborhoods like Fakhani and Ramlet al-Bayda, in the words of Tom Friedman, then a New York Times correspondent in the Lebanese capital. (Friedman’s editor removed the word from his piece.) The office of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin released a statement justifying the attacks on the familiar grounds that “guerilla targets” were hunkered down amid “civilian areas.” For residents like the writer Jean Said Makdisi, these were “cataclysmic days” in which the normal rhythms of life were upended by “raw, wordless fear, actual terror.” Sleep, like food, became scarce. Electricity cut out; water stopped running. “The death machines worked; hardly anything else did.”²

The IDF extirpated the PLO from Lebanon. But by continuing to occupy the country’s south, it helped create the conditions for the emergence of Hezbollah, as the scholar and former US colonel Augustus Norton has argued.³ The Party of God has its origins in Harakat al-Mahrumin, the Movement of the Dispossessed, which the Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr established in 1974. To break the grip that secular outfits like the Baath and the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) had on Shia voters in the south and the eastern Bekaa Valley, Sadr drew on an amalgam of religious and anticolonial rhetoric. The Imam, as he was known, called for a “moral” reform of Lebanese politics and improved representation for the Shia. More concretely, he demanded infrastructural investment in southern and eastern Lebanon, parts of which lacked the running water, electricity, schools, and clinics that were common in predominantly Christian Mount Lebanon. He also increasingly attacked Israel, whose reprisals against Palestinian armed groups were deeply disrupting the south. “It is our duty to form a Lebanese resistance before we’re expelled from our land,” he told a rally in Tyre in 1974. “It is…the people’s duty to defend themselves.” 

By the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, Sadr had a mass following among Shia in the south, the Bekaa, and Beirut’s “belt of misery,” the shantytowns around the capital into which rural migrants crowded—among them the family of the young Hasan Nasrallah. That same year, the movement formed a military wing, Amal. (The acronym stands for “Battalions of the Lebanese Resistance”; the word amal also means hope in Arabic.)

In 1978 Sadr disappeared on a visit to Libya to meet Colonel Muammar Gaddafi; by the early 1980s laymen like the lawyer Nabih Berri had taken over his movement. Increasingly secular in tone, and seemingly more preoccupied with consolidating political and financial power than fighting the Israeli occupation, Sadr’s successors alienated young clerics like Ragheb Harb, Subhi al-Tufayli, and Nasrallah, who soon left. Deeply influenced by the new Islamic Republic, which sent emissaries to advise the dissidents, they were determined to oust Israel. Their message of resistance attracted disenchanted Amal members, as well as young Shia men who had once fought against Israel and the Lebanese right with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the LCP.

This amorphous “Islamic Resistance” coalesced into Hezbollah, the Party of God, which in 1985 announced its formation with a programmatic “Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and in the World.” From the outset it categorically rejected compromise with Israel. Some in Amal were ambivalent about Palestinian armed action, resenting its effects on the southern Lebanese. By 1985 the movement, backed by Syria, was waging a brutal offensive against PLO loyalists in the refugee camps of Beirut and Saida, whom Hafiz al-Assad’s regime and its Lebanese allies viewed as a challenge to their ascendancy. By contrast, Hezbollah squarely linked the liberation of Lebanon to that of Palestine. As the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak concluded in 2006: “When we entered Lebanon…there was no Hezbollah…. It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.” 

Over two decades Hezbollah grew from an obscure religious movement into a major political party. In 1992, after Israel assassinated his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi, Nasrallah became the group’s leader. He oversaw what scholars have described as the movement’s “Lebanonization.” Though Hezbollah condemned the sectarian basis of Lebanese politics, it participated in parliament and, after 2005, in the government. At the same time, it built up an array of welfare institutions: subsidized schools, hospitals, and primary care clinics; institutions providing relief to the widows and orphans of “martyrs”; Qard al-Hasan, a financial institution offering microcredit; and even a construction firm, Jihad al-Bina, which, after the 2006 war, helped rebuild the Dahiyyeh, as Beirut’s southern suburbs are known. These institutions cater predominantly to Shia, but they are proudly nonsectarian.

Hezbollah also became a formidable fighting force. While other belligerents in the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) surrendered their weapons, postwar governments allowed “the resistance” to keep its arsenal, which it insisted was needed to fight the Israeli occupation. In 2000, after years of bitter skirmishes, Barak’s cabinet withdrew Israeli troops. But even as it celebrated liberating the south, Hezbollah maintained that the task was not yet complete, since Israel still controlled small border enclaves like the fifteen-square-mile Shebaa farms. Hezbollah’s critics, such as the Christian Kata’ib Party and Lebanese Forces, resenting its military strength, argued that the movement had become a state within the state, undermining Lebanese sovereignty. For its supporters, however, it was providing what the state did not: a social safety net and protection from foreign aggression. 

These differences came to a head with the July 2006 war. The conflict, which began after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers in a border raid—eight more died in the raid and an ensuing rescue attempt—killed more than 1,100 Lebanese civilians and injured over 4,400. (One hundred and sixty-five Israelis, most of them military personnel, died.) In little over a month, Israeli warplanes launched seven thousand strikes on Lebanon, damaging civilian infrastructure, from roads, bridges, and the only international airport to hospitals, power plants, pumping stations, and irrigation works. The Lebanese government put the costs of this damage at $2.8 billion; another $2.2 billion of output and income were lost, as the economy lurched into recession. Human Rights Watch estimates that, in the south, the IDF dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster bombs, more than any force has done in any global conflict since the 1991 Gulf war. Returning villagers found unexploded munitions inside their homes, on their rooftops, and dangling from trees and fences—death lurking amid the everyday.

Out of the 2006 war emerged the Israeli “Dahiyyeh doctrine,” in truth a refinement—if that is the right word—of tactics first used in 1982. As General Gadi Eisenkot explained in 2008, it entailed using “disproportionate force” against any locality from which “Israel is fired on.” “From our standpoint,” he made clear, “these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.” Yet the conflict also bolstered Hezbollah, which claimed a “victory from God”—in Arabic, nasr min Allah, a play on its leader’s name—for repulsing Israeli aggression. Domestic opponents like the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt criticized Hezbollah’s actions, but audiences across the Arab world recognized Nasrallah as an eloquent advocate of anticolonial liberation and the Palestinian cause. In an improved position of strength, Hezbollah did not hesitate to flex its muscle at home and abroad. 

In May 2008 Lebanon’s ruling coalition, the pro-Western March 14 movement—which included the Hariri family’s Future Movement, Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party, and Christian outfits like the Lebanese Forces—threatened to dismantle Hezbollah’s telecommunications network. In response the movement and its allies forcibly took over large swathes of Beirut. For a moment it seemed possible Lebanon would plunge into an Iraq-like sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia. An Arab diplomatic effort spearheaded by Qatar defused the crisis, but the rift between Hezbollah’s supporters and its opponents in March 14 further deepened. 

Four years later, Hezbollah intervened militarily in the Syrian war, in support of the embattled Assad regime. Its leadership’s rationale was clear: to protect a central cog in the “axis of resistance” that stretched from Beirut to Tehran, as well as to ward off the threat that radical Sunni groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and DAESH, which had emerged out of the Syrian chaos, posed to the region’s Shia. March 14, which sided with Syria’s revolutionaries, criticized Hezbollah’s actions from the start, but as more and more men died, even supporters began to question the intervention. And as Hezbollah recruited new fighters and shared information with the Syrian and Russian intelligence services, it lost internal discipline, growing more vulnerable to Israeli espionage and infiltration.

Another shock to the party came in October 2019, when mass demonstrations broke out across Lebanon, calling for systemic change, improved public services, and an end to the inequality generated by almost three decades of neoliberal reform that Prime Minister Rafic al-Hariri initiated. From Tripoli, a predominantly Sunni city in the north, to Zouk, in the largely Christian area north of Beirut, to Nabatiyyeh, a Shia town in the south, the protestors were united by their disaffection with the “political class.” They demanded an end to sectarianism, corruption, and clientelism. “All of them means all of them,” they chanted—and that meant Hezbollah too. 

Lebanon’s October 19 revolution, as it became known, took on an effervescent, utopian quality reminiscent of the 2011 Arab revolutions: just as in Cairo, Sanaa, and Manama, squares and streets were reclaimed for civic life. Flea markets were set up, DJs played to the crowds, talks and teach-ins were organized. For a brief while, another kind of society seemed possible.

But the shadow of economic crisis hung over the protests from the outset. For more than twenty years, Lebanon’s powerful commercial banks had profited amply from the generous interest rates on government bonds. This system depended on three things: continuing supplies of foreign currency, trust in the Lebanese state’s solvency, and faith in the value of the Lebanese lira, which in 1997 was pegged to the US dollar. From the early 2010s onward, the flow of dollars had begun to slow, prompting the central bank to engage in 2016 in a “swap”—purchasing dollars at an inflated rate from commercial banks. This financial legerdemain failed to quell fears about a liquidity crisis and sovereign debt default. 

By August 2019 the whole system had begun to come apart, precipitating a precipitous collapse in the value of the lira. Fearing a run on deposits, banks simply closed their doors, locking customers out of their own accounts. Between late 2019 and March 2020, hundreds of businesses shut, and thousands lost their jobs. In March 2020 the hapless new prime minister, the technocrat Hassan Diab, announced that the government was defaulting on its sovereign debt. As the economy unravelled, protests grew angrier—and the security services resorted to more heavy-handed tactics. But the Covid-19 pandemic allowed the authorities to regain the initiative: citing public health fears, they pulled down the tent city protestors had built in downtown Beirut. 

Still Lebanon had not hit rock bottom. On August 4 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at Beirut’s port exploded. The blast’s shockwaves blew in walls and roofs, shattered windows, and overturned cars across the capital. Nearly 220 were killed and over seven thousand injured. Some 300,000 were rendered homeless. Material damage cost between $3.8 billion and $4.6 billion. Some 145,000 were left requiring psychological care and over 24,000 needing urgent psychiatric assistance. As one survivor told Human Rights Watch: “You can’t cancel it from my memories.… There’s no life even though we’re still alive, but we’re dead inside. They killed us from the inside.”

The port explosion further hastened economic collapse, pushing prices higher and forcing more businesses to close or lay off workers. Between 2019 and 2021 GDP per capita fell by over half, while government debt had by some estimates reached a staggering 495 percent of GDP. By early 2022 the lira had lost 95 percent of its 2019 value, rendering many salaries and pensions worthless. As inflation reached triple digits and unemployment increased to almost 30 percent, poverty soared. Doctors, teachers, and academics left the country in droves. Soldiers took odd jobs as taxi drivers and deliverymen. Others risked smugglers’ flimsy boats to make it to Cyprus or Turkey, and from there to Europe. 

Meanwhile Lebanon’s politicians, as they so often have, simply tried to wait out the crisis. Obfuscating and prevaricating in their well-practiced way, they obstructed efforts to reach a bailout agreement with the IMF and to investigate the explosion. The ageing Michel Aoun ended his presidential term in October 2022; his successor is yet to be appointed. Mikati’s caretaker cabinet lacks the power to sign bills into law. 

This was the predicament in which Lebanon found itself on October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah opened what its leaders call a “front of support” for Hamas on the southern border. Since then it has launched drones and missiles toward northern Israel, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. Yet, to the surprise of some commentators, it has not launched a full-scale offensive. As the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh noted, “Hizbollah felt obliged to take part in the fight, but at the same time limited itself severely,” in the belief—or the hope—that Israel would do the same in a pattern of mutual deterrence.

For almost a year, Hezbollah’s leaders played a delicate rhetorical game. On the one hand, they repeatedly threatened escalation to deter Israel from launching an offensive. On the other, they also made it clear they did not want to wage a frontal war. Yet the Israeli cabinet was determined to break with the status quo and undermine Hezbollah’s claims of a “balance of fear.” Since October 2023, 80 percent of the cross-border strikes have come from Israel. When the UN took stock in early September 2024, 113,000 people had already been displaced from their homes in southern Lebanon, a third of them children. Israeli bombardment had destroyed 4,000 residential buildings, left another 20,000 “severely damaged,” and scorched over 1,800 hectares of agricultural land. Those who stayed behind, unable or unwilling to leave their homes, their shops and orchards, were left in a landscape of decimation, of empty streets and stray dogs, of shelled-out buildings and fields consumed by fire and white phosphorus. 

By the summer the conflict had come to other parts of the country. As Israeli incursions into Lebanese airspace became more frequent, anxious Beirutis became expert in distinguishing the sound of explosions from the sonic booms of warplanes. Even smartphones began to seem like offensive weapons: Lebanese Tinder users inexplicably came across Israelis, some in combat gear, seemingly just a few miles away, fueling fears that Israeli intelligence was using the app as an instrument of psychological warfare. But this was merely a prelude to the terrors of the fall. 

On September 17 and 18 hundreds of beepers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded across the country, killing forty-two and injuring almost 3,500, per the Lebanon healthy ministry. The devices blew up in homes and offices, in supermarkets and at funerals, causing injuries that one doctor described as worse than what he saw after the Beirut port explosion: amputated fingers and mangled hands, wounds to the midriff, burned and swollen faces, eyes lost because of shrapnel. Many civilians, including two children, were killed. That this portended an escalation was made clear when the Israeli war cabinet “updated” its aims to include the return of evacuated “residents of the north.” “The only way left to ensure their return,” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced, was through “military action.”

On September 23 Israel launched Operation Northern Arrows, intensifying its aerial bombardment of Lebanon. In a single day, some six hundred people were killed and more than 1,800 injured—half the total number killed in thirty-four days of fighting in 2006. More lethal attacks have followed. Southern Beirut suburbs like Haret Hreik and Burj al-Barajne have been reduced to ruins, just as they were in 2006. The photojournalist Mohammad Yassin’s images of the Dahiyyeh speak of a ghostly, depopulated place: a building stripped of its facade, revealing, like a doll’s house, a red sofa sitting in what was once a living room; streets strewn with mangled ovens and cars; abandoned toys propped against a pillar, as if for someone to pick up. 

A ground offensive began on September 30. Video footage has emerged of Israeli soldiers raising the Israeli flag on Lebanese territory and celebrating the obliteration of the village of Mhaibib, leading some to fear that the IDF is using the same tactics in Lebanon as in Gaza. They have also attacked UN peacekeepers’ positions, drawing widespread international condemnation. Yet so far the IDF has not penetrated deep into Lebanon, operating instead in border villages like Maïss el-Jabal, Maroun Ras, and Yaroun, which now lies in ruins. Israel’s main tactic remains relentless aerial bombardment, which it has deployed across the country, from central Beirut neighborhoods like Cola and Bashoura to predominantly Christian localities like the northern town of Aitou, where on October 14 an air strike hit a residential building hosting displaced families, killing twenty-three people, among them twelve women and two children. A UN official raised “real concerns” about breaches to international humanitarian law.

As well as terrorizing Lebanese civilians, Israel has inflicted a series of blows against Hezbollah, killing some of the movement’s most senior cadres. Fuad Shokr’s assassination in July was followed on September 20 by that of Ibrahim ‘Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s elite Al-Radwan unit. Most significant of all, Nasrallah himself was killed on September 27 in an air raid in which warplanes dropped more than eighty tons of “bunker buster” bombs on Haret al-Hreik, flattening four residential buildings and killing an unknown number of civilians. 

With Nasrallah’s death, the unthinkable had happened: the man who for three decades had spoken for Hezbollah, and who for many embodied the movement’s values of steadfast resistance and piety, was no more. The Sayyid—the term is an honorific, denoting Nasrallah’s descent from the Prophet Muhammad—was now a martyr. Mourning supporters told Al Jazeera that he “wasn’t just a politician,” more “like a father,” or a “brother.” With him alive, they “felt safe.” “Now, we don’t know what will be our fate.” On social media, some insisted that he was not dead but had gone into hiding. This speculation tapped into a deep vein of Shia belief that can be traced to the disappearance of the “Hidden Imam,” Muhammad al-Mahdi, in the ninth century CE: like the “occulted” Musa al-Sadr, Nasrallah would return one day to bring justice on earth. Displaced Lebanese, however, have voiced their frustration at being “abandoned” by Iran. 

Such discontent will be music to the ears of Netanyahu, who has openly called on the Lebanese to “free [their] country from Hezbollah,” inviting them to turn their ire inward. Some do blame the movement for bringing war down “upon the Lebanese people,” as a bystander told Al Jazeera, or hope that the conflict will weaken it. The YouTuber Ronnie Chatah—son of an assassinated Sunni politician whose slaying some blame on Hezbollah—inveighs against what he calls a “sub-state armed” group loyal to Iran, while the Christian leader and former warlord Samir Geagea is “optimistic” as to the conflict’s outcome, sensing an opportunity to end Hezbollah’s “hegemony.” But his optimism is not widely shared. There are reports of growing tension in some parts of Lebanon, and yet for most of the country’s inhabitants the priority is not political score-settling but survival.

What lies ahead? While Lebanese politicians call for a cease-fire, IDF’s Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, has threatened to bring a “sharp end” to the conflict now that Israel has “thoroughly dismantled” Hezbollah’s chain of command. It is true that, armed with terabytes of surveillance material, Israel has killed many of the movement’s political and military leaders—vastly experienced men of the first generation. But if Hezbollah has been blindsided by what Nasrallah described as “heavy blow[s],” it is too early to speak of its demise, as it hunkers down for a guerrilla war in the hills of southern Lebanon and sends lethal missile salvos toward Israel. In late October Hezbollah appointed Nasrallah’s longtime deputy, Naim Qassem, as the movement’s new secretary-general. On October 30, in his first speech as leader, Qassem warned Israel: “get out of our land to reduce your losses. If you stay, you will pay more than you have ever paid in your life.” Hezbollah, Qassem insisted, could agree to a ceasefire on the right terms, but it would not “beg” for one. 

Hezbollah may well survive this war. The question is whether Lebanese society can. As Israel’s air and ground offensive destroys essential infrastructure, from water facilities to telecoms and the failing power grid, the United Nations Development Programme is warning of further economic disintegration. The Independent Task Force for Lebanon (ITFL), a group of local experts, estimates that the war has already cost $13 billion, some 70 percent of Lebanon’s 2023 GDP. A prolonged conflict could drag 60 percent of the population into poverty. Some 500 schools have been turned into shelters for displaced persons, while another 1,100 have been shut, affecting 605,000 pupils. Forty percent of schoolchildren have been displaced. What kind of future can they expect? We are witnessing not a “limited, localized, and targeted” IDF campaign but the slow bleeding out of a country.