An excavator removes rubble and glimpses of an ordinary life can be seen on the outskirts of Beirut: the twisted iron bars of a water heater, the door of a washing machine, a child’s toy, an almost intact saucepan… The space is so flat that it is hard to imagine that a seven-storey building occupied it 16 hours earlier, when two Israeli missiles killed at least 37 people, including three children and seven women, in the deadliest attack in almost a year of war between Israel and Hezbollah, which has taken on another dimension this week. Nasrallah Humani has a brother (Ayman) among the 37, but his mother (Hadiya) is still on another list, that of the 23 missing – he insists on distinguishing – despite the fact that the bombing caught them under the same roof, now a layer of concrete and iron, so it seems only a matter of time before they recover the body and include her among the dead. “I went to the rubble and saw a prescription that the doctor had written for my mother. They haven’t found her yet. I’m going to stay here until they tell me something. I’m still asking questions. There is a list of missing people, but some of the bodies seem to be so disfigured that it takes a while for people to understand who they are,” she says.
Another missing person is Naya Gazhi, a four-year-old girl whose video of her laughing with life while she was trying to get her hair cut at the hairdresser’s has monopolized the networks in the last few hours. Hassan Raed, 27 years old and a friend of Ali’s father (another fatal victim of the bombing) shows the video he recorded with his mother (whose life was saved because she was at work) to clarify to all of Lebanon that the girl’s body has not been found, so she is still technically missing. As if it were a macabre joke, Ali was one of the 100,000 civilians who had fled the south of the country, where Israel is bombing the most intensely. “She came to Dahiye [el suburbio de Beirut y feudo de Hezbolá] “I thought he would be safer. Look what fate God had in store for him,” he says, fighting against the noise of the rubble.
Their lives were numbers in the military calculation in Tel Aviv of how many civilians would die in exchange for the grand prize: killing those gathered underground. Mainly, Ibrahim Aqil, one of Hezbollah’s key military leaders, wanted by the United States for an attack on its Embassy in the 1980s. Also another commander, Ahmed Wahbi, and 14 other members of the Lebanese militia. Israel claims to have significantly weakened the chain of command. Having them all gathered in person was as bad an idea as it was, perhaps, inevitable, after the massive hacking of their telecommunications, the detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies and the infiltration of Dahiye’s security cameras. The buildings adjacent to the bombed building have barely suffered any damage.
It is time for the burials. Here, in Dahiye, for three of the militiamen. The flags (yellow Hezbollah flags or with the face of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militia) and the slogans are the usual ones: “On the road to Jerusalem we have given our martyrs”; “We will answer your call, O Hussein (the grandson of Mohammed revered in Shiite Islam)!”; “We are the people of martyrdom”; “Death to America”; “We will liberate Palestine”… The words say one thing. The faces, another. The faces are long. The chants (men on the right, women on the left) sound muffled, despite the efforts of a speaker on the loudspeaker. Two elderly women have injuries in the eye, apparently from the explosion of the pagers. Others have scars on their hands.
Everyone seems aware that the week of blows – operational, moral, logistical… – with the explosives seekers (Tuesday), the walkie-talkies(Wednesday) and the assassination of Aqil (Friday) place Hezbollah before one of its biggest dilemmas since its birth in the 1980s, precisely during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. It has two options and both are bad.
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Open war
Israel is clearly pushing for an open war that would allow it to invade southern Lebanon to reestablish a “security strip,” as it did in the last century, and today it wants a part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the military leadership. In the best case scenario, it would not want war, but rather to step on the accelerator to force Hezbollah to choose between launching a retaliation (“they escalate, we escalate,” Hassan Nasrallah, the militia leader, often says) that would serve as a catalyst for the war. casus belli,and give it international legitimacy,or declare a kind of surrender that does not fit with its ideology: stopping its attacks, without a ceasefire in Gaza, and committing to the part of UN resolution 1701 (which ended the 2006 war) that it flagrantly violates and which requires it to stop having everything it has in large quantities south of the Litani River: armed men, rocket launchers and ammunition.
It is a war that Hezbollah does not want. It has shown this in recent months, as has its patron, Iran, with its measured responses to Israel’s targeted assassinations in its territories or the failure to fulfill Nasrallah’s promise: to kill an Israeli civilian for every Lebanese civilian killed. They feel more comfortable in the constant, multi-front sting (Yemen, Syria, Iraq…). But if Hezbollah continues to leave shreds of deterrence behind at every attack, it will end up transmitting an image of weakness that will not even prevent war, but will only embolden Israel further.
On Friday, Hezbollah launched 140 rockets against Israel, a higher number than usual. On Saturday, 90. As almost always, against military targets. The idea is clear: to show that its muscle is still intact, despite the “unprecedented military and security blow” it has just suffered, as Nasrallah himself defined it, but without unleashing a war. The problem: it still has to get the “just punishment” for the technological attack it has promised, and Iran has to get its own, which it has been putting off for two months, for the assassination in its capital of the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh.
The militia has been acting for months with a restraint that often goes unnoticed in Western capitals (since it is considered a terrorist organisation), but not in the Arab world, where it risks losing the prestige it has built up, even among those who completely reject its religious fundamentalist worldview, thanks to its image of “resistance”. Israel occupied southern Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah was born and 18 years later it ended up retreating with its tail between its legs. In the country, few understood anymore what exactly its children were supposed to be returning from Lebanon in coffins for.
This is precisely what Sami Messelmani, 70, is appealing to as he receives an endless line of condolences for the death of his son Abbas in the Israeli bombing. “We are facing an enemy that invades our land, kills our people, oppresses us in Palestine and has attacked us in the past. We have already fought it until we have driven it out,” he tells this newspaper, surrounded by close associates who praise Hussein as he finishes developing each idea. “Now, this war is in support of Gaza, to be on the side of the oppressed, who are alone against an oppressor supported by the Western powers. […] It is, in fact, all part of the same battle throughout history, of good versus evil, that continues.”
A crowd carries the coffin aloft to the cemetery. It lies close to Imad Mughniya, the Hezbollah military chief killed in Damascus by a car bomb in 2008, who occupies the central place. Many come to touch his tombstone and kiss it. Women cry, pray and read the Koran for the new “martyrs on the road to Jerusalem,” an expression that highlights the centrality of the city to the umma (the Muslim nation) and the Palestinian cause.
The young men fight and stumble to touch the coffin with Abbas’s remains. For them, it is a blessing. For the father, it is the fourth son he has buried with as much pain as pride. They were all from Hezbollah and all died in combat. Two, in the war that it waged with Israel in 2006 and left a taste of symbolic victory for the Lebanese militia, by not lowering its gaze for 34 days in the face of such a militarily superior enemy and managing to kill 165 Israelis. 121 of them were soldiers, almost 40% of the number that the weaker Hamas has managed to kill in almost a year of invading Gaza, using similar guerrilla techniques.
Since October 2023, Hezbollah has lost commanders and hundreds of militants and is now going through its worst moment of the war, but it is estimated that it still has at least another 50,000 potential fighters, a considerable arsenal of rockets and drones, a network of tunnels and a decade of combat training in the Syrian war, where another of Messelmani’s four sons died.
Netanyahu now seems determined to take advantage of his greatest moment of strategic superiority in almost a year to force what in Israeli political jargon is known as “disengaging” the northern and southern borders. That is, for Hezbollah to end, without anything in return, the “support front” that it launched a day after the start of the war in Gaza and that has escalated from those solitary rockets to hundreds of deaths and more than 7,000 shots fired in crossfire on the border, more than 80% by Israel. Late on Saturday afternoon it launched a violent wave of bombings. The only thing that distinguishes it from an open war is, mainly, that it remains almost exclusively limited to the border and that both sides direct their attacks against combatants, not civilians.
At least until the double technological attack: an operation as impressive and cinematic from a technical point of view as it was indiscriminate, detonating thousands of electronic devices without knowing who would be carrying them at the time or who would be at their side, and Hezbollah also distributing them among its doctors, nurses or charitable organizations. “The Israeli enemy is leading the region into a war,” summarized the Minister of Transport, Ali Hamieh, affiliated with Hezbollah, a few meters from the rubble.
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