Loubna El Amine | In Beirut

We were at my parents’ house in downtown Beirut, watching the final minutes of the Olympic soccer match between Argentina and Ukraine on television, when my aunt, who lives a few hundred meters from the scene of the explosion, received a phone call about the explosion. We zapped between Lebanese channels for more information. They showed the same image of a collapsed facade and repeated the same news: an apartment building in Haret Hreiq, in southern Beirut, had been hit by an Israeli airstrike.

The details emerged piecemeal. It was a targeted assassination of a Hezbollah commander, whose name kept changing over time until the newscasters settled on Fouad Shukur, also known as Hajj Mohsen, whom the U.S. blames for a 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut. The death toll in Beirut rose to four dead, including two children, and 74 wounded. Shukur’s body was found the next day in the rubble.

My aunt’s phone kept ringing; after a few calls, she barely waited for the caller to say she was with her brother. Some calls came from the US and Canada, where her sons live with their families. It’s over, it’s okay, she finally said, I’m tired of answering the phone.

Another aunt who lives not far from the explosion, in an area known as the “American neighborhood” because U.S. embassy workers lived there in the 1950s, said she heard two loud explosions. She ran from the balcony inside. “Maybe this is where it ends, they usually focus on that area – Haret Hreiq – may it not happen again,” she said in a voice message to the family’s WhatsApp group.

We had planned an extended family gathering at my parents’ house, as my brothers and I were visiting from the US and UK. My aunt was the only one to show up. The mood in the city had been tense since a rocket attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday, July 27, which Israel blamed on Hezbollah. Haret Hreiq is in the southern suburb of al-Dahiya, where my parents both grew up. Much of my extended family still lives there. In the 1950s, the area was home to left-wing, socialist, and Arab nationalist parties, which gave way to Shiite political movements in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly after the Israeli occupation of Beirut in 1982. Hezbollah led the liberation of southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000.

My father’s sister was married to my mother’s brother, who died a few years ago. My aunt now lives alone in their third-floor apartment on the main street of Haret Hreiq, a wide and busy road. We had to drive back and forth looking for a parking space and then squeeze through cars to get to their building. We would gather there for parties, bringing together both sides of my extended family. Their small balcony looked out onto many balconies like mine, lined up side by side, draped with curtains of different colors and connected to electricity poles by hundreds of tangled power cables. Some people smoked on their balconies, others hung out laundry, fanned themselves in the summer heat, watched television, observed the street below, or sat together talking.

In July 2006, Israel attacked al-Dahiya, dropping bombs that destroyed many residential buildings. It also bombed the airport, which is located nearby. The attack and its justification by Israeli commanders led to what is known as the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which involves the destruction of civilian infrastructure as a form of collective punishment. It is the strategy that Israel appears to be using in its war on Gaza.

We had decided to completely avoid the southern suburbs of Beirut and the south of the country, where we normally go in the summer, upon arrival in Lebanon. Since the attack on Haret Hreiq and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, the flow of people coming to Lebanon in the summer has been reversed, even though many commercial flights have been cancelled. The governments of the US, UK, France and other states have advised their citizens to leave immediately ‘on any ticket they can get’. We bought the first available tickets we could afford and left within five long days. I remember watching everyone with a foreign passport being evacuated in July 2006. Now I find myself on the other side of that divide, trying to escape with my family, leaving my parents, relatives and friends behind amidst the fear of all-out war.