MARJAAYOUN, Lebanon—For a few hours it looked like war, a real war that could escalate into the all-out Middle Eastern conflict the world has been dreading.
Early Sunday morning, around a hundred Israeli warplanes launched missile strikes in what it called preemptive action to take out Hezbollah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. Shortly afterward, the Iranian-backed militia group launched hundreds of drones and missiles, including Katyusha rockets, into northern Israel and the Golan Heights in what it said was a planned retaliation for the assassination last month of one of its leaders, Fuad Shukr.
Both sides then stepped back from the brink Sunday night, although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned it was “not the end of the story.”
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It was the most intense exchange of fire in 10 months of low-level, but consistent conflict to have roiled southern Lebanon since Hezbollah sided with Hamas after the brutal attacks of Oct. 7. And nobody is quite sure when, or even if, a real war will come.
“We think hopefully it will not happen, but everything may happen,” said Rami Majzoub Said, a security guard at the ruins of the Sea Castle, a landmark built in the Mediterranean port city of Sidon by 13th century crusaders.
“Israel, they are very harsh, very aggressive. They kill people. They threaten us. They make bomb sounds in the air,” he said. As Said spoke, the Muezzin call the faithful to prayer. Seconds later an Israeli fighter jet broke through the sound barrier, its sonic boom prompting residents to look up in fear, if only out of instinct. It is a routine repeated several times every day, either a warning of what’s to come or–as many see it on the ground below–a form of psychological warfare.
The United Nations has warned of catastrophe is full war breaks out. Peacekeepers here seen in Bourj al Moulouk.
Vasily Krestyaninov / The Daily BeastThe threat of war has loomed ever larger since the Islamic militant group Hamas sent its fighters into Israel on Oct. 7 last year, killing more than 1,100 civilians and taking more than 250 hostages. Hamas says 40,000 Palestinians, half of them women and children, have been killed in the subsequent Israeli invasion. From its bases in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah began firing rockets, mortars, and drones at the Israel-Lebanon border in solidarity with Hamas and in retaliation for the Palestinian dead.
Tensions have reached new heights, however, since the assassination of Shukr and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh last month. After the assassination of another Hezbollah leader in Lebanon on Wednesday, a rank-and-file Hezbollah member warned the Daily Beast that the conflict will only get worse.
On a global scale, world leaders have been scrambling to broker a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, and to stop the war in Gaza from escalating. On Aug. 15, a new round of ceasefire talks began between Egypt, Qatar, and the U.S. as mediators for Israel and Hamas with the plan to call for the release of all Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners and detainees and the reconstruction of Gaza. However, Hamas did not directly participate in the peace talks and rejected the new conditions in the ceasefire agreement. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken ended his ninth trip to the region since Oct. 7 last Wednesday, with an agreement tantalizingly out of reach.
The Israel Defense Forces insists that its attacks over the border into Lebanon are only targeting Hezbollah bases and soldiers. It claims to have killed over 400 Hezbollah members over the past 10 months. On Aug. 19, the IDF killed Ali Hussein Soleiman, a prominent member of Hezbollah, in a drone strike on a warehouse in Bekaa Valley, near the border with Syria, further ratcheting up tensions.
However, Israel has also killed at least 130 civilians, according to Lebanese officials. On Aug 14, Israel targeted a car in Marjaayoun, a small town near the Israeli-Lebanese border, in a drone attack, killing two Hezbollah soldiers in the process. That attack also wounded a 6-year-old boy who was standing in a corner store nearby and shattered the glass windows of a restaurant. Employees from the restaurant washed away the blood with water hoses and silently swept up the glass with brooms. One resident said she was still traumatized by the explosion.
Funeral of Hezbollah fighter Majdal Silim last week.
Vasily Krestyaninov / The Daily BeastOver the next few days, came more attacks, with the IDF and Hezbollah disputing whether the targets were civilian or not. On Aug 15, the IDF launched an airstrike on a factory in Toul, a small town in southern Lebanon that the IDF said was being used as a weapons warehouse.
The Daily Beast visited the factory and an adjacent building where Syrian refugee workers lived with their families. Both buildings had been destroyed and at least 10 Syrian refugees were killed. There was no sign of any weapons being stored at the site, just a stuffed bear torn apart in the bombing and blood on a mattress in the building next door.
“This enemy does not differentiate between stone or human,” said Toul’s mayor, Saeed Mahmoud, at the site of the attack. “This is criminality. Every day, it proves to us more and more that this is their nature, the nature of criminality. The stones in front of you, the martyrs who passed away here, we offer our condolences to all the families of the martyrs who were present here.”
“We want to prove to the whole world our resilience. We are people who love life, but they are not letting us live the life we want. Life with martyrs, there is no one that comes before the other. If you don’t sacrifice yourself and your family, how can you live with your head held high?” said Mahmoud.
