As Hezbollah and Israel Step up Attacks, Ailing Lebanon Fears the Worst

The Washington Post

16:20 JST, August 23, 2024

NABATIYEH, Lebanon – For weeks, the Middle East has been on edge, waiting for a retaliatory Iranian attack on Israel that many fear could trigger an all-out war. While a nervous calm prevails, and Tehran has signaled it will bide its time, daily violence continues to rage along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Israel has targeted what it says are Hezbollah weapons caches along the border and in Lebanon’s east, as deep as 50 miles inside the country. Hezbollah has responded with deeper attacks inside Israel, and on Wednesday released a wave of more than 50 rockets and drones at the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The “center of gravity” of Israeli military operations is shifting away from Gaza and toward the border with Lebanon, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said this week. Recent strikes on alleged weapons stockpiles were “preparation for anything that might happen.”

In Lebanon, already suffering through political paralysis and a protracted economic collapse, people say they feel trapped between the warring parties – and fear there is no way out. In the impoverished south, where Hezbollah holds sway and attacks have been most intense, Syrian refugees have borne the brunt of the recent violence.

Israel and Hezbollah have been nemeses for decades, and have fought two costly and indecisive wars. Hezbollah ignited the latest round of hostilities the day after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, launching strikes inside Israel in support of Hamas, its ideological ally and fellow member of the self-styled “axis of resistance,” a collection of Iranian-backed militant groups across the region.

Over more than 10 months of attacks and counterattacks – which have displaced tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border – each side has steadily broadened its reach and sharpened its rhetoric, while avoiding a full-scale confrontation. Analysts and officials fear that the brinkmanship cannot go on much longer.

Last month, a rocket from Lebanon killed 12 children in a village in the Golan Heights. Israel and the United States blamed Hezbollah for the strike; the militant group denied responsibility. The Israeli military responded by assassinating Fuad Shukr, a high-level Hezbollah commander who was close to the group’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah. A day later, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran; while Israel has not commented on the attack, it told U.S. officials immediately afterward that it was responsible.

The region has held its breath ever since. In a speech this month, Nasrallah said that his fighters would respond “regardless of the consequences,” but that keeping Israel waiting was “part of the punishment.”

While a new U.S.-backed push to revive Gaza cease-fire talks appears to have influenced Iran’s and Hezbollah’s calculations, they cannot indefinitely forestall escalation on the Israel-Lebanon border, according to David Hale, who served as the U.S. ambassador in Beirut from 2013 to 2015.

“There’s definitely in Israel this feeling of never again and they can’t go back to the pre-October 7 status quo where their opponents have a hand on the spigot, where the other side sets the pace,” he said. Without a clear diplomatic path to removing Hezbollah from the border, he said, Israel will probably expand its military operations.

On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike in the southern city of Nabatiyeh killed 10 civilians, according to Lebanese authorities, the deadliest attack in the country since October. The Israel Defense Forces described the building hit as a “Hezbollah weapons storage facility”; it did not respond to a request for comment on the reported civilian deaths.

The strike hit an industrial area on the edge of the city, a run-down district where most of the workers are Syrian, many war refugees already. Most eke out a living as manual laborers and sleep where they work.

Hussain Tahmaz, the building’s owner, denied having weapons on the premises. Construction materials were stored on the first floor, he said, while his workers stayed on the second floor. Nine of his employees were killed, he said.

Tahmaz said he has no connections to Hezbollah or other militants, and isn’t even a conservative Muslim.

“I’m a womanizer and I drink,” he said with a frustrated laugh. “I have nothing to do with any group.” Inside his office, he pulled up CCTV footage from the night of the strike, showing plastic roofing and metal bars being loaded into an otherwise empty warehouse.

“Do you see any weapons here?” he asked.

Laborers at a worksite next door said the strike shook them out of bed, shattering windows and littering the roof with shrapnel. The force of the blast was so strong, one man said, that two people were thrown into the street. But there were no secondary explosions, witnesses said, which would be expected if the warehouse was storing munitions.

Amoon Gadra, 33, who works sorting plastic waste across the street, said that she expected the violence to intensify in Lebanon but that nothing would make her consider returning home.

“In Syria it was much worse – there they used barrel bombs,” she said, referring to large indiscriminate attacks by the Syrian regime during the country’s civil war.

Lebanon says it is constantly updating the emergency plan developed in October to prepare hospitals and other government services in the event of broader conflict. But this is a country that is already unable to provide basic services.

Lebanon’s state electricity company said this week its last operational power plant had run out of fuel, forcing the country’s airport, ports and prisons to rely on backup power sources. Most Lebanese households receive only a few hours a day of government electricity, relying on costly private generators to make up the difference.

Lebanon’s minister of health, Firass Abiad, said the nationwide blackout made it difficult to prepare hospitals for a worst-case scenario.

“When you have no extra capacity, every resource has to be used wisely,” he said. “This is the main challenge for us now.”

Two of the people wounded in the Nabatiyeh strike remain in intensive care in southern Lebanon. Hassan Mousa, 19, suffered severe injuries to a leg, his stomach and a hand. Hussein Hussein, 21, lost a leg in the blast and suffered injuries to his back and face. They were taken to nearby hospital run by Hezbollah, which has retained support in its strongholds by offering services the state does not provide.

The well-appointed facilities were busy, but orderly. Doctors in scrubs wore pins depicting Hezbollah fighters killed in battle. Above the information desk was a colorful mosaic of Iran’s supreme leader.

Doctors have put the injured men into medically induced comas. Keeping vigil beside them was Hassan Ahmed Mousa, 51, of Aleppo, Syria, who now lives in Beirut. Hassan is his nephew and Hussein is his cousin, he explained, so he is the next of kin for both men. Two other members of his family were killed in the strike.

Relatives back in Syria have messaged him for updates. “My brother keeps asking me to send a photo of Hassan, but I can’t,” Mousa said. Tubes and wires crisscrossed his nephew’s hospital bed, connecting him to a respirator. “I haven’t told them everything.”

After the attack, he said, Hezbollah sent a car to Beirut to ferry him south and gave him a place to sleep at the hospital.

Two hospital officials sat beside him as he answered questions from journalists in a cramped office. On the desk, a coffee mug that read “I heart CPR” sat beside a yellow Hezbollah flag. Mousa thanked the group repeatedly, eyeing the officials as he spoke.

“Between us, there is a mutual respect” he said.