Anywhere else in the world, it would have seemed surreal. But Beirutis understood perfectly well that they were again without electricity yesterday because Israeli jets fired US missiles at Italian-made, French-installed transformers at the Bsalim power station for the third time in four years.
Electricite du Liban executives and technicians choked on toxic fumes as they picked their way through pools of oily black water left by firefighters. For once, the Israelis - who carried away the plans for the power station during their 1982 invasion - had lived up to their reputation for "surgical precision", hitting four out of nine giant electrical transformers, each one sheltered on a long terrace between two protective concrete walls.
Smoke and steam still spewed from the holes where the missiles penetrated the charred transformers.
"The oil inside them is burning. So is the insulation between the copper wires," a sad and angry engineer explained. Like most Lebanese, he long ago lost faith in the "Middle East peace process" that began in Madrid nine years ago.
"There will never be peace between us," the engineer continued. "It is as if we were all doomed to act out parts in a movie." He was still repairing the Jamhour power station, bombed by Israel in February, when Bsalim was attacked early yesterday.
The engineer did not know what an impeccable diplomatic source told us later: that the Israeli military had wanted to attack the Syrian army in Lebanon when the present escalation started on Wednesday, but the US ambassador to Israel, the former head of a Jewish-American lobby group, Mr Martin Indyk, vetoed the idea because he did not want to endanger Israeli negotiations with Syria.
So Mr Indyk's missiles - we found the markings of a US Marine Corps Lockheed Martin "Hellfire" rocket on one of the fragments - were fired at Lebanese civilian power plants in the hills above Beirut and near the northern city of Tripoli.
The circle of cynicism is complete.
Damascus does not want the Israelis to pull out of southern Lebanon peacefully - 22 years after UN Security Council Resolution 425 demanded that they do so - because Hizbullah's ability to make Israeli occupation forces bleed is Syria's main hope of obtaining the return of the Golan Heights. And Israel attacks Lebanese civilians because it cannot destroy Hizbullah and cannot risk war with Syria.
In the past three days of Israeli attacks and Hizbullah counterattacks, with the exception of one Israeli soldier who was killed by a Katyusha rocket, all of the casualties were civilians.
