“You look anxious. Everyone is scared, it is human,” says travel agent Mohamad Barakat, offering a coffee from the espresso machine he keeps in a corner of his central Beirut office. “Nothing is going well,” he adds. The sound of Israeli drones – almost constant for days – is getting even louder.
As he speaks, the 56-year-old’s phone keeps ringing. People are desperately trying to leave Lebanon, where an Israeli ground invasion has followed weeks of devastating air assaults and attacks, killing more than 1,100 since September 16th and displacing as many as a million, according to authorities. Shortly afterwards, there are two more air strikes, both hitting close to Beirut’s only airport. Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines is the last airline flying: photographs shared online later show one of its planes landing amid the smoke of an attack.
Barakat is putting people on waiting lists, or in business class. They pay huge fees in cash. A rare available ticket – one-way to Rome for two days’ time – is going for $1,800 (€1,630).
The travel agent is originally from a village on the border with Palestine. He recalls sleeping in bathrooms at night as a child “because Israel came to kill us, bombing us”. He says his siblings and father have been injured by Israeli forces.
“The Israeli army, they are treating us like mice. I think if they have mice in their houses they take care of them more.” He believes its killing of civilians is disproportionate, and that the more people Israel kills, the more “enemies” it will create. “It’s our land, our country, our nation. We have the right to live like any other people in the world.”
He refuses to refer to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu by name, though begins addressing him directly. “You are not working for peace. You are working to get more lands,” he says. “Everybody in the world must know that this country, they don’t like peace. They like blood, to keep his people smiling for him, to [win] a new election and to keep him out of prison.”
Israel says it is acting in self-defence with the goal of returning tens of thousands of evacuated Israelis to their homes, while keeping them safe from Hizbullah rockets.
Barakat says thinking that Hizbullah is the problem is a “very wrong idea ... from 1948 until [the 1980s] there was no Hizbullah. [Israel] created Hizbullah ... If you are trying to kill me or to take my money or to take my house, sure, you will have this kind of resistance.”
Close to Barakat’s office is the Beirut district of Gemmayze, which international media have called the city’s “Soho” or “Greenwich Village”. Before the devastating economic crisis, its streets were packed and, even recently, crowds gathered outside its many bars and restaurants.
A 26-year-old barman says his workplace has been closed for three days.
“I mean, it’s war, they’re not gonna slap each other. They are doing what they always do,” he says, adding that he believes his area will not be targeted, because it is not associated with Hizbullah.
Whether his bar will continue to open “depends on the situation”, he adds. “We are used to it as Lebanese, these events used to happen.”
“We don’t deserve what’s happening in Lebanon,” says Fady Fayed, a 39-year-old, sitting outside another empty business nearby. He recently evacuated his mother, sister and 10 cats from Beirut’s southern suburbs to a safer location.
“What’s happening now is a very old story with the Zionists, not the Israeli people. We don’t have [a] problem with Israel ... Zionists, they will not stop war because they have a vision, like a mythology, to take all these places to make their own land, but I don’t think this is right ... You don’t deserve to die for another people to take land.”
He says what has happened in Gaza over the past year – during which more than 41,600 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, in an assault launched following the Hamas attacks of October 7th, which Israel says killed 1,200 people – has convinced him that “it’s not self defence. This is a genocide.”
In Lebanon, he worries about the same. “They are trying to kill Hizbullah, right? But there are civilians dying.”
Hours before Iran launched missiles at Israel on Tuesday evening, a 32-year-old taxi driver said he hoped Tehran would act. “We need all the countries that support Lebanon to get involved in this fight, because it’s not fair to leave us alone,” he said. “The US is giving high technology to Israel ... The US is the main devil in the world.”
The man lived in Dahiye, which has been repeatedly hit by air strikes, before moving his family out days ago.
“Israel is a terrorist state ... Israel is an occupier of the Palestinians and an occupied people can defend themselves. This started in 1948, not [on October 7th] last year,” he said.
In an indication of the huge range of crises that Lebanon, and its citizens, have weathered, not everyone is interested in talking about the current conflict. A 52-year-old from Mount Lebanon stands in the street in Gemmayze, railing against Lebanese authorities and their apparent corruption. Her sick sister can’t afford urgent medical treatment, she says. Their home was badly damaged in the 2020 Beirut port explosion – “we’re living among dust, it’s a violation of human rights” – and she says someone stole her business, which used to be an electronics store. “I wish Israel would drop a bomb on them,” she says, “so I could at least get my land back.” .
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