[LCM Articles] From The New York Times Magazine

[Fadi P. Kanaan]

September 3, 2006


Besieged 


By SCOTT ANDERSON

Things were getting back to normal in Tyre. The bomb craters in the main
streets had been filled in with dirt, which slowed traffic but at least made
passage possible. Some of the town’s more spectacular ruins were already
being shoveled into great heaps of rubble. Under the blanching sun of late
August, the Lebanese port city — 12 miles north of the Israeli border on the
Mediterranean coast — was returning to its usual dog-day rhythms. In the
mornings and again in the late afternoons, shoppers crowded the central
market, families strolled the corniche, the old seaside promenade, and
traffic along Jal al Baher Street, the main thoroughfare on the east side of
town, was a honking, barely moving mass. The midday hours, however, were
given over to a heat-imposed somnolence. In the old city, residents settled
in their leafy courtyards or brought chairs out to the narrow alleys to
while away the time with neighbors. The outdoor cafes along the marina
filled with men who appeared able to muster only enough energy to smoke. It
was a city at rest. Even Tyre’s multitude of cats took part, gathering in
bunches to sleep under the shade of parked cars. 

But there was also something new in Tyre. Spanning the highway at the
northern outskirts of the city stood a high, triumphal arch quickly
constructed from wood and yellow cloth. That color featured prominently on
the scores of new posters and banners that lined Jal al Baher Street — that
were to be found on lampposts and billboards throughout the east side of the
city, in fact. The images on these posters varied, as did their slogans, but
all ultimately echoed the same thing: praise for Hezbollah, praise for “the
divine victory” just won. 

It was Aug. 8, and the city had been under attack for 24 days. Sitting on
the veranda of her elegant house overlooking the marina of old Tyre,
46-year-old Madona Baradhi was extolling the virtues of her hometown. >From a
prominent Christian family whose members can trace their roots in Tyre back
centuries, Baradhi, an effervescent and congenitally cheerful
customer-service representative for the Libano-Française bank, explained
that she had traveled much of the world and found no place better. 

“Always when I am on vacation,” she said, “the last few days, I just want to
come home because I miss Tyre so much.” She waved a hand out over the bay.
“Every day I swim, I walk to my job in downtown, I go to the market. And the
people here are wonderful — very tolerant and easygoing. We’ve never had any
of the difficulties between the different groups like other places in
Lebanon.” 

Three days earlier, Baradhi’s veranda had afforded her a panoramic view of a
predawn, three-hour battle across the bay. Israeli commandos, apparently
dropped by helicopter, attacked Hezbollah positions, killing at least eight,
then covered their withdrawal by strafing the oceanfront promenade a
half-mile away with helicopter gunships. The previous afternoon, she watched
as four apartment buildings in the northern, predominantly Shiite suburbs
were brought down by heavy Israeli bombs in great clouds of black smoke and
brown dust. Even on that early evening, as she sipped espresso on her
veranda, the concussion of the explosions on the east side of town, two
miles away, were powerful enough to occasionally rattle her home’s
windowpanes, to cause its old joints to creak. 

“My friends in Beirut keep calling me,” she said. “ ‘Come stay with us. Tyre
is so dangerous.’ But no. How can I leave all this?” She waved her hand
again over the picturesque marina: no one was moving on its stone walks; the
colorful fishing boats had sat in their moorings for weeks. 

What appeared to be an almost delusionary optimism may actually have been a
practical fatalism, an understanding of the city’s violent history. Tyre’s
very geography was formed by war. During the Phoenician era, the heart of
the city was an impregnable island fortress just off the coast that
withstood countless sieges — until 332 B.C., when one of its besiegers,
Alexander the Great, came up with the idea of building a massive stone
causeway to the island. The city fell to his men, and over the centuries,
drifting sand built up around his causeway, forever linking the island to
the mainland. 

Tyre’s history is a dizzying saga of rise and fall, periods of splendor
followed by ones of abject ruin; the Egyptians, the Romans, the crusaders
and the Ottomans all passed through the city, and all left their mark for
good or ill. This march of civilizations and armies made Tyre into a complex
mosaic of cultures, religious sects and ethnic groups, a multicultural
checkerboard that is both the enduring promise and the enduring tragedy of
the place: promise because the city’s extraordinarily resilient people
always rebuild and patch things over; tragedy because they always have to.
In just the past 31 years, the city has endured a civil war, a foreign
military occupation, a half-dozen air or naval bombardments and at least two
massive suicide bombings. 

Despite this sad legacy — perhaps because of it — Tyre has long had a
reputation as a relaxed and open-minded place. Residents of all sectarian
and political stripes tend to echo Baradhi’s view of their city as a haven
of comity and tolerance. What’s more, until mid-July of this year, Tyre
appeared on the cusp of a very bright future, about to catch the economic
boom that had so transformed Beirut and other Lebanese coastal cities in
recent years. Designated a Unesco World Heritage site for its profusion of
Hellenic, Roman and Byzantine monuments — among other archaeological
highlights, Tyre can lay claim to the world’s largest Roman hippodrome — the
municipal government had just embarked on the construction of a new stretch
of oceanfront promenade along the neglected south shore of the old city,
workers laying tiles and erecting lampposts. Along Jal al Baher Street,
construction was under way on a modern shopping mall, while on Tyre’s south
bay a small vacant lot had just sold to a hotel consortium for nearly $2
million, a figure that astounded locals but testified to the city’s growing
tourist industry and dearth of decent hotel rooms. Tyre did not yet have a
Starbucks — so far in Lebanon, those symbols of the arriviste city were
limited to Beirut — but by this summer it was easy to imagine that that
blessed day was close at hand. 

And then, quite literally, a bomb dropped. It happened at about 5:30 on the
afternoon of Sunday, July 16, while Madona Baradhi was swimming with her
nieces and nephews at the fine, white-sand beach beside the Tyre Rest House,
the city’s most exclusive hotel. “It was a very nice day,” she recalled,
“hot but not too humid, and a lot of people were in the water. Suddenly, we
heard a very loud boom, and when I looked to the city, I saw this great
cloud of black smoke rising up from downtown. That’s when we knew Tyre was
to be targeted also.” 

The signal event that set this in motion came four days earlier, when
Hezbollah guerrillas launched a bold assault on an Israeli Army border
outpost, killing three soldiers and taking two others prisoner. The Israeli
response was predictably swift, if unexpectedly fierce. That same day, the
Israeli military carried out airstrikes on some 40 suspected Hezbollah
strongholds throughout southern Lebanon, then expanded their targets the
following day to include the runways of Beirut’s international airport and
highways and bridges throughout the country. When the heavy bomb dropped on
Sunday afternoon — it destroyed the top four floors of an apartment building
and killed at least 11 — the residents of Tyre knew that, once again, war
had come for them. 

“Within minutes,” Baradhi said, “everyone had left the beach, and by that
night, everyone was leaving Tyre. I could see them from here.” On her
veranda, she pointed to a headland four or five miles away. “A solid line of
red taillights, everyone going north.” 

As it turned out, Baradhi’s decision to stay was not based on simple blithe
disregard. By way of explanation, she led me into her study and took a
framed photograph down from a bookshelf. In the fall of 1982, when fighting
between Israeli troops and Palestinian guerrillas turned the old city of
Tyre into a pitched battlefield, the Baradhi family was evacuated to the
Tyre Rest House. The photograph was taken there: her father looking somewhat
befuddled in the foreground; a pensive, young Madona behind; and in the
background, a large crowd of other displaced people. 

“We were only there a few days,” she said, “but even that was enough to show
me what it was like to be a refugee. When we returned, the house had been
badly damaged — you can still see the crack in the wall outside. This is why
I will not leave now, because in Lebanon you can leave your home and never
come back.” She carefully set the photograph back on the shelf. “I look at
it very often. I always keep it close to me.” 

Baradhi’s decision also pointed up one of the fault lines that runs through
the city. In the days after that first bomb was dropped on Tyre, and under a
rain of Israeli leaflets ordering its inhabitants to leave, an estimated
95,000 of the city’s 110,000 residents fled north. The pattern of exodus was
not uniform, however; instead, it appeared that many calculated who this
war’s principal victims were likely to be and made their choice accordingly.
The overwhelming majority of Shiite civilians living in the Hezbollah
strongholds at the east end of town — close to 100 percent in some districts
— understood that they were at ground zero and left. In other parts of the
city — in al-Bass, the Palestinian refugee camp closer to downtown, and in
the Christian quarter at the westernmost tip of the coast — perhaps half the
population remained. As time went on and the violence intensified, this
phenomenon lent Tyre a surreal quality: vast urban stretches where nothing
moved and no one was seen interspersed with pockets where a modicum of
normal life continued, where stores were open and old men gathered in cafes
to observe the destruction occurring elsewhere. 

To the question of why she supported Hezbollah, Amira Khassem, a 58-year-old
shopkeeper, seemed perplexed, as if the answer was utterly self-evident.
“Because they are the resistance.” She shrugged. “Because they have brought
order.” Khassem evidently saw no contradiction between those two words,
“resistance” and “order.” Nor did she seem to appreciate that the “order”
Hezbollah had brought to south Lebanon had precipitated a war that had
turned much of the region into a battlefield and all but crippled the small
grocery store that she and her husband ran in downtown Tyre. Just around the
corner from their shop on Abu Deeb Street, two weeks into the war, Israeli
warplanes flattened a six-story building reported to be one of Hezbollah’s
local command centers, turning the surrounding commercial district into a
ghost town. For Khassem, “order” was a good deal simpler. 

“As a woman, I used to be very afraid walking alone around here after dark,”
she told me in the fourth week of fighting. “With Hezbollah here, I know
that now I am completely safe, that nothing will happen to me.” 

When I asked her who patrolled the streets prior to Hezbollah, Amira
shrugged again. “No one.” 

One of the consequences of the 18-year cat-and-mouse war between Hezbollah
and the Israeli occupying army in south Lebanon was the collapse of
virtually all Lebanese government institutions in the region. It was a void
Hezbollah deftly filled. Using money funneled from Iran, Hezbollah
established an elaborate social-welfare apparatus — schools, soup kitchens,
medical clinics, even law enforcement — designed to meet the needs of its
Shiite constituency throughout the country, but most especially in the
war-torn south. By the time Israel finally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000,
Hezbollah had become the de facto government in the region. The party had
already joined the Lebanese political process; today, with a tenth of the
seats in Parliament, Hezbollah has earned a place in the current coalition
government and also, given Lebanon’s political patronage system, the ability
to ensure that greater economic benefits flow to its supporters. In essence,
then, the Party of God (the literal translation of Hezbollah) has emerged as
the bringer of order and services to a chaos and ruin it helped create. 

And yet, according to many residents I spoke to, until mid-July of this
year, Hezbollah was neither particularly popular nor trusted in the
progressive and easygoing streets of Tyre. While Hezbollah members were
respected for their social-service programs for the poor and their personal
code of conduct — as part of a general morality checklist, members are not
supposed to smoke or drink — many city residents felt a lingering unease
over the party’s ultimate intentions. The Party of God had long since muted
its more radical rhetoric, including its call for an Iranian-style Islamic
government in Lebanon, but was it all a ruse to lull their opponents to
sleep? 

Such fears extended into the Shiite community. In the most recent elections
for Tyre City Council, Amal, the other principal Shiite political party in
Lebanon, ran a quiet scare campaign suggesting a Hezbollah victory would
mean segregated beaches and a ban on outdoor cafes serving alcohol. The
tactic apparently worked; in the council elections, the Amal slate (with the
support of the Christian minority) swept Hezbollah. Even into the first days
of this summer’s war, some in Tyre admitted to a quiet satisfaction that, at
last, Hezbollah was getting theirs, that however hard the Israelis might
strike their enemies, the Party of God had brought it on themselves by their
reckless cross-border adventurism. 

That attitude soon changed. With Hezbollah giving Israel a far better fight
than anyone had anticipated, and with Israeli warplanes engaging in what
most in Tyre viewed as the wanton destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure —
highways, bridges, gas stations and power plants throughout the country were
bombed — national pride and national anger fused together in support of
Hezbollah. In Tyre, the catalyzing moment came with the July 16
apartment-building bombing; the following day, three children were
critically injured when Israeli warplanes blew up the canal they were
swimming in. After that, even most Hezbollah critics in the city came to
regard the Israeli offensive as an attack on the entire Lebanese nation. The
militiamen who launched their Katyusha rockets on Israel from the farm
fields surrounding Tyre were no longer viewed as the cause of the city’s
woes, but as the city’s only defenders. 

This sense of civic unity played out in myriad ways. After keeping a lower
profile in the early days of the war, the Hezbollah auxiliaries — the
teenage spotters on their motor scooters, the bearded functionaries in their
20’s with their walkie-talkies — suddenly were to be found throughout the
city, lounging on street corners, calmly walking past police checkpoints.
Defiant posters bearing the Hezbollah logo or the likeness of its bearded
and bespectacled leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, were pasted to more and
more walls and city monuments. Even Chucrallah Nabil Hage, the Maronite
archbishop of Tyre and a man who would seem unlikely to be a fellow traveler
of Islamic fundamentalism, allowed that Hezbollah was now seen as the chief
protector of the city and the nation. “I’ve always had very good relations
with them,” he explained to me as we sat in the stone courtyard of his
church in the Christian quarter. “They are very forthright and decent men.” 

What did not change was the elusiveness of the actual fighters. As arguably
the world’s most disciplined and hierarchical guerrilla organization,
Hezbollah’s military wing operates with both a cell structure and a pyramid
structure: small units of salaried “soldiers” maneuvering independently of
one another, occasionally coming together for joint missions ordered by the
next rung up the chain of command, their security and secrecy maintained
from below by an army of spotters, couriers and neighborhood patrolmen. A
walk down a city street that might conceivably lead to a Hezbollah outpost
would invariably end — for a journalist, anyway — in a young unarmed man
stepping from the shadows to politely, but very firmly, announce that the
path forward was “blocked.” In this war, the fighters in the streets were
determined to remain almost as invisible as their enemies in the sky. 

This vast “neighborhood watch” apparatus also made it very difficult to tell
where support left off and coercion began. Any interviews attempted in
public settings — in a refugee camp, for example — would usually lead to a
young man with a close-cropped beard suddenly appearing at the periphery,
casually taking note of the questions asked and the answers given. Even
Hezbollah supporters who lauded the movement’s social-services programs in
their district became visibly nervous if asked for help in locating an
actual recipient, as if even this benign peek into the organization might be
a breach of the rules on the street. 

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this code of silence centered on the
conflict’s victims. In their “all front” war with Israel, Hezbollah had
meticulously planned for the psychological dimension, and it appeared that a
crucial component in this was to minimize the reporting of their battlefield
casualties. On this front, they were able to rely on the support — or
acquiescence — of the local medical establishment. While journalists were
routinely allowed access to those hospital wards containing wounded women
and children, other wards — presumably those housing adult males — were
off-limits, blocked by orderlies or the requisite bearded young men. The
same pattern extended to the dead: occasionally ghoulish public displays of
the torn bodies of obvious civilians and a curious absence of those of
fighting-age men. 

Each car in the long convoy was crammed to overflowing — women, children,
the elderly — and as they passed, all stared back with wide, uncomprehending
eyes. They were coming from a cluster of villages at the extreme southwest
corner of Lebanon, flush on the border with Israel, and for the past two and
a half weeks, they had sheltered in basements and root cellars as their
communities on the war’s front lines were pounded into rubble. Taking
advantage of a lull in the fighting, they had chosen that day — July 31 — to
make their escape, fastening strips of white cloth to their cars’ antennas
and falling in behind a small United Nations convoy heading for Tyre. 

The reason for the lull was itself rooted in tragedy. The previous morning,
Israeli warplanes bombed a home at the edge of Qana, a small town eight
miles southeast of Tyre, in the basement of which two extended families had
taken shelter; by the time rescue workers were finished, 28 bodies — 16 of
them children — had been pulled from the ruins. By perverse coincidence,
Qana was the same town where Israeli artillery killed 108 residents seeking
refuge in a United Nations compound during the 1996 incursion known as
Operation Grapes of Wrath. 

In response to the outcry over the bombing, Israel had announced a 48-hour
suspension of “offensive” aerial operations. While no one was quite sure
what that meant, throughout south Lebanon, rescue workers struggled to reach
those who had been trapped by the fighting and get them out. Where many of
them were taken was to the four-story U.N.-administered school in al-Bass,
the Palestinian refugee camp in Tyre that had long ago become more like a
Palestinian neighborhood. If it struck anyone as ironic that Lebanese should
seek sanctuary in a Palestinian refugee camp, it was actually an irony that
didn’t end there; al-Bass was originally a refugee camp for Armenians
escaping the genocide in Turkey in 1915, a purpose that changed only with
the flood of displaced Palestinians into Lebanon following the 1948
Arab-Israeli War. 

Farouz Atamian, a 51-year-old sanitation worker for the municipal government
and one of the last Armenians in al-Bass, has lived there his entire life.
“It’s very nice here,” he told me during the war, while sitting in the small
garden of his ramshackle home. “We have more room than most of the others
because we are one of the original families in the camp.” 

Among the estimated 10,000 Palestinian inhabitants of al-Bass, there seemed
to be a kind of collective discomfiture over what was happening in their
adopted home, a sense that while this wasn’t technically their fight,
perhaps it should be. After all, Hezbollah was taking on the “Zionist
entity” and doing very well, and this was the same enemy the Palestinians
had battled with far less success for 58 years. 

Their sideline status in this fight could partly be attributed to the
historical schism that runs through Islam — Hezbollah is Shiite,
Palestinians are overwhelmingly Sunni — but it also underscored the troubled
position they hold generally in Lebanon. Seen by many Lebanese of all
persuasions as a destabilizing force in the country, Palestinians are often
held to blame for the 1975 civil war and even more for historically using
Lebanon as a base to attack Israel, then offering only feeble resistance in
the face of Israel’s periodic and ruinous retaliatory attacks. As many
Shiites in Tyre will point out, usually with a touch of pride, it was the
Palestinian presence that provoked the 1982 Israeli invasion that so
devastated their city, while it was Shiite militiamen — precursors to
Hezbollah — who dealt the invaders their greatest blow: the successive
bombings of Israel’s two command centers in downtown Tyre in 1982 and 1983
that together killed 135 Israeli soldiers, events still referred to in
Israeli military circles as the first and second Tyre catastrophes. 

“In this war against Israeli aggression, we all have our roles to perform,”
explained Abu Hussein Ali Salem, a craggy-faced man of 66 who is one of the
“civic leaders” of al-Bass camp. “So far, Hezbollah has taken the lead on
the battlefield, and we” — the Palestinians — “are contributing from behind:
by taking care of the wounded, the refugees. That, of course, could change
at any time. If we feel our place is on the battlefield, we are all prepared
to go.” 

As a younger man, Salem explained, he had been a fighter for the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the militant Palestinian guerrilla
organization responsible for many of the more spectacular terror attacks
against Israel in the 1970’s. He claimed to have taken three Israeli
soldiers prisoner during the bitter battle for Tyre in 1982 and subsequently
to have executed them. “It was at the north end of the city,” he said, “and
I was cut off from my unit. The Israelis were advancing, and I had to leave,
so I just turned to them with my machine gun — pffft.” He swept a gnarled
finger before him. “I had tried to talk to them before, but they never said
a word. They died right there.” 

There was something slightly unconvincing about this story — or perhaps it
had just dulled in the telling over the years. In any event, Salem professed
to be more interested in the future. “If the Israelis come to al-Bass, it
will be their graveyard. All of us here are ready to fight — and we will
fight them as well as Hezbollah.” 

During Israel’s air-war suspension, several thousand refugees had come into
Tyre from the southern villages. Most continued up the coastal highway to
Sidon or Beirut, determined to get as far away as possible from the
principal battle zone, generally delineated as everywhere south of the
Litani River. Nevertheless, a more buoyant mood began to spread among many
who remained in Tyre, a seeping optimism that the respite might be the
harbinger of a general cease-fire. Those hopes ended when, just before the
close of the 48-hour window, Israel resumed its airstrikes on the city’s
outskirts. 

On the first day of the resumption of the fighting, I dropped by the U.N.
school in al-Bass camp to talk with some of the newly arrived refugees. Each
classroom had been taken over by several families — usually grouped together
by their home village — and set in neat stacks were whatever meager
belongings they had managed to grab up in their flight: blankets, plastic
bags filled with clothes. In the corridors outside, a surprising number of
elderly women paced or sat slumped against the walls, many of them muttering
to themselves or to anyone who came into their range. 

At about 4 p.m., the building reverberated from the sound of four very loud
bangs — apparently nonlethal concussion grenades detonated close by — and at
one corner of the school courtyard, girls began running into one another’s
arms, screaming and crying. More girls kept rushing in to join the group,
the hysteria infectious, until perhaps 40 of them were mashed together in
one small, screaming knot. A man hurried over and began pulling the girls
free, yanking them from each other’s arms one by one, as if he were breaking
up a fight. 

On the morning of Aug. 3, a small crowd of doctors, orderlies and volunteers
from the Lebanese Red Cross milled about the parking lot of the government
hospital in al-Bass. They had gathered there to perform a mass burial.
Muslim custom holds that the dead should be buried in their home villages,
and quickly — on the day of their death whenever possible. But that
tradition had now collapsed in south Lebanon. Because of both the sheer
numbers of victims and the exodus from the region that the war had sparked —
often, there were no family members around to perform the ceremony — bodies
were being brought to the government hospital in al-Bass and warehoused in
two refrigerated trucks outside its gates. 

Hospital administrators had already performed one mass burial in late July.
A backhoe had cut two long trenches in a nearby field, the 72 dead were set
down in neat rows — each coffin identified by a number so it could
eventually be reinterred in the home village of the deceased — and then the
trenches were filled in, the whole task completed in a couple of hours. 

By early August, however, the trucks were full again. Off to one side of the
hospital parking lot, stacks of coffins for future victims were piled five
and six high, maybe 100 in all. As proper wood had long since disappeared
from Tyre, these were made from cheap shelving material — particleboard
topped by a thin veneer of white plastic — and affixed with simple
stainless-steel door handles for lifting. The local Palestinian carpenter
who had constructed most of the coffins, Ali Hussein Firmawi, estimated that
they cost $40 apiece and that he had already built around 185. 

“They only take about 10 minutes to make,” he said. “A little longer for the
children, because those sizes aren’t standard.” He was not at all proud of
his work, he explained — to build a proper coffin took weeks — but the need
was urgent, and he had no choice in the matter. 

After much conferring, the hospital administrators decided to postpone the
burial because of “the security situation”; there was a lot of shelling
around the city that morning, and a large gathering of people might draw the
notice of the Israeli warplanes and drones overhead. Over the coming days,
there would be more postponements, and the odor emanating from the trucks
would grow until it permeated a wide swath of al-Bass camp. 

Tyre now became a city closing in on itself. Against the near-constant
thrumming of invisible Israeli spy drones — a sound very much like a
lawnmower — the Hezbollah fighters on the outskirts of town and in
neighboring villages launched ever more Katyusha rockets toward Israel,
drawing ever more Israeli bombing raids in response. As the city grew
increasingly isolated from the outside world, rumors became the currency on
the streets: there was about to be a peace deal; Israel had finally launched
its much-delayed ground offensive; Hezbollah had Israeli forces pinned down
just inside the border; the Israelis were sweeping north and might be in
Tyre within hours. 

The pace of events only added to a general sense of fatigue and
disorientation. In the predawn of Aug. 5, there came the Israeli commando
raid that Madona Baradhi witnessed, and later that same morning, a missile
attack on Jal al Baher Street that killed two young men on their motor
scooters. The next afternoon, Israeli missiles hit several cars on the
coastal road, their occupants apparently trying to run the gantlet out of
the city. Rumors floated back that a family was killed trying to follow an
International Red Cross convoy out of town; an alternate rumor held that the
car had been coming the other way and traveling alone and that the missile
had wounded two. 

Along with a cluster of doctors and nurses and other journalists, I was
waiting by the emergency-room entrance of Jabal Amel hospital for those
coastal-road casualties to be brought in when there came a terrific bang
very close by. Two hundred yards down Jal al Baher Street, two Israeli
antipersonnel missiles had exploded, and amid a swirl of brown dust and
leaves torn from a nearby tree, a wounded man lay on his back in the street.
He had just raised his right arm and appeared to be trying to stand when a
third missile came in, lifting him six feet in the air and catapulting him
face down onto the sidewalk. Incredibly, the man still clung to life, his
mouth gasping for air, his severed right arm lying amid a sprawl of plastic
coffee cups and shredded leaves. Within minutes, an ambulance arrived to
take him up to the Jabal Amel emergency room, where, with one last shudder,
he finally died. Nurses quickly wrapped his body in thick plastic sheeting. 

The situation just kept getting worse. On Aug. 7, the Israeli military
announced a ban on all vehicular traffic south of the Litani River. The sole
exception, they said, would be medical vehicles with prior approval —
although Israel wasn’t giving approval to anyone, so the point was moot. The
ban meant that the city’s problems, already dire, were about to have a
cascading effect. With all gas and oil deliveries cut off for nearly a
month, its hospitals and ambulances were operating on emergency backup
supplies — and they, too, would start running out in another week or so.
With stores of insulin dwindling, Tyre’s diabetics might soon start dying.
With thousands of refugees crowded into the city’s schools and the
sanitation system collapsing — to say nothing of the still-unburied bodies
decomposing at the edge of al-Bass camp — there was growing concern of an
epidemic. 

“So right now, we’re experiencing a humanitarian crisis,” Dr. Ghassan
Farran, a member of Tyre’s city council, told me on Aug. 8. “Very soon, it
will be a catastrophe.” Somehow things got worse yet — Israeli warplanes
destroyed the last small bridge across the Litani. A fallen tree was
maneuvered into place to span the breach, but even this merely underscored a
remarkable fact: the only way in or out of a city that had once been home to
more than 100,000 people was now across a single 18-inch-wide log. 

And then on Aug. 12, the Israeli and Lebanese governments finally agreed to
a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, Resolution 1701. After one last furious exchange
that continued right until the moment the cease-fire took effect, the guns
and rockets and warplanes fell silent over southern Lebanon. 

Within the air-conditioned confines of her office in the Libano-Française
bank, Madona Baradhi was in a fine mood. Just over a week into the
cease-fire, most of the residents of Tyre had come back from their temporary
exiles. The central market was filled with shoppers, and the candy vendors
had returned to their little stands on the northern corniche. 

“Everything must come to an end,” she said, “and so it has with this war.”
Still, Baradhi admitted, it had been a trying week. Each day since the bank
reopened had brought a steady stream of people into her office who had lost
everything and were trying to figure out how to rebuild their lives again.
“They are taking out their savings, their pensions, trying to arrange loans
— so many people. That is why I say the Lebanese are both the winners and
losers in this war. We are the winners because we resisted Israel, but we
are also the losers for how much we suffered.” 

As to the question on everyone’s mind — whether the cease-fire would lead to
an extended period of peace, or was merely a prelude to the next round of
war — Baradhi, like many in Tyre, was philosophical. “Of course, I hope for
peace, but it depends on the people, the choice they make.” 

In the Shiite neighborhoods on the east side of Tyre, that choice appeared
to have already been made. With its “sacred victory” over Israel, support
for Hezbollah had soared, and the Party of God was riding that crest both by
maintaining its defiant stand and by, once again, being seen as the chief
provider to those in need. In the war-damaged neighborhoods, as in the
ruined villages throughout the south, Hezbollah engineers were surveying the
damage that had been done and drawing up blueprints for reconstruction,
while the party’s field representatives were handing out cash payments to
the homeless. As for Hezbollah ever surrendering its weapons to the incoming
Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers — both the most crucial and contentious
point in the debate over Resolution 1701 — the idea was met with derision by
the group’s supporters. 

“Why should the winners give up their weapons?” asked Moen Zaidan, an
orange-juice seller on Abu Deeb Street. “That never happens in war. No,
Hezbollah knows it must keep its weapons to prepare for the next war.” As
for when that war might come, Zaidan claimed to have a reliable guide.
“We’ll know it’s starting by what happens in Kiryat Shemona,” he said,
referring to the town in northern Israel that has been a frequent target of
Hezbollah’s rockets. “Because we are in a balance with them. If the Israeli
Army moves back there, then we’ll know it’s about to happen.” 

In this part of town, few seemed to doubt that war would break out again;
the real topic of discussion was when. Perhaps this cease-fire would last
for a few weeks, perhaps for a few years, but at some point, the missiles
between Hezbollah and Israel would start flying again. In the meantime, Ali
Hussein Firmawi, the Palestinian coffin maker, was staying busy. With the
cease-fire, his open-ended work order with the municipal government to build
temporary coffins had come to an end, but, he said, he had recently been
commissioned to build 40 more. 

“For Hezbollah,” he explained outside his small carpentry shop in al-Bass.
“These are to be of much better quality than the other ones. And the good
thing about Hezbollah, they always pay upfront, and in cash.” 

Scott Anderson has covered numerous wars for the magazine. His last article
was about National Guardsmen returning from Iraq.

 

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