An eerie calm fell over the Lebanese capital in the hours after Israeli warplanes pummelled its southern suburbs, Hezbollah’s seat of power where hundreds of thousands of civilians live.
The Iran-backed group’s long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed on Friday in a massive bombardment that was the first of the nearly 48 hours of incessant airstrikes. Scores of top commanders and officials were killed alongside him as well as in the attacks that followed. Many civilians are also believed to have been killed.
More than 24 hours after Nasrallah’s body was recovered from the deep pit left behind by the heavy bombs that killed him, a funeral for the militant leader is yet to be scheduled – highly unusual in Islamic tradition where the dead receive a quick burial.
The group is also yet to appoint a new secretary general, defying long-held expectations that the group would rapidly unfurl a succession plan after Nasrallah’s death.
This has added to a pervading sense that Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militant group which for decades dominated the country’s politics, had swiftly become a ghost organization. In one fell swoop, Israel seemed to remove not just the group’s leadership, but perhaps also all its contingency plans, further evidence of the profound scope of Israel’s infiltration of the group’s ranks.
“It’s fabricated. There’s no proof that he’s dead,” said Hassan, a Hezbollah supporter leaning on a parked moped, his eyes glassy with tears. “He’s going to appear soon and he’s going to surprise us.”
Abu Mohamad, a middle-aged Shia man displaced from southern Lebanon to a sidewalk in central Beirut, said, “It doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead, because a leader like Nasrallah lives in us always,” he said. “We will continue on the path he set, and we will return to our homes.”
Nasrallah inspired strong feelings in the Lebanese – revered and reviled in equal measure. But Lebanese across the divide are reeling from the tectonic shifts to the country’s political landscape, and the humanitarian devastation that it has wreaked.
Lebanese authorities believe just under 1,100 people have been killed and around 1 million have been displaced by Israel’s intensified bombardment campaign since it began last Monday. A response, Israel says, to the rocket attacks from Hezbollah that began a day after Hamas attacked on October 7, and which have forced 60,000 people from their homes in northern Israel.
Lebanon’s border villages have also been emptied of around 100,000 villagers by Israeli attacks in turn. Still, Hezbollah has vowed to keep up its border rocket fire until the end of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
Now, large parts of the densely populated southern suburbs have been devastated. The displaced have taken to the relatively affluent, and still untouched, western parts of the capital where they have camped out on sidewalks, parks, schools, churches and mosques.
Mattresses and blankets for displaced families cover the Corniche, the city’s seaside boardwalk, known for its views of the eastern Mediterranean against the backdrop of verdant green mountains.
When Israeli bombs hit the south of the capital on Friday, the streets of west Beirut filled with people throughout the night. Some of the displaced were chatting on the curb, a few lay asleep on benches. Women cradled sleeping babies and toddlers. Children wandered the streets in their pajamas, snaking aimlessly through double parked cars.
On the city’s commercial Hamra street, a crowd outside an abandoned building forced the traffic to a near stop. A man knocked down the iron gate, allowing a flood of displaced people in for shelter.
It was 3 o’clock in the morning. Nasrallah had only recently been assassinated – though not yet confirmed by his group – and many of his supporters were trying to put on a brave face.
“We’re ok! I’m sure our home is ok. There’s nothing to worry about,” one woman in her early 60s told a group of people around her.
Days later, the sense of dread is more palpable. Many of the country’s displaced have lost loved ones but can barely find the time to grieve as they scramble for shelter and food. Those not yet personally impacted by the bombardment must contend with the unknown territory into which the death of Nasrallah and his cadre of senior leaders has thrust the country.
“The assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah came to open a wound in the heart of the Lebanese,” the Patriarch of the Maronite Church, Bechara Boutros al-Rahi said at Sunday Mass.
Rahi has long been one of Hezbollah’s most prominent critics. In January he implicitly criticized Hezbollah for dragging the south of Lebanon into conflict with its cross-border rocket and drone attacks on Israel. Hezbollah has repeatedly vowed not to cease fire on its southern border until the end of Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza.
Rahi had also condemned “the culture of death that has brought nothing but imaginary victories and shameful defeats to our country.”
Nasrallah’s main Sunni foes have also condemned the assassination. “The assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has brought Lebanon and the region to a new phase of violence. It was a cowardly act that we condemn in every way,” Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Saad Hariri said in a post on X.
“We disagreed a lot with the late (Nasrallah) and with his party, and we met infrequently. However Lebanon serves as a tent for all, and in these extremely challenging times, our unity and our solidarity remains foundational,” Hariri continued.
Lebanon’s complex confessional power-sharing structure has mean that divisions frequently spark internal strife, political paralysis and even violence. But Israel, technically classified in Lebanon as an “enemy state,” has historically brought the fragmented country together, albeit temporarily.
Meanwhile, civilians wandering the streets for safety have borne the cost of this new war.
At central Martyr’s Square in central Beirut, against the backdrop of a poster that read in big letters “Beirut will not die” barefoot children were smeared in black dirt and families slept on straw mats. An elderly woman who fled her neighbourhood, leaving all possessions behind, was selling tissue boxes.
“We sleep on sidewalks because we have no choice,” said Umm Fawzi, from southern Beirut. “I swear that we fled only with the clothes on our back. There was not a living soul left in the neighborhood.”
