Beirut, Lebanon – Zahra, 12, woke up scared on Monday morning.
“I was so stressed because of the bombs,” the little girl from Borj Qalaouiye told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Zahra’s village lies between Nabatieh and Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon, but in October last year she and her family fled to Laylaki, a southern suburb of Beirut, shortly after Hezbollah and Israel began trading cross-border attacks.
The same day, she had another scare.
“I was so scared and then I saw on the news that they were going to bomb our building,” she said of the family’s refuge in Beirut.
On Monday morning, residents across Lebanon – including the southern suburbs and the Bekaa Valley – received messages from unknown numbers warning them to leave their homes quickly.
In total, around 80,000 messages were sent.
“I started crying,” Zahra says. “I was yelling at my mother to put her phone away and get dressed.”
No place to sleep anymore
Zahra and her parents went to a relative’s house in the Baabda district, a short drive east of Laylaki.
They fled as Israeli airstrikes killed at least 585 people and wounded 1,645, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, many of them believed to be civilians.
It is the deadliest day in Lebanon in 34 years, since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.
Eyewitness videos showed cars crashing bumper to bumper on roads in southern Lebanon, with some clips showing smoke rising in the background from nearby attacks.
The two-hour journey from Tyre reportedly took some people more than 14 hours, with drivers and passengers stuck in traffic jams less than an hour from home.
Many were fleeing without knowing where to go.
Diana Younes’ husband was driving home to Sawfar, a village 35 minutes east of Beirut in the Chouf Mountains, when he came across a woman and her daughter standing by the side of the road at 11 p.m.
Younes said her husband stopped to help them, but: “He asked them where they were going, and they said they didn’t know.”
Their house was already full of family members who felt unsafe in Beirut’s southern suburbs, but Younes and her husband invited them into their home anyway.
“We don’t know them, but it’s forbidden,” she said, using a flexible term that expresses sympathy for someone’s suffering in this context.
“We have no place for people to sleep anymore. They will sleep on the balcony.”
Many schools and daycare centers have closed. Some schools have been converted into shelters for newly displaced people, a figure that already stood at 102,000 before Monday’s attacks.
Even in areas that were not affected, few people felt safe.
Two women sitting on their balconies in Zouk Mikael, a predominantly Christian neighborhood about a 30-minute drive from Beirut, said the muffled explosions in the distance reminded them that their safety was not guaranteed.
“We saw death today”
While many fled, others were killed in their homes.
Photos circulated on social media showing 50 children and 94 women killed in the airstrikes, according to the health ministry.
Tel Aviv Tribune reported at least 37 towns and villages hit by airstrikes, while the Israeli military claimed to have hit 1,600 Hezbollah targets.
Earlier in the day, Israeli officials had ominously urged the Lebanese to avoid areas where Hezbollah “may operate or store weapons.”
An Israeli army spokesman warned people to “move away from danger for their own safety” without explaining where the danger or safety was.
Hussein was in Rayak, in eastern Lebanon, a town best known for two things: a disused train station and a very quiet air base.
“It’s a residential area and there’s nothing related to any political party or anything like that,” said Hussein, who asked that his full name not be used to protect his safety and privacy.
Because he was far from any militant activity, Hussein felt safe. But then the Israeli airstrikes began.
The strikes hit a school, a local gallery and a local dairy factory funded by the European Union and linked to the United Nations Development Programme, Hussein said.
Tel Aviv Tribune called the factory, Liban Lait, for confirmation, and was told the factory was surrounded by airstrikes but had not been directly hit.
A winery in Rayak posted a video on Instagram of the damage sustained in Monday’s strikes.
“We saw death today,” Hussain said from the nearby town of Zahle, where he had taken refuge.
“The plane was above us and crashed left and right, on the seaside, on the outskirts… They were blowing everything up.”
The warnings from Israeli officials ring hollow to many analysts.
“The Israelis will tell you that every house is equipped with Hezbollah weapons, but can you prove it? Of course not,” Michael Young, editor-in-chief of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“The Israelis are not interested in finding weapons, they want to sow terror in the Shiite community… because they want the Shiite community to turn against Hezbollah.”
Hezbollah and Israel began exchanging cross-border attacks on October 8, a day after Israel launched a relentless war on Gaza in apparent retaliation for Hamas’s operation inside Israel in which 1,139 people were killed and 240 others captured.
More than 102,000 people have fled to the Lebanese side of the border and around 60,000 Israelis are internally displaced from the other side.
On September 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu updated his government’s war aims to include returning these people home.
The events that followed were described as “a Netflix series” by Lebanese people who spoke to Tel Aviv Tribune.
Pagers exploded on Tuesday. On Wednesday, walkie-talkies killed 37 Hezbollah members and civilians, including at least two children.
Israeli fighter jets broke the sound barrier over Beirut on Thursday as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech telling Netanyahu that people would not return to northern Israel as long as Israel’s war on Gaza continued.
On Friday, Israeli missiles destroyed a residential building in a Beirut suburb where Hezbollah commanders were reportedly meeting.
At least 52 people were killed, including Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil and 15 other Hezbollah leaders.
Israel continued to strike hard at southern Lebanon and the Bekaa on Saturday and Sunday before Monday’s bloodbath.
“What we are seeing now is an Israeli effort to exert strong pressure,” Young said, adding that the Israelis have declared themselves “prepared to cross all red lines.”
“Liars… who support genocide”
Many Lebanese are angry with the international community, particularly the United States, for its failure to hold Israel accountable in Lebanon or Palestine over the past 11 months.
Fatima Kandil, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs, fled Monday to stay with relatives, sending an angry message to the administration of US President Joe Biden, which continues to send weapons to Israel despite a UN court order to stop plausible acts of genocide.
“The American government that is ‘democratic’ and ‘very concerned’ about peace in the Middle East… the protector of human beings that hits us with weapons… and all these countries that care about peace, children and families, they are liars,” she said. “Because they support genocide.”
Among her relatives, Zahra, a 12-year-old girl who has been displaced twice, would like to be able to return home to Borj Qalaouiye.
“This is the first time I’ve experienced war, and I don’t like war,” she says with naive irony. “I cry about it every day.”
Although this is Zahra’s first war, many of her family members remember the 2006 war with Israel or the Israeli occupation from 1985 to 2000.
“Sometimes I ask about it, but (my parents) don’t tell me anything because I’m so stressed,” she said.
Zahra misses playing with her friends and missing her family when she comes to visit, she said, adding that because of her displacement, she has no friends and so spends her time drawing or sleeping.
“I don’t like it,” she said, longing for the war to end so she could go home.
“Back home, my house was filled with friends and family.”
