Dwarfed by destruction, Imad Shami, 60, a Lebanese barber, stoops to feed an injured cat: an absurd snapshot of life against the obliterated graveyard of buildings around him.
The smashed landscape of the heavily-populated Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut – largely under the control of Hezbollah – shows it was the focus of Israel’s ferocious bombardment.
Behind the father-of-five, civilians looking to salvage belongings scramble through the skeleton of half-destroyed tower block, that tilts into the ground at an alarming 45-degree angle.
In front of him, the ash covers a moonscape of bomb craters.
Imad was one of a handful of civilians who stayed during the near-14 months of bloody conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, because he wanted to feed the 70 or so stray cats in the surrounding streets. He remained even during the final hours before the ceasefire when Israel pounded these streets into oblivion. A ceasefire has since silenced the explosions, but Imad worries it won’t end the crisis.
“Lebanon and the Lebanese don’t have a future; we jump from catastrophe to catastrophe,” he says bleakly, emptying cans of cat food next to a tangle of concrete that was, until Monday night, a seven-story building housing multiple families.
A family photo album, dentistry exam papers in English, and a neon child’s backpack are among the only signs that humans lived here.
“I am 60 years old. When I was a kid, my mum showed me the tracer fire and lines of bullets. All my life has been like this.”
“Every ten years, we have war or catastrophe — we try to stand up, and we get crushed.”
Lebanon, he says, has lurched from civil war and conflicts in the 2000s with Israel to an unprecedented financial collapse a few years ago, a vast explosion at Beirut port, and now this.
“We try to work hard and to keep safe. We were working hard and trying to make our life normal when this war came and took us back 20 years.”
As the dust settles on some of the hardest-hit areas of the country, Lebanese civilians have been returning to their bombed-out homes, facing another uncertain future. A US and France brokered ceasefire ended more than a year of violence that saw Israeli strikes kill nearly 3,800 people in Lebanon and displaced some 1.2 million more. More than 70 people in Israel—more than half civilians—were also killed, along with dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon faces the brunt of the impact, with the World Bank saying there is at least $8.5 billion (£6.7bn) in damages and losses from the war.
The NGO Mercy Corps, that also warns that Lebanon’s economy has suffered a “staggering blow,” said this week the country’s GDP contracted by an estimated 6.4 per cent —equivalent to $1.15bn—during the conflict’s escalation from mid-September, when Israel launched a ground invasion on top of its airstrikes, to late November alone.
- For more: Elrisala website and for social networking, you can follow us on Facebook
- Source of information and images “independent”“
