A shaky truce in Beirut

There was an Israeli drone buzzing over Beirut at 8 a.m. on November 27, four hours after a ceasefire was signed and the shooting stopped. It soon disappeared and a feeling of elation set in. It was the best day we had in months.

The Christmas spirit was palpable in Gemmayzeh, a Christian neighborhood in central Beirut. Christmas decorations were going up and the bars were packed that night. Lebanese in the diaspora who’d canceled their holiday trips to Beirut rebooked that day. But the Lebanese also know how to manage their expectations — they always hedge good news with dread.

The agreement lays out an initial sixty-day truce, during which Hezbollah is required to withdraw its forces north of the Litani river, and the Lebanese Army is to take its place. Israel meanwhile is required to gradually withdraw from occupied Lebanese territory. After the initial truce, the parties will work to establish a more permanent peace.

In the week after the deal was signed, Israel attacked Lebanon several dozen times and Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel once, in what the group called a “defensive warning.” The agreement allows Israel to strike Hezbollah if it violates the agreement by reconstituting its forces in the south or not withdrawing.

“With the same power we used to secure the agreement, we will now enforce it,” Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, said in a video statement the night before the agreement was signed.

Conflicts often reach their peak intensity just before a ceasefire, as warring factions attempt to secure strategic advantages or force concessions. In 2021, the fighting in Afghanistan escalated dramatically in the weeks leading up to the American withdrawal. During the final stages of the Bosnian War in 1995, combat intensified as Bosnian, Croat and Serb forces engaged in fierce battles before the Dayton Accords were signed. This pre-ceasefire escalation is often fueled by the perception that the end of active combat may limit future opportunities for strategic gains.

One week before the ceasefire came into effect in Lebanon, the fighting here reached a similar climax. Virtually everyone in central Beirut heard, and felt, the four Israeli air strikes in quick succession at 4 a.m. on November 23. They were described by many as the most powerful explosions felt since Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated almost a month before in the southern suburbs.

According to several security analysts, that morning the Israelis used bunker-buster munitions designed to penetrate deep underground before detonating, the same type used to kill Nasrallah. The target of the strikes still isn’t clear, but they killed at least twenty-nine people and injured sixty-six, with another thirty people still “missing.” Hezbollah Member of Parliament Amin Chirri denied that any of the group’s personnel were in the building. But Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported the strikes as an attempt to assassinate Hezbollah leader Muhammad Haydar. Others have speculated the target was senior commander Talal Hamiyah. The fate of both men remains unclear.

The majority of strikes in the greater Beirut area have been in Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hezbollah has a strong base of support. This particular strike was in Basta, a neighborhood as close to the center of Beirut as it gets. Rescue crews, members of the Lebanese Army and masked men with an unclear affiliation were at the strike site that morning, while the press was kept a hundred yards away. One mangled body after another was pulled from the rubble.

The following evening, Hezbollah launched more than 250 missiles and drones into central Israel, some of which landed in Tel Aviv. “A blow in the heart of Beirut equals a blow in Tel Aviv,” the group said. Israel responded in turn with a series of very heavy air strikes in Dahieh. This may sound unlikely, but until this point, both sides had been exercising a degree of restraint. Hezbollah was using its precision-guided missiles sparingly, and Israeli strikes in Dahieh usually came with preliminary evacuation orders. There was lots of room to escalate, and the fighting was spinning out of control.

On the morning of November 26, I was back at the air strike site in Basta. A rescue worker said they were still pulling out body parts. Omar Kabalan and his family barely survived the strike. His building is riddled with damage, and the building adjacent was demolished. He took his family outside and waited on the curb until they could see the full devastation at sunrise.

This is the second home Omar has lost in a year of war. His family home in Mais al-Jabal, a village near the Israeli border, was destroyed earlier in the year. “Yet all of this is not important compared to the sacrifices that our fighters are making on the front lines. Al-Sayyed Hassan [Nasrallah], this man was incomparable, no one can replace him. He is the type of person who comes around once every thousand years. After his loss, we have nothing to regret,” he said.

Omar is right — Nasrallah was irreplaceable to Hezbollah.

Over the last several decades, few world leaders have gained a cult of personality as strong as his. Nasrallah’s speeches were legendary — he had an authoritative charisma that made everyone in Lebanon, even Hezbollah’s staunchest enemies, pay attention. For Hezbollah’s supporters, he had the aura of a demigod.

More than two months after Nasrallah was assassinated, he is still Hezbollah’s leader in spirit. Part of this is a coping mechanism for the supporters, who feel like his death is the death of the organization. They are still in the early stages of grief. The acting secretary-general, Naim Qassem, attracts significantly less adoration. There are few portraits of Qassem plastered around the Shiite areas, possibly because they’re scared he too could be killed. Qassem was never supposed to be secretary-general anyway. It should have been Nasrallah’s cousin, Hashem Safieddine, head of the Hezbollah executive council, who was widely seen as second in command. He too was assassinated in October.

Virtually every day for two months, dozens of journalists and morbidly curious civilians would converge on a hilltop overlooking Dahieh to watch the airstrikes land after evacuation orders were issued. There were tents and lawn chairs and shisha-smoking and packed lunches — people were literally tailgating at the air strikes.

On the afternoon of November 26, Israel issued a flurry of evacuation orders — twenty buildings in total were about to be struck. The Israelis either strike without warning, like they did in Basta, when the purpose is to assassinate, or they issue evacuation orders, in which the purpose is to destroy infrastructure.

We headed quickly for the tailgate, but the city was crammed with traffic as panicked residents fled in every direction. As we sat bumper to bumper in central Beirut, the Israelis struck again without warning, just around the corner from the last strike in Basta. The sound of sirens was non-stop. Then we got news of another air strike in central Beirut. It was pandemonium.

There was no way we were going to make it to the hilltop at this pace. My driver checked the evacuation orders again, as he crafted a very dangerous scheme. He made a U-turn and suddenly we were in that part of the city adorned with portraits of Nasrallah and piled with air strike rubble. He had taken us down El Imam Musa al-Sadr Street — directly along the edge of Dahieh, the heart of Hezbollah territory. We rolled down the windows in anticipation of a strike and sped down the empty street at almost 60mph.

The air strikes started landing to our right, one only a hundred yards from the car. We rejoiced after passing a Lebanese Army checkpoint on the other side of Dahieh. By the time we made it to the hilltop, we found out that the strikes had already happened — all twenty of them. The Israeli air force struck twenty targets in 120 seconds, and we’d driven right past it all.

There were several dozen air strikes in the greater Beirut area that day and throughout the evening. I spent most of it waiting with some colleagues next to a building that was scheduled for an air strike, burning a trash fire to stay warm. We were expecting the whole tower to come down, but the strike only destroyed part of the building, where the Hezbollah-linked financial institution al-Qard al-Hasan is located.

Hezbollah did what it could to respond with missile and drone strikes that day, causing significantly less damage in Israel. The disproportionately higher casualties on the Lebanese side in this conflict are staggering: between September 1 and November 27, at least 3,100 people were killed in Lebanon, compared to only twenty-nine in Israel, according to data from the Lebanese Ministry of Health and the conflict-data aggregator ACLED.

And yet, when the ceasefire came into effect the next day, Hezbollah surrogates and Shiite society at large declared victory. But they were acting far more relieved than triumphant.

On the morning of November 27, thousands of people started pouring back into the southern suburbs, many of them heading home for the first time in months. They paraded through the streets with Hezbollah flags and other Shiite iconography, chanting, “At your service, Nasrallah!”

There was lots of celebratory gunfire, a once-in-a-decade opportunity to see Hezbollah members out in the open with their weapons. In the center of a public square, a woman brandishing a pistol stood in the sunroof of an SUV, accompanied by a gargantuan Nasrallah portrait.

“This is not Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut. This is the Dahieh of al-Sayed Hassan [Nasrallah]!” she declared.

An older man named Ali Hassan Mansour loitered nearby, pensively watching the shebab — the young guys— wildly shooting at the sky. To absolutely no one’s surprise, eventually someone was shot in the stomach by accident.

“This is a bill that we’ve needed to pay for forty years, and we knew it would cost us a lot,” Mansour said.

“From the very beginning, we have been crawling toward al-Quds [Jerusalem]. The destruction you’re seeing — that is honor and pride for us. Who is a person who loses his family and everything he owns, and yet comes here to celebrate victory? That is a righteous person,” he said.

Hezbollah’s culture of martyrdom is unparalleled in its strength and social penetration, even among other Islamist movements, which is why its members were so willing to go along with this suicidal war. But everything changed after Nasrallah was killed and the inner sanctum of Hezbollah territory in Dahieh started getting destroyed. Survival was paramount, so the group signed a deal that heavily favors Israel. Some Lebanese Shiites are delusionally embracing mere survival as a victory.

On December 3, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a grave clarification. “We are currently in a ceasefire. I point out: a ceasefire, not the end of the war… We are enforcing this ceasefire with an iron fist, acting against any violation, minor or serious,” he said.

If a larger war resumes, Hezbollah will have significantly drawn down its forces in southern Lebanon and be even weaker against the ultra-modern Israeli military. As Iran has its focus pulled to Syria, it will have less ability to rebuild Hezbollah. And without their dear leader to console and inspire, Hezbollah’s Shiite society may lose the will to keep fighting.