The clash between Israel and the Palestinians – and other teams in the Middle East – goes back decades. These stories provide context for existing developments and the history that led to them.
TIRO, Lebanon — In this historic port city, history repeats itself amid the sound of rockets and the screams of displaced children. Since the war in Gaza began last month, fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, has erupted across the Israel-Lebanon border.
Israel and Lebanon have evacuated tens of thousands of villagers living along the border for protection reasons. In Lebanon, many have ended up in Tyre, 80 kilometres south of Beirut, where they are staying with relatives or taking refuge in schools. a reminder of the accusation of war in Gaza, even from its borders.
Recently, at the technical school in Tyre, a tired-looking woman carried two fabric-covered foam mattresses in her car, which were distributed through the emergency services. In the last hour, about fifty more people had come to collect the mattresses. Thin mattresses and blankets.
“Every time there’s a crisis, we don’t know if we’ll go back and locate our destroyed homes,” he says. She asks to be known only by her surname Um Majid, in reference to her older brother, through whom many women are known in this conservative society.
The 49-year-old has been displaced before, this time breaking down in tears when asked about her children, the youngest of whom is 10 years old.
“We are an oppressed and abandoned people,” she says, blaming the United Nations, the United States and what she calls “heartless” Arab countries for having to abandon their olives and re-ripen in the fields of Marwahin village.
Lebanon and Hezbollah have been engaged in all-out war since the Lebanon-based defense force was established in 1982, the year Israel invaded neighboring Lebanon, occupying southern Lebanon for 18 years.
It is a border created when Britain and France divided the region after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago, sowing the seeds, many Lebanese say, of current unrest.
Um Majid, like most of those who have been forced to evacuate, is adamant that the trauma of being forced to leave her home does not diminish her for the rest of the people of Gaza.
“Our trail is the trail of resistance, whether it’s the trail of Lebanon or the road to Gaza. We stand with Gaza, even though our homes are destroyed and our young people are dying,” he said.
Hussein Abdul Hussein Hussein, 92, stands next to his son Amin, who ties a stack of mattresses to the roof of the car.
Father Hussein, whose family circle grows olives and tobacco, says instability is a way of life in Lebanon.
Even before the start of the war in Gaza, Lebanon was facing overlapping crises of currency collapse, the effects of the COVID pandemic, the Beirut port explosion in 2020, and a political paralysis that left the country without a president for more than a year.
For those living along the border with Israel, life is even harder.
“After 1948, we were displaced about 20 times,” says Hussein. “Whenever Israel wanted, they would shoot at us and we would pick them up and leave. What can we do?”
This time, on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel from Gaza, killing some 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, retaliatory attacks across the Lebanese border began in earnest. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army’s reaction killed 11,470 Palestinians. according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
Hamas-allied Hezbollah has also stepped up its efforts to divert resources from the Israeli army from Gaza.
“Every time we build for the future, a crisis comes and we have to leave,” says Amin Hussein, who points out that from the top of a mountain near his village you can see Israeli settlements across the border. He says his family members are now scattered all over Lebanon, anywhere they can find a place to live.
At the technical school, the principals have emptied the study rooms on the first floor to accommodate families, while the normal students continue the categories on the upper floor.
In the schoolyard, Lebanese aid workers try to distract worried youths with stuffed toys and makeup.
One of the boys, 10-year-old Hassan al-Sayyed, has a lion painted on his face because, according to him, it is a lion.
Standing next to his mother, he says his circle of relatives left their home because he and his sisters were terrified by the airstrikes on their village.
His father, Mustafa al-Sayyed, says he left burnt fields on land that his circle of relatives had planted for two hundred years.
“Even the soil is damaged,” says Sayyed.
He says the white phosphorus used in Israel has infected the soil and water, allowing winter wheat and barley to be planted this year until seasonal rains wash them away.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say Israel has fired white phosphorus (used as a smokescreen but prohibited by foreign laws in civilian spaces) into Lebanon. Israel denies it.
The classroom that the Sayyed share with some other circle of relatives is completely devoid of furniture. A small woman with a butterfly painted on her face is sitting on a foam mattress.
On the second floor, standing next to a group of young people on the blackboard answering a teacher’s questions about auto mechanics, the school’s president, Mohammed Ali Jaber, says he worries that a generation of displaced young people will grow up uneducated.
“Learning is key. If you let other illiterate people go, the disorders will get worse and worse,” said Ali Jaber, 62. “It’s the environment here. It’s not something new here in Lebanon. “
1. 6 km away, in the ruins of one of Tyre’s ancient ports, marble pillars rise above the crystal clear waters of the Mediterranean Sea. A college student and her boyfriend on the stone wall for occasional moments of intimacy in the now deserted e.
Tyre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. It was the center of a maritime trading empire when captured by Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago. Today, it relies on tourism for much of its economy.
The old port is just over 10 miles from the border with Israel, across the bay. The site’s director, Ali Bedawi, says that since the war began last month, they have heard explosions and noticed smoke coming from Israeli strikes.
Despite this, right next to the rocks, a fisherman casts a long rod into the bay as local divers scour the clear waters.
One of them surfaces to show off his finding. The diver, who uses the nickname Bahar, was an Israeli Lebanese Defense Forces resistance fighter in Lebanon and does not need to use his full call because of the threat of Israeli retaliation.
From a bag he takes out pieces of inlaid steel: what appear to be Byzantine crosses and small ancient coins. Among the steel and quartz balls, she says, the shells of spiny murex snails, whose mucus used to make purple dye used in royal clothing in Phoenician times, were used as ancient weights.
For nearly 40 years, since he was freed from an Israeli criminal in a criminal exchange, he says he has been diving and finding treasure in the water.
It comes out with the sound of explosions in the distance, then black smoke rising over a hill across the Lebanese-Israeli border. Bahar says they don’t hear about Defense Forces attacks on Israel, only incoming Israeli attacks.
“We don’t need war, we don’t need problems, we need to live,” he said. “But if Israel attacks us, we will protect ourselves. It’s my legal right to protect my land and protect my honor. “
Like others in the Arab world, the Lebanese were horrified and enraged by photographs of Israeli movements in hospitals and homes in Gaza. They were equally furious after a Lebanese woman and her three grandchildren were hit by an Israeli airstrike on a major highway near the town of Ainata, about 3 kilometers from the border.
Israel denied attacking civilian targets and said it was responding to Hezbollah attacks. Human Rights Watch called the Israeli attack a conceivable war crime.
Bahar accuses other Arab countries of doing enough to protect Palestinians.
“None of those damn Arab countries are helping,” he says, perhaps Jordan, which has dumped medical supplies into Gaza. “Where is Egypt in all this? If Egypt spits, Israel will drown,” she said, quoting an old saying. about the strength Egypt would have if she used it.
In the capital, Beirut, Lebanon’s diverse mix of other peoples — including Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Armenians, Turks, and Kurds — can be seen in a corner of the eastern suburb of Bourj Hammoud, where a makeshift shrine of glass and steel houses devout statues. and a damaged plaster angel wing. Mohammad Hassan, a 24-year-old Egyptian doorman, said he had placed one of the statues of the Virgin Mary there.
“I discovered it next to the garbage cans, so I took it, cleaned it and put it there,” said Hassan, who is Muslim.
Hassan came from Egypt to paint seven years ago to send money to his widowed mother, but now he says Lebanon is so expensive that “it’s worse than Egypt. “If he could scrape together the $5,000, he says he’d sign up with his friends who pay smugglers to take them to Europe. He asked that his entire call not be used so that he could talk blatantly about his departure.
“A lot of Egyptians left here,” he says. On the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean, he says: “Many go to Libya, then to Italy and other places. It’s true that there are other people who succeed and others who die. “
A driver dressed in plastic sandals and a tattered T-shirt approaches to join the conversation.
“Our country is the most beautiful country in the world, but now all we think about is how we can get out of here,” says Robert, expressing a sentiment not unusual for many Lebanese. “The only challenge is Hezbollah,” he said. There are no cadres here because of the parties that care about politics. The state can’t manage them, the army can’t manage them,” said Robert, who asked that his last call not be used to allow him to talk blatantly about Hezbollah. .
But in a cafe in a predominantly Shiite suburb, dozens of young people watch a televised speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Lebanon has been a divided country in many ways.
A young woman dressed in a black chador over her clothes, gathered with her family for lunch, pulls a photograph of Nasrallah from her purse and tenderly shows it to her restless three-month-old nephew, telling him the call of the tough guys. Leader of the Defense Force.
Many citizens say there is enough blame to be doled out by the state of the country, adding corrupt politicians and militias meddling in politics. But the ongoing political crisis, coupled with the war in Gaza, has hit markets hardest, where many Lebanese struggle to meet their needs.
“A year has passed, there is no state, there is no president, there is no stability,” says Hélène Khodor, buying vegetables at the local market. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. Everyone emigrates. Young people don’t stay. You invest this huge amount of cash to teach them and then they leave and it’s no use because there’s no work,” he said in Arabic. with an Armenian accent.
Khodor says she and her husband worked various jobs over the years to send their daughter to the Beirut Conservatory to study piano and then earn a second degree in journalism. Today, the salary of her daughter, a piano teacher at Lebanon’s first music school, is worth it. about $100 a month, less than the cost of transportation to work.
“We worked to move forward,” he says, “and then they pushed us back. “