Ali was watching the war on TV. Then an Israeli bomb fell beside his home

Beirut: Ali Khalifeh was watching the war unfold on his television set when a bomb landed next to his home, turning the adjacent apartment building into a flaming crater. It was 7.45pm on Thursday in the Lebanese capital, and many Beirutis were sitting down for dinner. As Khalifeh, 72, checked the news updates on Al Jazeera, his wife hung out the washing on the balcony of their apartment in Basta, a working-class neighbourhood in central Beirut.

Suddenly, an explosion erupted, and their apartment walls began shaking. The blast sent his wife flying through air before slamming her into the ground. The war, it seemed, had burst out of the television set and into their living room, damaging their home so badly they had to seek shelter with relatives nearby.

Salah, who witnessed the deadly Israeli airstrike, sits among the debris in Basta.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“This is the heart of Beirut,” Khalifeh says during the first visit to inspect the damage to his home since the Israeli airstrike, the deadliest attack on Beirut since the latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah began last October. Two days later, he, like many other residents here, is still in shock that an attack like this could happen in Basta. This densely packed residential neighbourhood, famous for its charming antique shops, has been considered one of the safest parts of Beirut. Israel’s attacks on Beirut in the past fortnight have mostly targeted Hezbollah strongholds in the city’s southern suburbs, leading residents there to seek refuge elsewhere in the city.

Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia militant group, has been firing rockets across the Lebanon-Israel northern border since October 8, forcing an estimated 60,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes in the country’s north. Israel has pulled off several successful operations against the group in the past month as it seeks to wipe out its leaders, cripple its military capabilities and force it back from the Israel-Lebanon border. First came the shock detonations of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the group’s operatives. Then, the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and, soon after, that of his heir apparent, Hashem Safieddine. All caused civilian deaths but achieved their military objective.

This operation appears to have been less successful. According to multiple reports in Israeli and international media outlets, Israel launched the Basta strike and a simultaneous air raid on the nearby neighbourhood of Al-Nuwayri in an attempt to kill senior Hezbollah figure Wafiq Safa, who they believed was moving between the two locations. Hezbollah’s in-house television station has said that Safa, the head of the group’s liaison unit, was not at either site, although other outlets have reported he was seriously injured in the attack.

What is known is that 22 people died in the strikes and 117 were injured, almost all of them at the Basta site visited by this masthead. Israel has not commented on the attacks, which came without warning.

During our visit, emergency workers are still pulling dead bodies out of the rubble on stretchers. When we arrive, three people are missing; when we leave a few hours later, there are two. Prams, children’s toys and furniture jut out of the pile of rocks that was previously a four-storey apartment building. Plucked from the rubble and put on display on top of the debris is a burnt copy of a biography of Nasrallah, reflecting his iconic status among Hezbollah supporters.

Khalifeh blames Israel for the attack that drove him out of his home and killed his neighbours. “Who will bring back the dead people?” he asks in despair. “Why all the damage, the death, the displacement?” He is frustrated that Lebanese families are paying the price for the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which the group says it has launched in solidarity with Palestinians fighting in Gaza. He supports the Palestinian cause, but he doesn’t want to risk dying for it.

“This war shouldn’t have happened,” Khalifeh says.“We support and love Palestine, but there are other Arab countries. Why does only Lebanon fight?”

Mouheiddine Makkawi, 64, and his wife left their home in Burj al-Barajneh, in Beirut’s heavily targeted southern suburbs, to stay with his sister in Basta when Israel began targeting his neighbourhood and the surrounding areas. It turned out to be no haven: their Basta apartment was directly opposite the Israeli target site. The bomb blast devastated the apartment and destroyed his sister’s convenience store downstairs. “I don’t know what we can do now. We have no other place to go,” he says. He is furious at Israel for its air attacks on Beirut, which have driven him from his home and almost killed him.

“So many civilians are being killed: women, men, children. It doesn’t make any sense,” says Makkawi, who runs a printing business. “They target one person, but kill 100 more. This creates hatred.”

More than 2100 people have died in Lebanon from Israeli attacks over the past year, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Most of the deaths have come in the past three weeks.

During our visit, emergency workers pause searching for bodies in the rubble for a visit by one of Iran’s most senior politicians, parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who is accompanied by a group of Hezbollah parliamentarians. Hezbollah is a crucial proxy for Iran, which provides the group with funding that has helped it amass a giant stockpile of rockets and missiles, making it more powerful than the Lebanese national military.

“There is no existence of any Hezbollah official or presence here,” Hezbollah MP Ibrahim Mousawi says. “This is a purely residential area. This is life that has turned into chaos and death.”

Sitting in their damaged apartment across the street, twin brothers Mohammed and Jamal al-Sheikh explain how the bomb blast sent their furniture flying across the room. How it made them gasp for air and their eyes water.

Aged 63, they have lived through Lebanon’s 1975 civil war, Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon, and the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Twins Jamal and Mohammed al-Sheikh on the balcony of their damaged apartment.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“Of all the wars we have lived through, we have never been through anything like this,” Mohammed says. “This is the heaviest.”

As we talk, a representative from Jihad al-Bina, Hezbollah’s development foundation, arrives to survey the damage to the home the brothers have lived in for 52 years. The representative is going from door to door, assessing how much compensation the residents and business owners should be paid. Outside, Jihad al-Bina workers are unloading concrete blocks to begin the rebuilding effort. It’s a reminder that as well as being a ferocious fighting force and a listed terror organisation in countries such as Australia, Hezbollah is woven into the fabric of Lebanese life. Meanwhile, the Lebanese authorities, who collect residents’ tax payments, are nowhere to be seen.

“We don’t have the money to repair the house,” Mohammed says. “Whoever arrives with goodwill and good faith, we will take it. We wish the Lebanese state was looking after us.”

Across the road, Ghazi Remmo is sweeping up shards of shattered glass from the floor of his mobile phone shop, which was pummelled by the airstrike. The 50-year-old lives a few doors down from his shop and saw the attack from his balcony: the buildings bursting into flames, people screaming in the street and dead bodies lining the road. Like so many of his neighbours, he was certain he was living in a safe part of Beirut. Not any more.

“Already, we could hardly live with the devastated economy. Now we can’t do anything,” he says. Lebanon has been crippled by financial calamity since 2019, worsened by the 2020 Beirut port explosion, which killed 200 people and injured about 6500. The World Bank in 2021 said Lebanon was suffering one of the worst 10, and possibly the worst three, economic crises since the mid-19th century and that was before the latest conflict made things tougher. Adding to the sense of chaos is the fact the country has not had a president in two years because of political infighting.

“We are living in a nightmare in this country,” Remmo says. “We never know where they are taking us.” He is now desperate to move to Australia, Canada Germany – anywhere that can offer him and his three children a better life than Lebanon. He survived the attack, but his faith in the future did not.

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