Current events are like hot air balloons, says Arundhati Roy; they rise up into view and disappear out of sight again. This seems to be the situation now in Lebanon. Many friends and colleagues abroad are emailing to ask what’s going on, since Lebanon is no longer in the news. Our hot air balloons have already disappeared. We are not in the news anymore, but this does not mean that war is no longer raging in Lebanon. The only difference between now and the summer, when we were in the news, is that quick death caused by immediate shelling has been replaced by slow, sporadic death caused by cluster bombs and soil and air contamination, and the brute power of Israel’s armed forces has been replaced by the soft power of UN political control. Read more about War still keenly felt in Lebanon
“I told my wife, you just buy clothes for our son. I do not need any new clothes for myself and if you postpone getting a new outfit for yourself too, it will be good. Who knows what will happen in the next few months. Whatever we have saved, we spent during this summer, and now we need to save so we can eat during the next war.” This is what the taxi driver tells me in response to my remarks that Beirut does not feel as it did during previous Ramadan seasons. He was trying to explain to me why there is no movement in the city, why the city is dead despite the holiday season. Read more about An uncertain Ramadan in Beirut
This was our second visit to Bint Jbeil and we saw more and more life coming back to the town. The rubble here is of old hand-hewn stones fallen from a very old house. We saw many children’s books all through the neighborhood. Inside the windows of the homes still standing was extensive damage. I had asked why the garage doors of the stores were bent in various ballooned shapes. The answer was that the bombs created pressure that blew out all windows and doors and bent the metal garage doors of the store fronts into various ballooning shapes. Read more about Photostory: Bint Jbeil to Beirut
“You’re just a kid,” scoffed nonogenarian Ahmed Yehya al-Hajj when I told him I was sixty years old. “I have sons older than you and a grandson over fifty.” Ahmed is fortunate to be alive, and not just because of his age. He was visitiing one of his many offspring in the village of Houla when the house was struck by an Israeli missile. First reports were that as many as sixty people may have died, but in fact there was only one fatality and several very serious injuries, some permanent. Still bad enough, for those affected. The survivors showed me the remnants of the missile. They also shared the remnants of their hopes and dreams. Read more about The damage against civilians
No matter how hard the photographers tried to capture with the camera what the eye sees, the picture cannot fully communicate the scene. It does not take with it the smell, the thoughts, the feelings one experiences while walking among the rubble left by the Israeli war machine. On the TV stations, one can see the toys of children shattered everywhere, broken furniture, torn out clothes. But on the TV stations or on the pages of newspapers, these are just items, objects one sees and one’s eyes get used to them, just like how the bodies of the deceased become objectified while on screen. Read more about What the camera fails to see
This past week has been slow and tough. It is almost as if last month was all played in fast forward and then since the ceasefire, we are moving in ultra slow motion. For the last month, I just wanted everything to end. Now I don’t know where to begin. For the last month, I would purposefully try and numb myself because I was too afraid to feel everything. Today I am begging for my feelings to return because without them, I cannot live. After a month of stress and living in fear, everything has caught up with me. My throat hurts a lot and my stomach is a perpetual mess. The knots have not gone yet and its beginning to cause physical damage. I am down, down, down. I couldn’t lift a finger to type. I couldn’t answer my phone calls. It was so difficult to wake up in the morning (and I’m usually Mrs. super positive!). Read more about After the ceasefire
“To the residents of the Amiriyyah building Please visit the Afaq Center, Sayyid Hadi bridge. Please bring along any paper that proves your rent or ownership of a unit in the building. Thank you for your cooperation.” Thus read a sign on the rubble of a leveled building in south Beirut. The building was hit by a bunker buster on 13 of July 2006, the second day of the war, when the Israeli Air Force hit the Nour Radio Station that used to operate from the Amiriyyah building. Amiriyyah is a name that takes us to the first Gulf War, specifically to 13 February 1991, when the United States Air Force committed a massacre in the air raid shelter of Al-Amiriyyah in North Baghdad. Read more about Photostory: From Al-Amiriyyah, Baghdad to Amiriyyah, south Beirut
Two days ago, driving toward the village of Qana, we saw men at work, creating neatly aligned rows of rectangular cement structures that would soon be ready for burials. On foot, we entered Qana, thinking we should at least identify the site where a massacre had taken place when, on July 30th, an Israeli bomb hit a building that sheltered children as they slept. It took five hours for ambulances to reach them. Statistics differ, but the most recent Human Rights Watch report estimated that twenty-three were killed. Read more about The Massacre at Qana
Upon arrival in Beirut in early August, 2006, Michael Birmingham met Abu Mustafa. Michael is an Irish citizen who has worked with Voices campaigns for several years. Abu Mustafa is a kindly Lebanese cab driver. Having fled his home in the Dahiya neighborhood which was being heavily bombed, Abu Mustafa was living in his car. Abu Mustafa joked that he sometimes went back to his home in the already evacuated area of the Dahiya, just to take a shower or sometimes a proper nap. Read more about A Proportionate Response
Breakdown. I had a momentary breakdown. Driving back to Beirut last night, alone in my car, paying attention to Music for the first time in a month, I began to comprehend all that I saw this last week in the South of Lebanon; I finally let out tears. How does one describe destruction giving it a unique touch, a local expression? I am beginning to think this is impossible because of the very nature of man made destruction. Villages in the South look like pictures I have seen of Hiroshima; they look like Berlin at the end of WWII, and they basically look like many other cities and villages destroyed in history; in a picture, frame per frame, it all looks the same. Read more about Breakdown
