Quiet dread blankets Beirut
Tourists flee as restaurants and shops close
Israeli air raids target southern neighbourhoods
Jul. 15, 2006.
ANDREW MILLS
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
BEIRUT—Rapidly, Israel is cutting Lebanon off from the rest of the world.
Israeli warplanes yesterday bombarded the major crossroads, bridges and tunnels that link this tiny country together. Israeli warships blockaded Lebanon's ports. The airport remains closed indefinitely. A major strike on mountain bridges rendered the main route through the Lebanon range to Syria impassable.
At the centre of what is quickly becoming an island sits Beirut, a city that has been besieged so many times before.
Yesterday evening, shortly after seven, screams punctuated the tension of West Beirut as yet another loud rumble emanated from the southern suburbs followed by some smaller explosions and a tall plume of black smoke.
Another bridge. Gone.
In Beirut, the Israeli air strikes have focused entirely on the Dahiyah, the band of suburbs that form the city's southern boundary. There, the apartment buildings and slums are home to the majority of Beirut's Shiite supporters of the militant group Hezbollah.
It is in the Dahiyah, Arabic for suburb, where Hezbollah's offices and radio station came under Israeli fire yesterday.
The streets are strewn with chunks of concrete and broken glass. Its residents have sustained the brunt of this city's casualties in the last two days.
While thousands of families have started the flee Dahiyah for safer areas of the city, some are resolute in their support for Hezbollah.
"We will stay here until our last breath under the banner of Hezbollah against the barbarians and terrorists of Israel and the United States," Hashem Hashem, a 52-year-old employee of the state-run Lebanese University, told Reuters.
But a sense of dread for what might lie ahead has set in amongst the sectarian groups that call Beirut home.
The fear here is that the recent Israeli offensive may trigger another Lebanese civil war. Inter-communal relations have been growing steadily worse since last year's assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Things haven't been this tense since 1975.
Yesterday, most of the shops and restaurants in West Beirut had pulled down their shutters and were closed by early evening. As the sun set, people streamed into one of the few grocery stores that remained open in West Beirut, searching for bread. But, like much of the city, the shop had run out of bread hours earlier.
Down at the Mediterranean seafront, the Corniche was the domain of only a few hearty power walkers and the occasional fisherman. It is normally choked with residents and tourists at this time of year.
At one end of the Corniche, the swish Phoenicia Intercontinental Hotel suddenly had rooms available. Three days earlier, the hotel was filled to capacity with hundreds of tourists, mainly from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. They flood into Beirut every year at this time, seeking relief from the summer heat.
But in the last two days, the bombings reached a critical point and most of those tourists have been packing their cars and heading for the Syrian border, destroying the Lebanese tourist season.
"Last night, the bombing was too much. We couldn't handle it. We had to leave," said Leila Hamade, 46, who had been holidaying with her family from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
"I'm scared that it's a closed space. You feel that you're surrounded. From the sea. From the air. Everywhere. There is no escape," she said.
But yesterday what is usually a two-hour drive became hours longer as Israeli warplanes had taken out the bridges on the main Damascus highway earlier in the day, closing that route altogether.
And so the exodus of tourists fanned out into the Lebanese countryside, jamming the back roads that climb into the Lebanon mountain range with SUVs packed with suitcases, mountain bikes and children.
At the border, Lebanese traffic police struggled to organize thousands of cars into orderly lines, where they waited for hours to pass the checkpoint.
In addition to the fleeing tourists, there was also a handful of anxious Lebanese heading for safer ground in Syria.
"We're going to the suburbs of Damascus," a Lebanese woman said from the front seat of a Mercedes, packed with her three children.
"We're going to drop the children with friends and then go back (to Beirut). Last night, they couldn't sleep so they got really scared. They can't take it any more."
Some rode buses or in trucks, while others paid taxi drivers exorbitant prices for the trip to Damascus, only to find that their driver was only willing to take them as far as the Lebanese side of the border. They had to carry their luggage across the kilometre or so of no-man's-land that lies between the two borders.
"I'm still rattled. A bundle of nerves. I've never seen anything like this before," said Mohit Balani, 32, who was trying to get home to Dubai.
Back in Beirut, the power failed late last night and the city plunged into darkness.
In West Beirut, a group of men in their twenties quietly gathered around an old Mercedes, listening to Lebanon's beloved singer Fairouz playing on the tape deck.
Fairouz became a symbol of resilience and courage for many Beirutis during the country's 1975-1990 civil war, which pitched sectarian group against sectarian group in a series of clashes that killed more than 100,000 people. Beirut was the notorious venue for multiple massacres, a string of kidnappings and the first set of suicide bombers.
Fairouz never left the city amid the fighting and sang of hope that peace would one day return. This weekend, she was to have performed at a summer music festival. Tickets sold out weeks ago. It was to be a highlight of the summer.
But like just about everything here, the performance and the festival have been cancelled indefinitely.
Re: Israel and the movement of things
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