War between Hezbollah and Israel drags Beirut back into despair

BEIRUT—From his tiled terrace in the foothills overlooking Beirut, Mohammed Dayekh is watching a place he once loved go up in flames.

A 34-year-old director and screenwriter with jet black hair and tattooed forearms, Dayekh grew up in southern Beirut. Four years ago, he moved to the hills above the city after Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group, tightened its grip on his old neighborhood and made it more conservative. More women started wearing the Iranian-style chador instead of Lebanese-style headscarves, and men talked up Tehran’s influence.

Now, Dayekh feels a flood of complicated emotions as he watches Israeli airstrikes hit the neighborhood. He had yearned for change in Lebanon, he said—but not like this.

“This place that I destroyed in my own mind is being destroyed by someone else,” he said, as fires from the strikes rose above the Mediterranean.

Beirut has staggered through war, economic collapse and a port explosion in 2020 that leveled much of the city center. Now, the latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, is dragging Beirut back into a cycle of violence, just as it was beginning to stabilize after years of chaos.

Israel says its airstrikes are targeting Hezbollah’s infrastructure, including what it says are weapons storage facilities and bunkers used by the group’s military wing underneath Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah-dominated neighborhood where Dayekh grew up.

Israel’s military also says it is targeting the group’s economic lifeblood, including branches of a U.S.-sanctioned microlending bank that is part of its sprawling network of social services.

Over a one-month period in September and October, the Israeli military issued 99 orders urging civilians to leave and stay away. The orders cover half the urban area of greater Beirut—five times greater than the area affected by a monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, according to a study by the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University in Beirut.

The bombings destroyed 325 Beirut buildings, including residential and commercial structures, over 30 days, the study said. Strikes have hit near Beirut’s airport and hospitals which are located near neighborhoods where Israel says Hezbollah is hiding its military and administrative infrastructure.

Bombings have intensified in recent days, despite hopes for a cease-fire. At 4 a.m. on Saturday local time, an Israeli strike leveled an apartment building in a densely populated residential area in the center of the capital. This time, there was no warning beforehand.

Hours later, rescue workers combed the pile of concrete in search of bodies. Dust wafted through the air as an excavator pulled clumps of concrete and dirt from a crater. Silence settled over the street as a procession of men carried a body in a white tarp around a corner and down the pile of rubble.

Israel hasn’t said what the target of the strike was. The Lebanese health ministry said 15 people were killed in the strike.

Overall, some 3,600 people have been killed in Lebanon over the past year, according to the Lebanese health ministry. The conflict began when Hezbollah started firing missiles daily at Israel after Oct. 7, 2023, to show solidarity for Palestinians in Gaza, it said. Israel retaliated in an effort to stop the attacks.

The conflict also has caused $8.5 billion in damage, according to the World Bank, nearly half of Lebanon’s annual economic output, which had already cratered after a financial crisis that started in 2019.

The Israeli strikes have largely emptied parts of the Shiite-majority southern section of Beirut, pushing tens of thousands of people into the other half of the city, including predominantly Christian, Sunni and mixed areas. The displaced have crammed into schools and churches, sleeping in their cars and pitching tents for a time on the city’s beaches.

“With this massive displacement that is taking place, there are a lot of question marks on how to do the day after,” said Nasser Yassin, the Lebanese minister of environment.

Faded glory

In the 1950s and ’60s, Beirut attracted Hollywood stars and European jet-setters. But it never fully recovered from a 15-year civil war that began in 1975, pitting Muslims against Christians and the Israeli army against the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was temporarily based in Lebanon in the early 1980s.

When the war ended, Lebanon’s government rebuilt the devastated capital. And for a while, the city boomed, drawing cash from the Persian Gulf and Lebanese expats who returned each summer from the U.S. and elsewhere to eat mezze with family and enjoy Beirut’s beaches and bars.

A parallel boom took place in southern Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, as Hezbollah—bankrolled by Iran—evolved into a political party that elected candidates to parliament, launched its own satellite channel and expanded its military forces. It also smuggled new missiles and drones into the country from Iran and widened its network of tunnels in southern Lebanon.

Dayekh, the director, rose from Dahiyeh’s slums into a career in stand-up comedy and writing satirical shows for national cable networks.

While he loved Dahiyeh and its lively street culture, Dayekh chafed at its growing ultraconservatism under Hezbollah’s sway. When he overheard Hezbollah supporters speaking positively about Iran, it irritated him that they didn’t know Iran was also the country of avant-garde directors he admired. He decided he needed to leave, just as Beirut fell apart again.

In 2019, a banking crisis caused Lebanon’s economy to implode, and massive protests called for a transformation of Lebanon’s political system. Then, in 2020, a warehouse full of hazardously stored ammonium nitrate exploded, destroying a swath of the capital.

“We are every time moving forward with even more scars,” said Mona Fawaz, a professor of urban studies and planning at AUB.

‘Everything turned to ashes’

By 2023, Lebanon was learning to live with what felt like a permanent state of crisis. But Beirut residents watched warily as tensions in the region escalated after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.

The Israeli airstrikes and invasion of Lebanon have driven more than a million people from their homes, with most converging on Beirut and its immediate surroundings, according to the Lebanese government.

In late October, a strike demolished apartment buildings across the street from Rafiq Hariri University Hospital, one of the city’s largest medical centers. The strike killed at least 18 people steps away from beachfront hotels, on an outer edge of Dahiyeh that residents still considered safe.

Israel’s military said the strike was directed at a Hezbollah member involved in planning attacks on Israel near the hospital, and the hospital wasn’t a target of the attack.

Ola Eid, a 46-year-old actress, had been throwing chocolates to her neighbor’s two young girls on an adjacent balcony. The blast threw her to the ground as the building collapsed around her, a large plant saving her from a falling door. One girl’s body had been torn apart.

“Everything turned to ashes,” she said. After spending the night in the adjacent hospital, debris still stuck in her hair. “Nobody thought they would hit here.”

For Dayekh, moving to hills above Beirut has kept him out of harm’s way.

His father, who still lived in the old neighborhood, fled to Dayekh’s house when Israeli warplanes dropped 80 tons of bombs nearby, killing Hezbollah’s top leader Hassan Nasrallah in late September. His dad was so panicked when the blast shattered the windows of his apartment that he forgot to grab his false teeth when he rushed out the door.

Now, Dayekh often smokes as he watches the fires from airstrikes, trying to make sense of his conflicted views about the damage to Dahiyeh.

“It saddens me,” he said. “I’m witnessing it being destroyed.”

Wael Taleb contributed to this article.

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com