At the end of September, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hezbollah was reaching its height, I met one of the group’s supporters in a seaside café in western Beirut. He was a middle-aged man with a thin white beard and the spent look of someone who had not slept for days. He was an academic of sorts, not a fighter, but his ties to Hezbollah were deep and long-standing.
“We’re in a big battle, like never before,” he said as soon as he sat down. “Hezbollah has not faced what Israel is now waging, not in 1982, not in 2006. It is a total war.”
He talked quickly, anxiously. Only a few days earlier, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, had been killed in a bombardment of the group’s south-Beirut stronghold, and my companion—he asked that I not name him, because he is not authorized to speak on the group’s behalf—made clear that he was still in a state of shock and grief. Israeli bombs were destroying houses and rocket-launch sites across southern Lebanon, in the Bekaa valley, and in Beirut; many of his friends had been killed or maimed. He had even heard talk of something that had seemed unthinkable until now: Iran, which created Hezbollah around 1982, might cut off support to the group, a decision that could reconfigure the politics of the Middle East.
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When I asked about this, he said after an uneasy pause: “There are questions.” He said he personally trusts Iran, but then added, as if trying to convince me: “It’s as if you raised a son, he’s your jewel, now 42 years old, and you abandon him? No. It doesn’t make sense.”
He kept talking rapid-fire, as though seeking to restore his self-confidence. The resistance still had its weapons, he said, and the fighters on the border were ready. Israel’s soldiers would dig their own graves and would soon be begging for a cease-fire.
But his speech slowed, and the doubts crept back. He mentioned Ahmed Shukairi, the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who said shortly before the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War, “Those [Israelis] who survive will remain in Palestine. I estimate that none of them will survive.” Shukairi’s vain illusions were not something to emulate. “I don’t want to be like him,” the man said.
It took a moment for the historical analogy to register: He was telling me that he thought Hezbollah, the movement he was so devoted to, might well be on the verge of total destruction. We both paused for a moment and sipped our tea. The only noise was the waves gently washing the shore outside, an incongruously peaceful sound in a country at war.
“This tea we’re drinking,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s our last.”
A shop in eastern Beirut on September 23 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)
Two months of war have transformed Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that seemed almost invincible, is now crippled, its top commanders dead or in hiding. The scale of this change is hard for outsiders to grasp. Hezbollah is not just a militia but almost a state of its own, more powerful than the weak and divided Lebanese government, and certainly more powerful than the Lebanese army. Formed under the tutelage of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it has long been the leading edge of Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance,” alongside Hamas, the Shiite militias of Iraq, and the Houthi movement in Yemen. Hezbollah is also the patron and bodyguard of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, with a duly elected bloc in the national parliament (Christians and Muslims are allocated an equal share of seats). Hezbollah smuggles in not just weapons, but billions of dollars from Iran. It runs banks, hospitals, a welfare system, and a parallel economy of tax-free imports and drug trafficking that has enriched and empowered the once-downtrodden Shiite community.
Hezbollah has long justified reckless wars against Israel with appeals to pan-Arab pride: The liberation of Palestine was worth any sacrifice. But the devastation of this conflict extends far beyond Hezbollah and cannot be brushed off so easily. Almost a quarter of Lebanon’s people have fled their homes, and many are now sleeping in town squares, on roads, on beaches. Burned-out ambulances and heaps of garbage testify to the state’s long absence. Many people are traumatized or in mourning; others talk manically about dethroning Hezbollah, and perhaps with it, Lebanon’s centuries-old system of sectarian power-sharing. There is a millenarian energy in the air, a wild hope for change that veers easily into the fear of civil war.
A few stark facts stand out. First, Israel is no longer willing to tolerate Hezbollah’s arsenal on its border, and will continue its campaign of air strikes and ground war until it is forced to stop—whether from exhaustion or, more likely, by an American-sponsored cease-fire that is very unlikely before the next U.S. president is sworn in. Second, no one is offering to rebuild the blasted towns and villages of southern Lebanon when this is over, the way the oil-rich Gulf States did after the last major war with Israel, in 2006. Nor will Iran be able to replenish the group’s arsenal or its coffers. Hezbollah may or may not survive, but it will not be the entity it was.
I heard the same questions every day during two weeks in Lebanon in September and October, from old friends and total strangers. When will the war stop? Will they bomb us too—we who are not with Hezbollah? Will there be a civil war? And most poignant of all, from an artist whose Beirut apartment was a haven for me during the years I lived in Lebanon: Should I send my daughter out of this country?
A café in Beirut on September 20 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)
On a sunny morning in early October, I drove south out of Beirut on the highway that runs along the Mediterranean, toward the border with Israel. Just outside the city, dark smoke trails became visible on both sides of the road—last night’s air strikes. New ones appear every morning, like a visual scorecard of the war’s progress. There were other cars on the road at first, but beyond the coastal city of Sidon, the highway was empty.
My driver, visibly anxious, drove more than 90 miles per hour. Yellow Hezbollah banners fluttered in the breeze, alongside brand-new martyr billboards that read Nasrallah Aat (“Nasrallah Is Coming”)—a play on his name, which means “victory of God” in Arabic. We passed several charred and overturned cars. On the northbound side of the road, dozens of abandoned but undamaged vehicles were parked on the shoulder. These had been left by families fleeing the war in the south, my Lebanese fixer explained; they had run out of gas and apparently continued on foot. Her own family had fled the south in the same way.
After a little more than an hour, we reached the outskirts of Tyre, an ancient city in southern Lebanon. It is usually a lively place, but we found it eerily deserted, with shattered buildings marking the sites of bombings here and there. We passed some of the city’s Roman ruins, and for a moment, I felt as if I’d been transported into one of the Orientalist sketches made by 19th-century European travelers in the Levant, an antique landscape shorn of its people.
We had been directed by the Lebanese army—which maintains a reconnaissance and policing role in the south—to go to the Rest House, a gated resort. There, on a broad terrace overlooking a magnificent beach, we found a cluster of aid workers and TV journalists smoking and chatting under a tarp, with their cameras set on tripods and pointed south. This was as close as any observer could get to the war. Beyond us was an undulating coastline and green hills stretching to the Israeli border, about 12 miles away. There, just beyond our vision, Israeli ground troops were battling Hezbollah’s fighters, near villages that had been turned to rubble.
I was staring out at the sea, mesmerized by the beauty and stillness of the place, when a whooshing sound made me jolt. I looked to my left and saw a volley of projectiles shooting into the air, perhaps 200 yards away. They vanished into the blue sky, angled southward and leaving tufts of white smoke behind them. I felt a rush of panic: These must be Hezbollah rockets. Didn’t this mean Israel would strike back at the launch site, awfully close to us? But one of the Arab journalists waved my worries away. “It happens a lot,” he said. War is like that. You get used to it, until the assumptions change and the missiles land on you.
Not far away, camped out on the Rest House’s blue deck chairs, I found a family of 20 refugees who had left their village 11 days earlier. One of them was a tall, sweet-faced 18-year-old named Samar, dressed in a black shawl and headscarf, who sat very still as she described the moment when the war got too close.
“I saw a missile right above me—I thought it would hit us,” she said. “I felt I was blind for a moment when the missiles struck.” Everything shook, and a rush of dust and smoke made it hard to breathe. Five or six missiles had hit a neighboring house where a funeral was under way, killing one of the family’s neighbors and injuring about 60 others. “It was as close as that umbrella,” she said, pointing to the poolside parasol about 15 feet from us.
The whole family fled, then returned a few hours later to get some belongings, only to be blasted awake that night by another Israeli strike that shattered the remaining windows of the house. They all ran to the main square of the village and huddled there, praying, until dawn, when they drove to the Rest House. They have not been home since. They live on handouts from aid workers and journalists, and do not know if their house is still standing.
I heard stories like these again and again across Lebanon, from families who had fled their homes and some who were reduced to begging. The displaced are everywhere, and they have transformed the country’s demographic map. In the west-Beirut neighborhood of Hamra, a historically leftist and secular enclave, you now see large numbers of women in Islamic dress. I saw them in Christian neighborhoods, in the mountains, even in the far north. You can almost feel the suspicion that locals direct at them as you walk past.
Some locals have welcomed displaced people and offered them free meals; others have turned them away, and many landlords have ripped them off for profit. “Everybody is saying, ‘Why do you come and rent in our civilian neighborhoods? You are endangering everybody around you,’” a friend told me in the northern city of Tripoli. The danger was real, and it could be seen in the evolving pattern of Israeli strikes, which moved from Shiite enclaves to what had been considered safe areas in the mountains and the north. Hezbollah’s fighters appear to be leaking out of the danger zone, blending in with the refugees, and Israel has continued to track and strike them.
Some refugees have fled their homes only to stumble into even more dangerous places. Julia Ramadan, 28, was so frightened by the bombings in Beirut that she retreated to her parents’ apartment, in a six-story building on a hillside in Sidon. The area is mostly Christian, and dozens of southerners had also sought shelter there. Two days after she arrived, Julia spent several hours distributing free meals to other war refugees with her brother, Ashraf. She was home with her family when a missile slammed into the building.
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“With the second missile, the building started to shake,” Ashraf told me when I met him later. A powerfully built man who works as a fitness trainer, he had bandages on his foot and arm. “With the third and fourth, we felt the building starting to collapse.”
Ashraf instinctively turned and tried to use his body to shield his father, who was sitting next to him on a couch in the family’s living room. The building gave way, and father and son found themselves alive but trapped under the rubble. It took eight hours for rescuers to dig them out, and then they learned that Julia and her mother were among the dead. At least 45 people were killed, according to Lebanon’s health ministry (locals told me the number was 75). Israeli officials later said a local Hezbollah commander and several operatives were in the building.
One of the first to arrive on the scene was Muhammad Ahmed Jiradi, a 31-year-old whose aunt, uncle, and cousins lived in the building. He told me he could hear the screams of the people pinned under the wreckage. One of them was his uncle, saying that his wife and children were dead. Jiradi tried frantically to move the broken concrete and steel, but he had no tools, and could manage little. Many of the trapped people died before they could be rescued, their screams gradually fading.
“I saw my aunt pulled out,” Jiradi told me. “Her guts were spilling out; her head was gashed. This is the last image I have of her. I always thought of her as so beautiful. My mother wanted to see her. I said no. I told her, ‘Her face was smiling.’ But it’s not true.”
Jiradi told me these things in a listless monotone as we sat in armchairs in his spartan apartment. He had run out of money to pay for rent and food for his wife and children. He talked nonstop for an hour, periodically repeating, “I can’t take it anymore.” He said this not with any visible pain or emotion, but with the glazed look of someone who has lost all hope.
The Lebanese border with Israel as viewed from Ebel El Saqi, Lebanon, on September 10 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)
Whom do the Lebanese blame for these horrors? When I asked, many of them gave me scripted answers: the Zionist enemy, of course. But some Lebanese told me that they did not want to die for the Palestinians. This was an indirect way of criticizing Hezbollah, which started this new round of fighting by launching rockets at Israeli civilian targets the day after the October 7 massacre, ostensibly to show solidarity with Hamas.
“I don’t know who started this war,” Jiradi told me. “I just want to live in peace.”
That may sound neutral, but in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has called for resistance to Israel at any cost, the absence of ideological fervor can be a tacit refusal to comply. People often voice fatigue in private, where they aren’t worried about being accused of siding with the enemy. But I even saw it on a few highway billboards. It’s Enough—We’re Tired, one of them read. Everyone in Lebanon knows what that means.
One afternoon, my driver, a 56-year-old man named Hassan from southern Lebanon, showed me a picture on his phone of a demolished house. It was his own, in the village of Bint Jbail, near the border with Israel. He had spent decades building it, and now the Israelis had bombed it into ruins. I expected him to erupt in anger at Israel, but then he told me why it had happened: Several Hezbollah fighters had sought shelter in his house, and Israel had targeted them there. He made clear that he held Hezbollah responsible for his loss.
Some Lebanese welcome the strikes on Hezbollah, despite the harm done to civilians. “The Israelis—it’s unfortunate that civilians are dying, but they are doing us a great favor,” a businessman from the north told me. He asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. “I was at a meeting today, and we were all saying, ‘It’s getting worse, but the worse it gets, the faster we will be out of this.’” In the same conversation, this man described his own close call with an Israeli air strike—an experience that did not lessen his hunger to see Hezbollah destroyed.
Hezbollah is keenly aware of its domestic vulnerabilities. In early October, its media wing made a bid for public sympathy by organizing a tour of the worst-hit parts of the Dahieh, the dense south-Beirut district that is home to its headquarters. By 1 p.m. that day, about 300 journalists, many of them European, were clustered together in the war zone, dressed in helmets and flak jackets, patiently waiting for their Hezbollah guides.
The Dahieh usually swarms with people, but the bombings had emptied it. We followed our Hezbollah minders through the cratered streets, many of the reporters excitedly snapping pictures of a place we’d been unable to see until now. At each bomb site, a Hezbollah official stood up and delivered a speech declaring that only civilians had been killed there, innocent women and children murdered by the Israeli “terrorists.” (They did not take us to the places where Hassan Nasrallah and other commanders had been struck.) Reporters thrust out microphones to record his every word. Some clambered over the mountains of rubble, still smoking in some places, greedily edging one another out to get the best shots.
At one site, I saw a man slip past the crowd to get into his auto-repair shop. I walked up and asked him if we could speak. He told me he’d chosen this moment to check on his shop after hearing about the Hezbollah media tour, “because I know the Israelis will not bomb you guys.”
He was right. The Israeli drone operators probably watched the whole weird show from the sky. You can hear the drones buzzing loudly overhead all day and all night in Beirut. Some people told me the noise kept them from sleeping. People jokingly call them Umm Kamel, or “Kamel’s mother,” a play on the name of the MK drone type. It is an effort to domesticate a reality that is very frightening to most Lebanese: Israel could strike them at any time. After the man from the Dahieh repair shop made his comment, I found myself looking up at the sky and wondering how I registered on the Israelis’ drone screens. Could they see my American phone number? Was I, as a U.S. citizen and a journalist, a moving no-kill zone?
Israel’s surveillance technologies have brought a new kind of intimacy to this war. In September, Israel detonated thousands of pagers it had surreptitiously sold to Hezbollah months earlier, wounding the group’s members as they went about their daily routines. Some of the victims were struck in their groins, perhaps even emasculated, because they had their pager on their hip. Others lost eyes and hands. I spoke to a doctor at one of Lebanon’s best hospitals, who described the chaos of that day, when dozens of young men were admitted without registering their names—a violation of the usual protocols, but Hezbollah was not going to give up its members’ identities. Another doctor told me he received several men wounded by pagers who were all listed only as “George,” a typically Christian name. He let it pass.
Even Israel’s efforts to minimize civilian casualties have created a weird closeness with the enemy. Most people I know in Lebanon watch the X feed of Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-speaking Israeli military official who posts warnings about upcoming strikes. But the Israelis also place calls to individual residents in endangered areas. I spoke with a 34-year-old woman named Layal who told me that many people in her southern village, including her parents, had received calls from Israeli officials telling them to evacuate. “But some people do pranks, pretending to be Israelis,” she told me, and that caused confusion. I must have looked baffled, because Layal added—as if to explain—that some of the pranksters were Syrian refugees. Many of the refugees loathe Hezbollah, which sent its fighters to bolster the Syrian regime during that country’s brutal civil war.
Layal told me that one of her neighbors, a woman named Ghadir, had gotten a phone call in late September from someone who spoke Arabic with a Palestinian accent. “You are Ghadir?” the voice said. She denied it. The caller named her husband, her children, the shop across the street. Every detail was correct. The caller told her to leave her apartment. Ghadir reluctantly did so, and that night her entire building was destroyed in an air strike. Layal fled soon afterward, without waiting for a phone call; when I met her, she was living in a rented house in the mountains.
That night, from the dark roof-deck of my Beirut hotel, I watched orange flames burst upward from the city’s southern edge, the aftermath of an air strike. It looked like a volcano erupting. Sounds of awe came from a cluster of young Lebanese at a table next to me; they held up their cellphones to capture the scene, posted their shots to social media, and went back to their cocktails.
A vendor from southern Lebanon selling fruit in Beirut on September 24 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)
Hezbollah has a violent history inside Lebanon, and its domestic enemies are now sniffing the wind for signs of weakness. One of them is Achraf Rifi, the former head of one of Lebanon’s main security agencies. Almost two decades ago, Rifi’s investigators helped identify the Hezbollah operatives who had organized the murder of a string of Lebanese public figures, starting with former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. That bombing destroyed an entire block on Beirut’s seafront and killed 23 people. Rifi’s dogged police work publicly exposed Hezbollah’s willingness to kill anyone who got in its way. It also put him on the group’s target list.
Rifi is 70, with an austere, stiff-backed manner, and he lives in an elegantly furnished apartment in the center of Tripoli. When I went to see him there, he walked me out onto the terrace and pointed down through the evening gloom at a red traffic barrier on the far side of the street. That spot, he said, was where a car packed with 300 pounds of TNT was parked when it exploded in August 2013, one of two simultaneous bombings in central Tripoli that killed 55 people. Rifi told me the car bombing was a joint operation by Hezbollah and Syrian intelligence, and it was intended to kill him. He was inside at the time, and was shaken but not seriously injured.
Rifi knows both parties to this war well: Not only was he the target of that Hezbollah bombing, but as the head of the Internal Security Forces, he became familiar with Israeli spycraft by dismantling 33 Israeli cells inside Lebanon (three of them were in Hezbollah). Fighting Israeli espionage was one of the few objectives he and Hezbollah shared. Rifi told me that Israel’s successful infiltration of Hezbollah, which helped it kill many of the group’s senior leaders, became possible during the years the group spent fighting in Syria to protect the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Off their home turf, Hezbollah’s soldiers were exposed to Israeli surveillance. The Syrian war also created opportunities for self-enrichment and corruption within the organization—a problem that worsened with Lebanon’s subsequent economic collapse, as newly needy people could be tempted to spy in exchange for Israeli money.
Rifi told me he thought that about 20 percent of Hezbollah commanders in the middle and upper ranks had been killed in Israel’s operations this fall, including some of the group’s most effective leaders. He said he thought the bleeding would continue. As a critic of Israel, he would not have hoped to see Hezbollah disarmed this way. But the job is being done.
“The Iranian period is finished, I think,” Rifi told me. “In Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen.”
He may be right. The death of Nasrallah—the most powerful figure in Lebanon—felt like the end of an era to many people, and it ignited a frenzy of anxious speculation about what will happen next. Hezbollah’s defeat, if it comes, is by no means sure to bring peace or order. Day after day, I heard people ransack past chapters of Lebanon’s history for clues about the future.
One night in Tripoli, I listened to a group of friends argue for hours over an exquisite meal at a farm-to-table restaurant called Crop. (Lebanese restaurateurs have learned to take wars in stride.) One of the guests, a local city administrator who had spent years abroad, delivered an acerbic speech about Lebanon’s failure to cohere as a country. “I don’t see anyone who believes in a nation called Lebanon,” he said. “I see the Christians, the Sunnis, the Shia, the Druze—each is loyal to his own community or party. There is no public interest.”
A young historian named Charles al-Hayek interrupted and began to argue passionately that Lebanon was not past hope. The country had special traits that set it apart from other Arab countries: traditions of religious diversity, democracy, higher education, individual and public liberty. These could help Lebanon forge a more enlightened social compact.
A third guest began to argue that Lebanon needed a powerful leader with Western support to beat back the Iranian project and find a new way forward. Hayek shook his head impatiently. The Arab world, he said, was always clamoring for a rajul mukhalis—literally, a “man who finishes things.” This quest for a charismatic leader had always ended in tyranny, Hayek said. The same was true of Lebanon’s sectarian appeals to foreign patrons—France for the Christians, Saudi Arabia for the Sunnis, Iran for the Shia. The country must learn to stand on its own, Hayek said, and the end of Iranian hegemony could provide an opportunity.
At another dinner, this one in Beirut’s Sursock district, the hostess—a glamorously dressed woman in early middle age—asked everyone at the table to describe their best- and worst-case scenarios for Lebanon. One guest invoked the possibility of civil war, and another said: “Civil war? Come on, civil wars are expensive. We don’t have the money.” People laughed. But he wasn’t kidding. Lebanon’s economic collapse is so severe that the country’s political factions—which, apart from Hezbollah, have not fought for decades—lack the guns and ammunition to sustain a serious conflict.
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At one point, the hostess glanced impishly around the room and said: “Please, I want to know who is the best urologue in Beirut.”
Why? someone asked.
“Because I will ask him who has the biggest balls in Lebanon, and that man will rescue us.”
People laughed. But again, it wasn’t just a joke. Many Lebanese I spoke with were desperate for a deus ex machina, and they seemed to want much more than a politician in the familiar mold. The country’s financial straits, together with the explosion that devastated the port of Beirut in 2020, have exposed the depravity of Lebanon’s political class. As one Lebanese friend told me, you go into politics in Lebanon to make money, not to serve the public interest. Corruption isn’t a by-product; it is the essence of the system. As a result, the talk about a new leadership has tended to revolve around the Lebanese army, often described as the country’s last intact national institution. The wish of many is for someone who will assert the army’s power against Hezbollah, smash the whole corrupt political system, and build a better one: Al rajul al mukhalis.
Lebanon’s power brokers have been deadlocked since the previous president’s term expired in 2022—no one has yet succeeded him—and the Biden administration has been pressing for a new election that might empower a government willing to challenge Hezbollah. The Lebanese presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian (each of the top leadership jobs in Lebanon’s government is assigned by law to a particular religious community). The current head of the army, Joseph Aoun, qualifies. But even if an election could be held—which is hard to imagine in the chaos of this war—Aoun’s powers would be constrained by the Lebanese power-sharing system.
I relayed some of the conversations I had heard about the yearning for a military intervention to a retired senior officer in the Lebanese army who is close to Aoun and familiar with his thinking. We met in an officers’ club in the mountain town of Baabda, near the army’s headquarters, on a green hillside property that once belonged to a Kuwaiti princess. Through the boughs of cedar trees, we had a glorious view of Beirut far below, and the Mediterranean beyond.
The officer, clean-shaven and in civilian dress, told me that the army would never stray from its constitutionally defined role. Even if Hezbollah were substantially weakened, taking it on would spark a civil war. I asked about the possibility of disarming Hezbollah—the fervent aspiration of its domestic rivals and foreign adversaries. He said, “The only one who can disarm Hezbollah is Iran.” And that, he said, could happen only in the context of a political settlement between Iran and the United States, its most powerful enemy. Those were sobering words. In essence, he was telling me that Lebanon has no say in its own future.
As of now, no one knows for sure how much strength Hezbollah has left. Despite the battering of its top ranks and decision makers, it has a powerful corps of fighters in southern Lebanon who can operate independently. But with time, the officer told me, “Hezbollah will feel the lack of money. This will be the biggest problem. And when the Shia go back to the south, who will rebuild?”
A tent housing displaced Lebanese in Beirut, photographed on October 2 (Myriam Boulos / Magnum)
As I flew out of Beirut, I could see smoke rising from ruins not far from the airport. Middle East Airlines—Lebanon’s national carrier—is still operating, but other companies are no longer willing to take the risk. It has become so difficult to buy an outbound ticket that some people are sleeping outside the airport, hoping for cancellations. Others talk of fleeing by boat to Cyprus if things get worse. More than 300,000 Syrian refugees who fled to Lebanon during their country’s civil war have escaped back across the border over the past month, a testament to the depth of their fear.
As the plane banked and rose from the Beirut airport, passengers could see the Mediterranean on one side, glittering in the sun. But visible in the other direction, just beyond the runway, was something that offered a hint about the war now raging in Lebanon: a cluttered patch of warehouses and shacks that had arisen gradually during the 1980s, built by Shiite migrants from the south, with little or no oversight by the state. Now they store commodities of all kinds that are flown in and out of the country free of any taxes or tariffs. A shadow economy, made possible by Hezbollah’s enforcers, has gradually enriched and sustained the broader Shiite population.
That arrangement has been essential to Hezbollah’s power, and it has tied the lives and livelihoods of most of Lebanon’s Shia to the revolutionary creed of the Iranian regime. Many fear that if they lose Hezbollah, they will be left defenseless. Some of the elders still remember the days when most Shia were mired in rural poverty, mistreated not just by Lebanon’s other sects but by their own semifeudal overlords.
But their faith in Hezbollah is being tested. One Shiite woman who fled the south and is now living in a rented home in the mountains confided her disappointment to me. “A Hezbollah guy called us to say ‘What do you need?,’ but he didn’t have much to offer,” she said. “Just pillows. I asked for medicines for the kids, but they didn’t bring anything to us. Before the war, Hezbollah said they had an emergency plan. Where is the plan?”
Some people made bitter comparisons with Hezbollah’s reaction to the 2006 war it fought with Israel. Back then, the group’s leaders had quickly rolled out an energetic construction campaign, promising to rebuild every home that was destroyed. Young volunteers with clipboards surged into Shiite districts within hours of the cease-fire, delivering cash and food and supplies. Hardly anyone expects that to happen again. If the refugees’ needs continue to go unmet, Hezbollah could lose support. Might that make possible a new era in Lebanon, free of Tehran’s dictates?
Hezbollah loyalists rarely share their feelings with outsiders. But I got a glimpse of the atmosphere inside the group from a young woman whose brother, a Hezbollah fighter, had been killed in an Israeli air strike in late September. I met her through a friend in the mountain town of Aley, where she had taken refuge.
Her brother’s name was Hamoudi, and he was an unlikely militant. “He didn’t pray,” his sister told me. (She asked that I not reveal her name or the family’s surname.) “My mother said, ‘You will not become a martyr; you don’t pray.’” Some in the family—which is very loyal to Hezbollah—said Hamoudi seemed almost an atheist. “He didn’t read the Quran,” his sister said. “He listened to music. It’s haram”—forbidden—“to touch girls,” but Hamoudi, a burly 25-year-old with rosy cheeks and an infectious smile, loved women and didn’t try to hide it.
He was a film producer and editor and had taught himself the trade, working his way up from production assistant to camera operator and lighting designer. He started his own firm, doing social-media reels for restaurants and clothing companies and coffee shops. When he moved from the family’s southern village to Beirut, he found an apartment, not in the Dahieh, but in the more cosmopolitan Hamra district, where he often stayed out late partying with friends.
His sister showed me pictures and videos on her phone: Hamoudi swaying to music in the car, getting a haircut, voguing on the beach. “He was my friend, my brother, my secrets box,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “The one I go to first in my sadness and my happiness.”
Hamoudi had always been torn between the family tradition of muqawama—resistance—and the lure of Beirut and its glamor. Only at the end of the summer did he return to the family home in the south. By then, Israeli air strikes had become more frequent, the news ever grimmer. A 17-year-old friend in the family’s village was badly injured when a pager exploded in his hand in mid-September, she said. The boy’s father was killed soon afterward. On the day Nasrallah was killed, she called Hamoudi and asked him to come to Beirut to comfort her. He said he couldn’t. It was on that same day that he formally joined Hezbollah as a fighter, his sister said.
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Hamoudi seemed resigned to his death as soon as he joined. He even washed himself as martyrs are meant to, and made a martyrdom video, she told me—whether because everyone around him seemed to be dying, or because he had been assigned a mission, she didn’t know. But the very next day, an Israeli bomb struck the house where Hamoudi and two other Hezbollah fighters were sheltering, killing them all. The sister told me she suspected it even before she got the news. “I felt something,” she said. “Years before, he had a motorcycle accident, and I felt something the second it happened. This time, the same.”
Hezbollah issued a poster bearing Hamoudi’s picture and his name, with looping Arabic script declaring his martyrdom. You see these posters all over the Dahieh and in southern Lebanon these days, always with new faces. Hamoudi’s family has not yet been able to hold a funeral, because their village is still so dangerous. “When we see his grave, that day he will die again,” his sister said. “It will feel like the first day.”
Hamoudi’s sister is a devout Muslim and a supporter of Hezbollah. I have met many women like her in Lebanon, and I vaguely expected her to deliver a speech about the coming victory of the resistance, or to assure me that she would never give in. But as she wiped her tears away, she said nothing of the kind.
“I’m thinking to leave the country,” she said.