Israel will pay, families vow after missile strike deep inside Lebanon

ALI DEBS, a commander from Hezbollah’s elite Redwan forces, had narrowly escaped a missile sent to kill him in his car just a week earlier when the bombs came raining down again. Fired from Israeli fighter jets, they crashed into a residential building in Nabatieh, killing him and two other Hezbollah fighters.

On the floor above him, Hussein Berjawi was hosting relatives for dinner. Seven were killed, the youngest aged seven.

It was the bloodiest day for civilians in Lebanon since hostilities began on Oct 8, when Hezbollah opened a “support front” for Hamas, forcing Israel to fight on two of its borders.

The Israeli strikes, about 22 miles from the border and the deepest into Lebanon so far, were ostensibly in revenge for an attack the night before on Safed, in northern Israel, which killed an Israeli soldier. They also came as Israel steps up a campaign of drone assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders inside Lebanon, dragging the fight far away from the front lines.

At the funeral last weekend, coffins holding the charred bodies of the family passed through a stoical crowd of mourners. The deaths had put them in war mode. “War is coming,” said Hassan Haidar, a relative of the dead. “No matter what [Hassan] Nasrallah decides to do, Israel knows it will pay for this,” he said, referring to the Hezbollah leader. “We will protect the south at any cost.”

The family’s local mosque had overflowed before the public funeral, the silence broken only by wailing. The coffins were kept closed because of the bodies’ mutilated state. They were laid in a public square in Nabatieh, a city that overwhelmingly backs Hezbollah.

Strikes here, above the Litani river, go beyond the usual rules of engagements between the two sworn enemies. The scale of civilian deaths shocked and unnerved Lebanon.

Lebanese analysts say the escalation is “controlled … for now” as Israel lacks international support for a major offensive in Lebanon. The drone strikes, however, have reignited fears, even among those convinced the conflict will not escalate. De-escalation efforts are stuck in an existential standoff. Western diplomats said the deepening Israeli strikes are “testing” Hezbollah’s restraint. As the United States and France rush to find a diplomatic solution, Israel threatens to attack as far as Beirut if an agreement cannot be reached, while Hezbollah reiterates there will be no deal until Israel stops bombing Gaza. While both sides up the ante, the margin for error is growing increasingly thin.

In Jdeidet Marjayoun, a Christian village nestled between Israel and Syria, Hezbollah has not brought weapons in to attack Israel and, so far, it remains unscathed. It is, however, only eight kilometres from the Israeli village of Metula and it has seen the Israeli tanks roll in before.

“It’s not [Lebanon’s] war, we should not be included in this,” said 47-yearold Chadi, a Christian, as he sat in his empty bakery. “What is happening in Gaza is horrific but we should not be involved.” Some of the other heavily Christian villages around Marjayoun tried to set up roadblocks at the beginning of the war to stop Hezbollah and its allies moving weapons in, he explained. They were quickly dismantled. “If they want to come here, they will come here. Who could stop them? Us? The army?” he laughed.

Relationships between religions here in the predominantly Shia Muslim south are old and complex. Lebanon was once a major base for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) to launch attacks, causing several Israeli invasions that led to the birth of Hezbollah in the first place.

In 1982, when Jdeidet Marjayoun was last invaded, Christian militias in Lebanon joined forces with Israel to expel the PLO, committing infamous massacres of Palestinian and Shia communities. Now, in coordination with Hezbollah, for the first time in more than 20 years, Hamas and other Palestinian groups are launching attacks from Lebanon again.

The sound of incoming artillery thudded across the valley.

Strikes had hit five villages in Lebanon earlier in the day, an hour later Hezbollah would launch a series of strikes on various villages in northern Israel. At this stage in the conflict, it was somewhat of a slow day.

There’s a black-and-white divide in southern Lebanon, one local said, either people are desperate to fight Israel or desperate for it not to escalate. Unlike on the other side of the border, Lebanese civilians have no aid raid sirens, no sophisticated air defence system and no bunkers to retreat to. “You would be eaten by a drone within 90 seconds,” a local journalist warned as we tried to move a couple of miles toward one of the Marjayoun villages that had been hit in recent days.

Like many, Chadi, a retiree of Lebanon’s intelligence service, could not afford to flee to Beirut or safer areas outside Hezbollah control even if he wanted to. The depth of Lebanon’s four-year-long economic crisis has slashed his pension and the weak Lebanese state, which has neither an empowered cabinet nor president, is as cash-strapped as most of its citizens. It is woefully ill-prepared for war.

Anis Abla, the head of a civil defence unit in Marjayoun, despaired at their lack of resources. His men have been constantly tackling white phosphorus fires wearing “at best” the N-95 masks that everyone wore during Covid. United Nations peacekeepers had donated gas masks but Lebanese government refused the cash needed to renew their filters. They have only been able to use them once.

On Instagram, citizens crowdfund medical kits for the teams operating on the front lines. The list of their most needed items includes scissors, tourniquets and oxygen masks.

However, as Nasrallah finished his speech last week, vowing “blood for blood” , back in Nabatieh his ardent supporters welcome a war on their doorstep. “Fear? There would be nothing better than to die a martyr,” said 17-year-old Ali, highlighting the heart of Israel’s problem; ideologies cannot be bombed out of existence. Every round of violence generates more martyrs in waiting.

Nowhere was that more clear than in the family home of the seven-year-old and his mother killed in the Nabatieh strike. Gripping a picture of Zainab, the mother, a teenage boy’s legs buckled as the coffins were brought out of the home for burial. His jaw locked open, his scream silent as hundreds of people at her azza wailed their goodbyes. “Death to Israel,” he managed to scream, his body convulsing as he sobbed.

‘War is coming ... whatever Nasrallah decides, Israel knows it will pay for this ... we will protect the south’