It seemed to have struck every building in every street. Barely a window was left intact

Stepping out the shower on a hot summer’s day, I glanced at my phone to see a tweet from my colleague Nabih Boulos, of the LA Times, about an explosion at the port.

Throwing on a pair of shorts, I went to grab my camera to follow the story as, with an unnatural roar, a second, monstrous explosion tore through the city. The windows became a million shards of glass, first all around me and then under my knees as I dived for shelter under the table.

Instead of my camera, I grabbed my first aid kit, a towel and my phone. Downstairs, a grey dust and an eerie silence hung in the air, until people began to spill out of the next door café, dazed and crying.

A French psychologist helped dress the worst of my wounds: a freeflowing gash on my hairline and several around my knees from my glass-strewn floor. Two young

Lebanese women offered to drive me the short distance to the nearest hospital. Their speech was short and breathless, and the car’s windscreen was a shattered spider’s web, but so was everybody else’s.

The destruction seemed to have struck every building in every street. Barely a window remained intact.

We were shouted away from the first hospital, which we were told had reached its capacity. The second, too, was not accepting patients. It was easy to see why. Window frames hung askew, the interior was pitch black. Beds were being set up in the car park. Staff stumbled around, struggling to cope with the order of their place of healing reduced to a shattered shell. Every now and again an ambulance would turn up, into which shouting men would steer the most seriously wounded to another hospital.

We finally found a hospital in a suburb, where a doctor, picking glass from my head, remarked: “I saw the [2006] war, it was nothing like this. I’ve never seen anything like this.”