Ifirst met​ Hassan in October 2024, a few weeks after his flat in Dahieh, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, was destroyed in an Israeli bombing. His wife and children, he said, were now living with three other families in her sister’s cramped apartment elsewhere in the city, while he slept in his car. Hassan had lived all his life in Dahieh. Even now, his car was parked on the edge of the area, shaking every night as bombs dropped nearby. We sat in a street café at a plastic table and he began telling me about the day it happened.

It was around 7.30 in the evening, he said, and his wife was laying the table for the children’s dinner, when a group of Hizbullah men, rushing from apartment to apartment, knocked on the door and told him to get his family out. Hassan asked if they had time to pack. ‘No,’ the men said. ‘Put on your shoes and go down, now.’

‘We all went down with nothing but the clothes on our back,’ he said.

In the street, Hassan was told that a few minutes earlier the Israeli army had posted an evacuation order for the residents of the street. At 1.30 a.m., a missile struck the building next door. It collapsed, taking Hassan’s building down with it. Everything he had was buried under the rubble: furniture, clothes, pictures, schoolbooks and toys. ‘I worked all my life to save up to buy a flat,’ he said. ‘I could have chosen anywhere in Beirut, but I chose Dahieh, because that’s where I grew up, it’s where my parents live. It’s the best place to live in Beirut.’ When I asked why he wanted to stay in a neighbourhood that had been the focus of Israeli bombing campaigns not only in the year since the 7 October attacks, but in many earlier wars, he said that for people living there it was like a home village. ‘The community is so close that you never feel alone. You don’t worry about leaving the children alone, or whether your parents need anything,’ he said. ‘Let’s say you come home with a piece of furniture you want to carry up to your flat. You don’t have to ask people to help you, they’ll be around you, carrying it with you.’

Dahieh, which in Arabic simply means ‘suburb’, is a cluster of municipalities three miles south of central Beirut. Originally they were part of an arc of orchards and villages that stretched from the slopes of Mount Lebanon in the east to the coastal dunes in the south-west. As Beirut expanded from the Mediterranean port city of the late 19th century into a modern, post-independence metropolis, its growth fuelled less by wealth and industry than by its clichéd image as the Paris of the East, the orchards and villages were settled by migrants from the mountains, mostly Christian, seeking work and access to city services. Next, Palestinians and other refugees set up camps there, followed by Shia from the impoverished countryside of the Beqaa Valley, and later from the south, fleeing the increasingly militarised border region with Israel. From the early 1970s, on the eve of the civil war, these new settlements were often referred to as the ‘belt of misery’, and they became fertile recruiting grounds for leftist and communist organisations, and later for Islamist militants. Since the 1980s, the name Dahieh has often been followed by the phrase ‘Hizbullah’s stronghold’, conjuring images of bearded men with green bandanas and Kalashnikovs and women shrouded in black shuffling past posters of martyrs, helping to justify the violence inflicted on the area’s civilians.

In reality, Dahieh is a patchwork of neighbourhoods shaped over more than half a century by social and economic forces as well as the violent politics of the age. One can still find, tucked in between multi-storey apartment blocks and car repair shops, an old village house, surrounded by a few fruit trees, or an abandoned garden with bushes growing wild. Some parts of Dahieh, like Hay al-Sulum, are poor: beginning as slums they expanded over the decades into something resembling towns, with cinder-block houses growing steadily taller as one illegally built floor was stacked on top of another, year after year. In places the buildings stand so close that their balconies almost touch, electrical cables criss-crossing between them, plunging the street below into darkness. Every few dozen metres the road is jammed by minibuses, motorbikes pushing their way between them, past carts selling fruit, vegetables, clothes and household goods. But in other parts of Dahieh, smart residential buildings line boulevards with shops, gyms and cafés, much like any middle-class neighbourhood anywhere.

Hassan​ was a toddler when his father, a soldier in the Lebanese army who was fleeing revenge killings, moved the family from their village in the Beqaa to the southern suburbs of Beirut in the mid-1980s. The civil war was entering its last, murderous years, and the family, like tens of thousands of other mostly Shia families, found refuge there. They squatted at first in a couple of rooms in a small, bullet-ridden apartment at the edge of Burj al-Barajneh, in the no-man’s-land between the Palestinian refugee camp and a Shia neighbourhood.

These two neighbourhoods were the battleground of the so-called War of the Camps, a war within the civil war. Hassan remembers the day his mother ran out to grab him from the dirt yard in front of the house, where he was playing with other children, as mortar shells began to explode around them. But he also remembers a happy childhood spent exploring the wreckage and playing hide-and-seek in the ruins. He even fashioned his own billiard table from broken bits of wood. He said these were his ‘safe years’.

After he graduated from university, his father dipped into his savings and bought Hassan a taxi licence. He became the private driver to a wealthy hotel owner, who gave him a monthly salary, a pension and medical insurance. For a decade he drove the hotel owner by day and worked as a taxi driver on the side, while his young wife, Naila, a lawyer by training, worked as an accountant for a large firm. Eventually the couple saved enough to buy a flat next to his parents in Dahieh, where the family had moved in the 1990s.

‘There is this perception that the Shia are poor. It’s not true,’ Hassan told me. Within the Shia community of Lebanon, he said, some worked in West Africa or the Gulf, and others worked their lands in the south, which until the war in 2024 had seen substantial agricultural investment. Across the community, Hassan said, the most important consideration was education. ‘A Shia, from the moment he’s a child, his parents drill it into his head: education, education and more education. They’re obsessed with it. Because a Shia doesn’t have the connections within the state that members of other sects have. So to become something, he needs education.’

Life in Dahieh, like elsewhere in Beirut, had its challenges, Hassan said. The Lebanese state was largely absent, with a single police station serving the whole area, and policemen rarely showed up during violent clashes between clan members, some with roots in the Beqaa Valley, who traded weapons and drugs and ran protection rackets. ‘You can’t open a business without their permission. You have to pay them a khawa [protection money].’ When I asked him why Hizbullah didn’t deal with the clans, Hassan said it was because the party needed them. When Hizbullah wanted to punish someone or break up a demonstration, it would send in the zu’ran – thugs from the clans – rather than its own fighters.

A community leader not affiliated with the party, and who had stood against it in elections, gave a more nuanced view. Hizbullah, he said, didn’t want clan war. As a religious movement, it was very much opposed to the clans’ drug and weapons dealing – if it caught clan members with drugs it would hand them over to the security services. But it would never risk a direct confrontation. The cost would be a cycle of vendettas and feuds between party members and the clans that would undermine the solidarity of the area. Hizbullah is in a bind, he told me. It has to provide services because the Lebanese state won’t, not because it wants to replace the state. The state looks at Dahieh and shrugs and says: that’s Hizbullah territory. So the party has to step in.

Over the last decade, Hassan said, a new class of people had appeared in Dahieh, what he called the party aristocracy, driving black SUVs with tinted windows and flashing their wealth, claiming connections, real or pretended, to Hizbullah apparatchiks, and behaving accordingly. This ‘aristocracy’ was dictatorial even towards its own community. ‘It was no longer enough to support the resistance,’ Hassan said, as many in his family and his wife’s family had done, some of them even dying for it. ‘You also had to support the party politically.’

Hassan backed the anti-corruption demonstrations of 2019, which took place after the collapse of the banking sector wiped out the savings of millions of Lebanese. This scandal exposed the close relationship between the country’s financial sector and its politicians and sectarian leaders. Hizbullah chose to side with the establishment it had spent years criticising, backing the status quo in Lebanon.

A few days after his apartment was destroyed, another missile targeted the building where his parents lived, a couple of blocks away – his parents weren’t there; they had left at the start of the war. The missile ripped open the façade. Videos from the site immediately after the strike show further explosions and fire pouring out of the basement. Later, when he visited the building, Hassan found that in the rooms at the back of the basement – behind a shop selling ceramics and bathroom fixtures – there had been stores of weapons and ammunition.

As we spoke, I could sense Hassan’s feelings shifting between anger at Israel’s savagery and disappointment with Hizbullah for starting what it called a ‘war of support for Gaza’ that was turning into a nightmare in Lebanon. For many months Hizbullah stuck to its narrative of deterrence, before Israel upended the rules and unleashed a massive campaign that killed many senior figures in the party – including its long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah – and levelled large swathes of Beirut and south Lebanon.

Hassan’s feelings about Hizbullah were also personal: he couldn’t believe that weapons had been stored in the basement of his parents’ building. ‘What if some madman had decided to drop a cigarette and start a fire?’ He said it quietly: such thoughts were rarely voiced in public, not because people were scared, but because it felt inappropriate to criticise the party in the middle of a war – one shouldn’t reproach one’s own.

For weeks​ , while staying in a friend’s flat on the Achrafieh hill, overlooking Dahieh, I would wake up in the middle of the night as the building shook and the windows rattled. I would count the explosions: one, two … eight … fourteen. From the balcony I could see white flashes of light crackling through the sky, followed by the shriek of a plane – or was it a missile – and then the rumbling of explosions, and an orange ball of fire that sometimes folded in on itself before rising. As the sun climbed above the mountain ridge in the distance, pillars of silver smoke appeared to rise from the suburbs before drifting towards the city, carrying the acrid smell of incinerated concrete, metal and plastic.

When I drove through Dahieh afterwards, under the constant buzz of Israeli drones, the streets would be deserted apart from the occasional motorbike whizzing down a side street, and the security men, presumably from the party, standing at some intersections. The previous night’s bombed buildings had usually collapsed into the streets; sometimes a whole block would have been pulverised. I would meet a few people here and there – a woman in black carrying a salvaged pot, a man with his daughter on her scooter carrying bundles of clothes – and there was always Abbas the car mechanic, who refused to leave, and spent his days going from street to street feeding hungry cats, occasionally yelling at the unseen drones: ‘Dawwashtu rassna!’ – ‘You’re giving us a headache.’

I kept hearing the stories of survivors. In one impoverished neighbourhood on the edge of Dahieh, where poor Shia families lived alongside migrant workers, a woman had come out onto her balcony to shout at a group of noisy children when a missile struck and threw her several metres through the air. She survived. Several others were killed, including the children. I went to an apartment next door to a strike that had levelled a nine-storey building: furniture upturned, plaster dust everywhere. The father told me his son had been asleep in the room, but the boy had gone to the bathroom moments before the missile hit. The randomness of who lives and who dies.

In November​ 2024, Hizbullah accepted a ceasefire negotiated on its behalf by the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, and brokered by the Biden administration. Despite the assassination of so many of its military and civilian leaders, Hizbullah continued to fight in the south until the ceasefire took effect, but the terms of the agreement reflected its weakness. Israel was permitted to continue striking targets it deemed threats and to retain control of five hilltops inside Lebanese territory; Lebanese army units were instructed to dismantle weapons caches and tunnels in the south.

Hizbullah also accepted the formation of a government openly hostile to it, which had the maximalist goal of disarming the party and bringing all of its weapons under the control of the state. The party’s new secretary-general, Naim Qassem, responded by calling for a new ‘defensive strategy’ for Lebanon based on utilising the resistance’s weapons and capabilities, as well as those of the official armed forces, and rejected calls for disarming Hizbullah itself. But he also urged restraint on his own followers.

Over the next fifteen months, Israel conducted thousands of sorties into south Lebanon and, by the UN’s count, violated the truce around ten thousand times, killing more than 330 Lebanese, a substantial number of them civilians. In December 2024, as if to confirm Hizbullah’s weakness, the Assad regime in Syria fell. In Iraq, calls grew louder for the disarmament of Iran-aligned militias. Was Hizbullah finished? Would it split into factions, or fracture into cells to maintain its security? Throughout the ceasefire, Hassan knew that the war would return. Every time he drove into Dahieh, he saw heavy machinery clearing rubble, breaking up masonry and loading it onto trucks. But not a single house had been rebuilt, and that, he told me, was the reason he knew the war wasn’t over. What made it more obvious was Israel’s continued bombing campaign. ‘We were living in fear of these drones,’ Hassan said. ‘They kept killing us the whole time. My relatives, my wife’s relatives, everyone had lost someone they knew.’

War was engulfing the region. Over the course of 2025, Israel continued its destruction of Gaza and conducted strikes in Syria, Yemen and Qatar. In June the US bombed Iran in the twelve-day war. The Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire formally ended on 2 March this year, after Hizbullah fired six rockets into northern Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in joint US-Israeli strikes. Israel’s response was a sharp escalation of its already brutal tactics. Now, rather than the evacuation of individual buildings or blocks, the orders covered the whole of south Lebanon and Dahieh, nearly 20 per cent of the country’s territory, turning more than a million Lebanese, a sixth of the population, into refugees. The bombing of Beirut resumed, and the anticipated ground invasion of the south followed two weeks later, employing what Israeli officials openly called the ‘Rafah model in Gaza’: occupying a security zone of border villages and systematically razing them, house by house, orchard by orchard.

Inside Lebanon, Hizbullah’s rocket attack was met with fury by the government. The prime minister, Nawaf Salam, declared all Hizbullah’s military activities illegal and demanded that the group surrender its weapons to the state. He called its attack ‘an irresponsible act that jeopardises Lebanon’s security’, and later said that each of the six missiles had caused the displacement of ten thousand Lebanese. If Hizbullah had been so badly beaten two years earlier, when it had its full arsenal and its leadership, critics argued, this new attack was suicidal.

One​ afternoon, a few weeks into the current war, I walked through downtown Beirut. The sun had come out after weeks of rain, washing the sandstone façades in gleaming orange light. The cobblestones, still wet, glinted and the bougainvillea was in full bloom. But the streets of this manicured, high-end shopping district, with its mélange of faux-Moorish arches and French-style baroque, where luxury shops and cafés stand on every corner, were empty, apart from salespeople in their fitted suits and short skirts.

The downtown area, rebuilt in the late 1990s, was supposed to be the emblem of a Beirut risen from the ashes of the civil war. Architecturally, the restoration is impressive. Socially and economically, it has been a farce. By knocking down and reconstructing whole streets from scratch, the real-estate company Solidere destroyed a social fabric that had existed for decades, if not centuries, replacing it with a shopping destination devoid of soul. The hundreds of apartments in the reconstructed buildings have been empty for as long as I can remember.

I walked to the Waterfront District, an area of reclaimed land jutting into the sea, created by dumping several million cubic metres of wartime rubble on what had once been a rubbish dump. Solidere called it an expansion of the iconic Beirut seafront, offering such attractions as ‘marinas, waterside leisure, lifestyle, cultural and other entertainment’, and claimed it would be ‘a model of urban development’. Apart from a few pop-up structures, a running and cycling track, and a scattering of trees, the area resembles a vast, empty car park.

In 2023, during the first round of fighting, the waterfront became the obvious gathering spot for those fleeing the bombing. People who couldn’t afford to go elsewhere stayed in tents there for months. Half-hearted attempts to move them away from the glitzy part of town, lest they spoil the view for the inhabitants of nearby luxury residences or customers at the cafés, failed.

When the fighting resumed this year, the tents filled the area again. There were colourful one-person tents; makeshift tents made of tarpaulins stretched between poles, with a sofa or mattresses below; tents attached to their owners’ cars, or clustered together to house an extended family. Children played in front of them; elders sat on cinder blocks or on the pavement – smoking, talking, waiting for news. Neighbours tended to find one another and pitch their tents close by, so as to recreate the streets they had left behind, while those streets, in turn, mirrored the villages their inhabitants had once come from. There were no toilets in the makeshift camp, but in one corner, where a few spindly pines offered shelter, used toilet paper was scattered and flies swarmed around. At night, fires were lit with whatever was available: crates, cardboard, tree branches, still green, releasing thick smoke into the sky.

Here I came across Mariam. She was leading her grandson, a blond boy of about five in a tiger onesie, back to his mother, who had managed to find a room to rent nearby. Mariam herself had been sleeping in the car with her husband since they abandoned their house in Dahieh, but she said she went back to the house every couple of days to wash and do laundry. ‘We only die once, and death comes to you anywhere.’ To make her point, she told me that one night she and her husband heard that a group of people from their ancestral village in the Beqaa had pitched their tent on Ramlet al-Baida, the sandy beach south of Beirut, so they went to pay a visit. ‘After we left, the Israelis hit the tent. Three men were killed,’ she said, looking me in the eye, as if she was challenging me to explain her survival rationally.

She spoke about her confidence in the coming victory, because God was with the brave men of the resistance. The young men fighting in the south, she said, weren’t fighting for the Shia of Lebanon alone. They were fighting for the honour of Lebanon, Sunnis and Christians and Druze alike. Her own son, she said, had been fighting in the south for almost a month now and she hadn’t heard anything. She held up her phone: useless to her, since he wasn’t allowed to communicate.

Mariam had grown up in a well-to-do family with agricultural lands in the Beqaa. At a young age, she was drawn to the local husseiniyya, where the tragedy of Karbala – when Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet through his daughter Fatima, was martyred with his family after he refused to give an oath of allegiance to the Umayyad caliph – was retold every year in poetry, song and religious lectures: it’s the central event of Shia tradition. Mariam hadn’t even finished primary school, but she found she could write poetry in the traditional metre, celebrating the defiance of Imam Hussein and his companions in the face of overwhelming power, as well as the courage and sacrifice of the women of Karbala. Her verses were admired by older clerics and poets.

She also made a vow: if she ever married and had a son, she would name him after one of Hussein’s companions slain at Karbala. ‘My husband comes from a very poor family,’ she told me. ‘When he came to ask for my hand, I told him: I will marry you, and I don’t want a dowry. But you have to accept my vow.’ He agreed. The couple married and moved to a small house in Dahieh. When their son was born, her husband kept his promise, setting aside the local tradition of naming his first-born after his father. The son would follow in Mariam’s footsteps, attending the nearby husseiniyya from a very young age. ‘When he was about to leave for the front, I turned away because I didn’t want him to see me crying,’ she said. ‘We will all die one day. Someone could come to me and say your son was killed in a car accident, or a drone killed him while he was sleeping, and that would crush my heart. But to die a martyr, that is an honour.’

In the last war, she said, her nephew, another Hizbullah fighter, had spent 21 days buried under rubble after his position was struck. Shrapnel had cut off his ear and was still lodged in his neck when they pulled him out; his burned clothes had stuck to his skin. He spent months recuperating in hospital. When she asked him how he had survived under the rubble, he told her: ‘My aunt, al-Zahra [Fatima herself], was with me the whole time.’ He too is now back in the south fighting again.

For Mariam​ , the fight against Israel is both a religious and a patriotic duty, carried out to defend the dignity of all Lebanese. But for another section of society it is a war imposed by a single party, Hizbullah – which, in the prime minister’s words, is ‘fighting other people’s wars on Lebanese soil’. This debate has run through the country since the 1960s – when the question was whether Palestinian fighters should be allowed to operate from Lebanese soil. Then, as now, Lebanese society was divided between those who saw armed resistance against Israel as a national duty and those who believed it would inevitably lead to the country’s destruction. Then, as now, Israel identified that split and widened it.

It’s clear that the communal solidarity of previous rounds of fighting is fading, replaced by suspicion, anger and outright xenophobia. To those old enough to remember, the present atmosphere recalls the days of civil war. In several towns, Shia displaced from the south and Dahieh have been barred by locals from renting apartments. Where they have been taken in, they are closely monitored. After every Israeli strike, discussion on social media and in the press immediately tries to identify any Shia in the vicinity, on the assumption that Israel only targets them, and that any non-Shia killed are collateral to a Shia target rather than being evidence of indiscriminate bombing.

In Ayn El Mrayseh, north-west of downtown Beirut, an Israeli strike on 8 April brought down half a building, killing 27 people, most of them women and children. I stood on the roof of an adjacent building, talking to one of the neighbours. He bemoaned the fact that in such a mixed area it was hard to keep people from the ‘other community’ – i.e. Shia – from moving in.

In his novel The City and the City, China Miéville describes two cities inhabiting the same geographical space. The border usually runs between neighbourhoods, but sometimes it bisects a single street, with one side belonging to one city and the other to its twin, or it cuts across a park, or even through a building. To maintain the separation, the citizens of each city learn to unsee the other. You can walk on the same pavement as someone and unsee them because they belong to the other city.

Almost every city in the world has its own other city, or cities: rich and poor, conservative and liberal, where the privileged learn to unsee the dispossessed, where progressive eyes unfocus so as not to see what we don’t want to believe exists. But it is in cities that have gone through civil war and fragmented into warring neighbourhoods that the feeling is strongest. It’s hard to put the pieces back together after watching people from over there killing people from over here, and in places like Baghdad, Sarajevo and Aleppo the old frontlines can still be traced long after the barricades have come down.

Beirut has long revelled in the cliché of two cities. The image preceded its civil wars – some argue it was the cause of them. The city can be split any number of ways: Arab and French, Muslim and Christian, socialist-progressive and religious conservative, in support of the resistance against Israel or against it. And somehow Beirut – bombed, exhausted, dysfunctional – still revels in the cliché, still uses it to seduce new arrivals chasing their own imagined city. Some still look for the Paris of the Orient; others want to relive the revolution by walking down streets of bullet-pocked old buildings. The Israelis, and some Lebanese, are working hard to push the narrative that there is one overriding division: between the Shia, who are to be punished; and the rest, who are to be liberated from Iran and Hizbullah. It is a narrative that risks pushing the whole city to the brink of civil strife, and that disguises the fact that all of Beirut, indeed all of Lebanon, is a target of the same war.

Iwent back​ recently to visit Hassan and his wife in their new apartment, in a predominantly Christian neighbourhood in the hills overlooking Beirut. The living room was spacious, with a dining table in one corner, a sofa and a couple of chairs in the other, but it felt empty, like the temporary home it was. There were no pictures on the walls, no stains on the carpet and no memories. Hassan sat on the edge of the sofa. He had just finished his lunch, and the smell of rice and fava beans lingered in the air. His two children were squeezed behind him: the boy, about five, playing a game on his father’s phone; the girl, older, a bored look on her face, watching a cartoon on YouTube.

After the ceasefire of November 2024, Hassan told me, the party gave every family that had lost its home $6000 to cover a year’s rent and another $2000 for furniture. (Not everyone seems to have received this.) ‘We’re settled here, thank God,’ Naila said. They had been lucky, she explained, to find somewhere to rent before the new round of fighting began. She said they had only managed to get the place because her aunt, who is married to a Christian, arranged it. ‘They wouldn’t have rented to us, I’m sorry to say, because we are Shia.’ She had signed the lease in her own non-sectarian name. Hassan’s name, unmistakably Shia, would have complicated things. ‘You see how far we go just so the kids can live in peace.’

Their precautions extended into daily life. They tried to keep a low profile, avoiding people from the neighbourhood and even the shop downstairs, buying their groceries from outside the area. The municipal authorities maintain an informal neighbourhood watch system, periodically checking apartments and asking questions about visitors. ‘This is sectarianism,’ Hassan said. It had always been a subtle undercurrent, but it had got much worse during the latest war. ‘I mean, they look up your family tree to see if you have any ties to the party. And if they find any connection, by God, there’s no way they’ll let you stay.’ Hassan and Naila felt that there had been an aversion to them since the war started, even though they had nothing to do with Hizbullah, nor had anyone in their immediate family. They were not affiliated, not on the payroll. But people saw Hassan’s name, and that was enough.

When his parents came to stay with them for a week, one of the neighbours informed on them. The police station called Naila, and told her that anyone hosting a displaced person had to report their name, occupation and age to the municipality. Neighbours began dropping by under various pretences, until Hassan’s parents left.

The unintended consequence of this bigotry and discrimination is that someone like Hassan no longer blames Hizbullah for anything. On the contrary, for him and his wife, Hizbullah’s battle in the south has become more than just a fight against Israel. It is bound up with the struggle for the survival and the dignity of the Shia sect itself. The more excluded and threatened they felt, the more they saw Hizbullah as the only force capable of protecting the Shia from the marginalisation they had experienced for decades before the party’s rise. ‘We’re praying from the bottom of our hearts that, please, for God’s sake, Hizbullah don’t lose this war, because seriously, if they do lose, that’s it, the whole sect will be on a blacklist,’ he said. After a pause, he said: ‘Actually, we’re on the blacklist now. In jobs, in housing, in life, in everything. It’s like they want to drive us out of Lebanon. This has become a war on the sect.’

As he spoke his agitation mounted, and suddenly he yelled: ‘So tomorrow I’m driving in my car with my family, or I’m on my way to work, and a missile hits me? For God’s sake, why? Let’s finish it and go all the way to the end. The people of the party and the resistance should go all the way, to the last man.’ He turned towards his children behind him on the sofa. ‘I can’t take it any more. I have these two kids, and I want a guarantee of fifty years that nothing will happen to them going forward. I want a written guarantee from the party, otherwise I won’t keep sending them to school just to go and die in an airstrike.’ His voice was so loud and heated I thought the neighbours would come barging in at any moment. ‘Because what did I bring them into this world for? Send them to school, send them to university, and every fifteen, twenty years, Israel comes and kills our children. We can’t live like this.’

The young man​ had pulled the hood of his parka down over his face and tucked his chin into the collar so that only a slit between the ridge of his nose and his eyebrows remained visible. He pointed at a concrete water tank on a ridge and said an Israeli commando unit, which had arrived by helicopter, had been positioned there. With his finger he traced an arc of bullet holes along the left side of the tank. ‘See the bullet holes,’ he said. ‘That’s us firing at them.’

We were in the town of al-Nabi Shayth, on the eastern slopes of the mountain range near the Syrian border, standing on a mound of rubble that had once been a multi-storey house. In front of us lay the green Beqaa Valley; in the distance, the snow-capped peak of Mount Sannine. On 7 March, the Israeli military had issued an evacuation order for the whole town. Children and the elderly left for the safety of neighbouring villages, while most of the men stayed put. All the main roads leading to the village had been hit with drone fire, rendering them impassable and isolating the town.

That evening, just after sunset, a house – the mound of rubble we were standing on – was hit. Debris and masonry began raining on the parka-man’s house next door and he ran out to help. ‘We carried out those who were alive, and the rest – may Allah reward them. Sixteen of my relatives were killed here by the Israelis.’ People were digging with their hands to retrieve the injured and the dead. More strikes followed: one up the hill, the man said, one at the bottom of the slope, one on a nearby farm.

In the darkness ambulances started arriving, among them three with the markings of the Hizbullah-affiliated Islamic Relief and with men wearing Lebanese army uniforms inside. These men were actually IDF soldiers, and headed to the cemetery where the commando unit was hoping to find the remains of Ron Arad, an Israeli pilot who disappeared in 1986. When the townspeople, including parka-man, opened fire on the Israeli position, heavy aerial cover was directed at any house where shots were coming from (all the locals have guns). A second man had joined us. ‘Every time someone moved,’ he said, ‘they would hit the house he came out of. Whoever stuck their head up got hit. They hit the house and everyone in it.’ ‘Is that bravery, for an air force to take on people house by house?’ parka-man asked. ‘But in the south, Israelis are being buried every day, and they will be buried here too. We are the people of this land.’

So far, Israeli ground troops haven’t ventured much beyond the Litani river, twenty miles from the southern border. This raid – al-Nabi Shayth is deep in the Beqaa Valley – was an exception. The town occupies a special place in the history of Hizbullah and its fight against Israel. At the edge of the town lies the shrine of Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, the party’s second secretary-general, killed in February 1992 with his wife and five-year-old son by an Israeli strike on his motorcade. Some fifty thousand mourners walked in his funeral procession. After his death Hassan Nasrallah took over the party. Both men had studied at the Shia seminary in Najaf in the 1970s, where they were drawn to the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini. When they returned to Lebanon, they met sometimes in a room near the main square of al-Nabi Shayth, where they planned a course for a new Shia resistance.

But the town’s role in the armed struggle against Israel, and in Lebanese politics, predated the founding of Hizbullah by more than a decade. In the 1970s, leftist guerrilla movements – Palestinian factions, the Lebanese Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party – used the area as a training ground, drawn by the isolation of the valley between two mountain ranges, its proximity to the Syrian border and the strong clan ties of its people. When the Iranian Revolutionary Guards arrived after the Israeli invasion of 1982, they set up training camps for the young men who would form Hizbullah’s first generation of fighters.

I said to parka-man: surely it had been suicidal to fire at an Israeli unit with such overwhelming air cover. ‘How many will die? Two hundred, three thousand, ten thousand?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It will still be easier on us than when al-Shimr stood on the chest of Imam Hussein and beheaded him. Even if the whole town dies we will continue to fight, we wish for death, we are people who aspire to martyrdom. They can’t humiliate us.’ Two and a half hours after the raid began, the Israelis withdrew. Forty-one people were killed: three Hizbullah fighters, a few Lebanese soldiers and at least thirty civilians.

A​ceasefire​ , brokered by the US, took effect on 16 April, after roughly six weeks of open war that killed more than 2800 people in Lebanon and displaced more than a million. The terms, as before, allowed Israel to retain forces inside south Lebanon, where it has continued to demolish villages. Lebanon, for its part, committed to preventing Hizbullah from operating against Israel. The agreement carried no signature from Hizbullah, which was not a party to the talks.

Since then, Hizbullah has shifted its tactics, moving away from anti-tank guided missiles and rockets towards cheap, first-person-view drones, guided by fibre-optic cables that make them effectively immune to electronic jamming. It has posted dozens of attacks online, showing drones diving onto Merkava tanks, armoured personnel carriers and Iron Dome launchers. Israeli commanders admit they have no ready answer.

Israel, meanwhile, has pushed deeper into Lebanon, killing at least 650 people since 16 April and levelling dozens of border villages. By the UN’s count, it has destroyed or severely damaged more than ten thousand civilian structures. On 26 May, the army expanded its evacuation orders to the Zahrani river, forty kilometres beyond the Litani, including the ancient city of Tyre in its ‘combat zone’. A Unesco World Heritage site, Tyre was bombed relentlessly in late May and early June. On 9 June, Israel ordered the evacuation of the entire city.

Even as the destruction continued, Israel and Lebanon pressed ahead with talks. After the fourth round, on 2 and 3 June, they agreed to a ceasefire, along with a pilot scheme under which the Lebanese army would take control of designated areas, to the exclusion of all non-state armed actors. Hizbullah rejected the plan. As long as Lebanese villages remain occupied, it said, it would continue to fight. Qassem called the direct negotiations with Israel a ‘grave sin’, and accused the Lebanese government of ‘giving up land’ and ‘confronting the people of the resistance’. ‘What we are doing is not treason,’ Joseph Aoun responded on social media. ‘Treason is committed by those who take their country to war to achieve foreign interests … When you went to war, did you first obtain national consensus?’

These are not the first direct talks between Lebanon and Israel. In 1983, after Israel’s brutal invasion, the Lebanese president, Amine Gemayel, signed an agreement with Israel that was rejected by parliament and by most of the country’s leftist and Muslim factions. It triggered one of the bloodiest phases of the civil war and eventually the agreement collapsed. Then, as now, large sections of the Lebanese population weren’t consulted. Then, as perhaps will be the case now, the next confrontation was Lebanese v. Lebanese.

On 16 April, the day of the ceasefire, it was hot and humid, without a drop of a breeze from the sea. I was walking along the seafront when I saw Mariam again. She was sitting under an olive tree, intended as an ornament at the entrance to Zaytouna Bay, a luxury marina of yachts and restaurants. I asked her about her son. She smiled and said she hadn’t spoken to him yet, but had been told he was all right. He would not be coming back, not with a temporary ceasefire in place. ‘They can’t be trusted,’ she said. ‘But so far we have won. For fifteen months they were killing our sons, and they thought we were defeated. But look at the brave resistance. They forgot to factor in the fighters’ faith, and that we are the people of this land, and there is no occupier in the entire world, in all of history, who has ever stayed.’

12 June