‘Nobody won’: Residents of a Lebanese city return to rubble and sorrow

BAALBEK, Lebanon – Hammers clanged against brick and metal as residents of Baalbek set to work repairing their homes, desperate to restart their lives again.

A day after a ceasefire ended Lebanon’s deadliest war in decades, tens of thousands of people who fled the violence had already returned on Nov 28 to the hard-hit city in the country’s east.

Teenage girls snapped selfies in front of the ancient Roman temples. Excited young men on motorcycles performed doughnuts in the street, their back tires spinning up dust and shards of glass.

But after weeks of pounding Israeli airstrikes, the scars were not easy to ignore: bombed-out restaurants, flattened apartment buildings, trees snapped like twigs. And many of the dead were still buried under the rubble, residents said.

“I’m an old woman. I’m not affiliated with anyone. What did I do to deserve this?” said Ms Taflah Amar, 79, as she swept debris from the front of her house, one of the few still standing on her street.

“I’ve been crying all day,” she said.

For the more than one million people displaced in Lebanon by Israel’s offensive, it has been a bittersweet homecoming. In Baalbek, an impoverished city where Hezbollah holds sway, many have returned to find their neighbourhoods almost unrecognisable.

For nearly a year, the city had largely been spared from the war between Israel and Hezbollah, with the fighting mostly confined to southern Lebanon. Then, Israel went on the offensive in September, ordering whole swaths of the city evacuated and raining missiles from the skies.

“Why would they target the restaurant?” said Ms Basma Yaghi, who had just returned from Beirut to find her popular neighbourhood haunt destroyed.

She flicked through photos on her phone taken over the summer: wedding parties; families enjoying lunch under a courtyard’s leafy trees; toddlers running around in the restaurant’s indoor play area. That all seemed like a distant memory now, with only twisted metal rebar left where the dining room once stood.

“I can’t understand anything,” Ms Yaghi said.

For the resolute few who had stayed in the city, many were caught off guard by the ferocity of Israel’s weeks-long bombing campaign. Some were sceptical that a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah would hold, but were just happy that the airstrikes had stopped.

“We had no idea that they were going to strike this hard,” said Ms Hind Saydah while sitting in her living room, which was still caked in dust despite her best efforts to clean it.

“When you leave your home, you leave your worth behind,” she said, recounting a local saying in Baalbek that has garnered newfound significance in recent weeks.

Her brother, Mr Hassan Saydah, had inherited the 150-year-old home from their father, and his father, and his father before that. There was no way he was going to leave, he said, even when airstrikes obliterated his neighborhood and killed his chickens. Repairmen mingled around him as they assessed the damage – US$15,000 (S$20,000), they said.

“I don’t have any of that,” he replied.

Their sister-in-law, Ms Samia Baalbaki, named after the city where she had spent her whole life, had not been so fearless, fleeing for the first time in her life. Now back home, she struggled to find meaning in the war and the untold damage it had wrought on the tiny Mediterranean nation.

Posters of Hezbollah’s slain leaders still line the city, where many of the group’s top officials were born and where support for them still runs deep. Hassan Nasrallah, Hashem Safieddine, Fouad Shukur – all were killed in recent weeks amid Israel’s offensive.

“Nobody won. Our homes are destroyed. Our leader is gone,” she said.

Other billboards in the city warned residents of the dangers of unexploded missiles, some of which were still being detonated by the Lebanese military on Nov 28. They were a sinister backdrop to the city’s revival, as the frenetic streets came back to life once again and the markets teemed with customers.

For Mr Mahdi Zeinnedine, 36, a bus driver, all he could think about was that his children would be home in an hour. He had sent them to Syria when the war began, but now hoped that the ceasefire would allow them to live in peace once again.

“We’re going to grill some chicken,” he said with a grin, holding shopping bags filled with bananas, his children’s favourite. NYTIMES