KIM GHATTAS
A month after the start of Israel’s multipronged shock and awe military campaign against Hizbollah and Lebanon, the Lebanese are barely coming to grips with the enormity of what has befallen their country.
A quarter of Lebanon is now under Israeli evacuation orders. Almost a quarter of the population is on the move, sleeping in schools, on the street, in rented houses or hotel rooms — whatever they can find or afford. After two weeks of intense shelling of the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut, there were a few quiet nights. But drones buzz loudly, incessantly over the city. The war rages on in the south and the Bekaa Valley. More than 2,300 people are dead, many of them women and children.
Whole towns have been razed to the ground. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to turn Lebanon into another Gaza and demanded that UN peacekeepers deployed in the south get out of the way. Meanwhile, the man who exerted a chokehold on Lebanon’s politics for two decades, adulated and hated in equal measures, Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizbollah, is dead.
In this maelstrom, Lebanon faces multiple challenges. First, the social pressures are tremendous. The displacement of more than a million people from areas targeted by Israeli strikes has squished people against each other in different parts of the capital.
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