5 November 2024

The Middle East’s deadly doom loop

Jamie Dettmer

Dazed and exhausted, a Lebanese Shiite mother of four gestures to her baby bump — her fifth child is weeks away from arriving.

For the past month, Samara and her young children have been sleeping rough in an abandoned, dilapidated shop front, a few hundred meters from the Grand Serial — the imposing building housing the offices of the Lebanese prime minister.

The country’s parliament is just a few blocks away. But it might as well be on another planet.

Since fleeing from the embattled border village of Ayta ash Shab early last month, Samara and her family have been receiving only a meal a day from the country’s cash-strapped and dysfunctional public authorities. “I don’t have a house, no. It’s gone,” she lamented. Most of the homes and buildings in her village have been destroyed, just as they were back in 2006, during the last war between Israel and Lebanon’s militant Shiite movement Hezbollah.

It’s as though the Levant is stuck in a time-loop, doomed to forever repeat the cycles of war and revenge. The weapons have evolved, of course — with the development of battlefield AI and drones — but the back-and-forth of attack and reprisal, and the general contours of the conflict have mainly remained the same, with minor variations depending on the involvement of outside powers or the regional ambitions and political makeup of neighboring countries.

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