Ashrafieh, the upscale Beirut neighborhood where the Jesuit residence is located, was quiet the evening of Sept. 23, but Daniel Corrou, S.J., knew that not many miles away Israeli fighters and missiles were striking communities in Beirut suburbs. And he knew that many thousands of people were fleeing to what they hoped would be safety in the north.
But few people are feeling safe in Lebanon, even in neighborhoods like Ashrafieha, a week after detonating pagers and walkie-talkies killed 39 and wounded thousands more. After the pagers started exploding, Father Corrou says, local hospitals, including Hotel Dieu, the Jesuit university hospital, were quickly overwhelmed by casualties.
“You heard sirens everywhere in the city,” he says. “That was just a very stark reminder of what was going on.”
Father Corrou is the regional director of Jesuit Refugee Service in a tough part of the world, overseeing JRS-Middle East and North Africa efforts in Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Since the pager campaign targeting Hezbollah militants last week, attributed to Israeli intelligence, the conflict between Hezbollah, the formidable Shiite militia that essentially governs the region north of the Israeli border, and the Israel Defense Forces has sharply escalated. What had been largely tit-for-tat exchanges that began following the Hamas raid on southern Israel last October now appears to be closer to an all-out war. I.D.F. reserve brigades are mustering at the border, and Hezbollah leaders insist its campaign will continue until a cease-fire is declared in Gaza.
On Sept. 23, Israel forces launched hundreds of strikes across southern and eastern Lebanon. More I.D.F. air strikes and Hezbollah rocket barrages into Israel have continued each day since. Some injuries have been reported in Israel because of the Hezbollah rockets, but the I.D.F. strikes in Lebanon have been deadly. By Sept. 25, with no end in sight to the latest cycle of attacks, more than 600 people had been killed and more than 1,800 had been wounded, the greatest death toll since the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel devastated south Lebanon.
Scenes of bombed-out buildings and truck and car traffic choking coastal highways were reminiscent of that brutal conflict. Perhaps worse for Lebanese still hoping to avoid a full-scale war, news images begin to resemble what the world has already seen of the I.D.F. campaign against Hamas in Gaza, which has similarly forced thousands of noncombatants, essentially Gaza’s entire population, from their homes. Over the weekend the I.D.F. greatly expanded its target list, and attacks were occurring across the south and the Bekaa Valley where JRS hosts a number of programs.
Father Corrou says all JRS operations have been suspended. Many of the agency’s employees, like thousands of other residents of southern Lebanon, are fleeing toward Beirut or making plans to. He has been attempting to arrange emergency shelter away from the conflict zone for as many senior staff and their families as he can.
Following a policy of “escalate to de-escalate” criticized by the Biden administration, Israeli forces have ratcheted up their military campaign against Hezbollah. Biden administration officials have been told by Israeli counterparts that the accelerated I.D.F. campaign is intended to suppress Hezbollah with the ultimate aim of returning displaced Israelis safely to their homes along the border with Lebanon.
I.D.F. operatives have been calling residents in the south and urging them to leave if they are living near Hezbollah operations or storehouses. The problem for many Lebanese, Father Corrou says, is that they do not find out they are living near such a site until after it has been targeted by the I.D.F.
“They’ll bomb an olive oil factory and everyone will just assume, ‘Well, maybe there was more than olive oil going on in that [site].’”
People are told “you should be afraid of the Hezbollah strongholds that are close to you, but no one knows where they are.” The uncertainty about where the next strike may occur has been creating terror among Lebanon’s civilian population, he says.
The same terror was experienced last week as the wave of pager explosions rippled across Beirut. While the ingenuity and daring shown by the perpetrators of the pager attack were themes of news coverage in the West, the event was experienced much differently in Beirut, Father Corrou says. The pager attack “took your breath away,” he says, revealing Israel as a more formidable foe than many in Lebanon already imagined.
The high-tech attack has, of course, been the source of widespread fear in the community. “No one wanted to ride in elevators for the couple of days after [the pager attacks] or go to the market or be in public spaces.” As the world saw in the videos that quickly circulated, “the person who’s carrying the pager got the worst hit, but it could have hit anyone.”
Father Corrou points out that however it is depicted in the Western press, where Hezbollah may be classified solely as a terrorist entity, in Lebanon the movement also represents a broad-reaching social services network and a legitimate political party. Hezbollah, he says, “has business interests. It has individuals that are very well respected in the community, doctors and lawyers and all that.”
He also points out that at the moment of the remote detonations, no one among the killed, wounded and maimed were acting as combatants. Many of the injured, of course, had nothing to do with Hezbollah’s armed campaign but were unfortunate enough to be standing near a detonated device or were, most tragically, children bringing the buzzing pagers to their parents.
“That is not a clean kill,” Father Corrou says. “That is a war crime.”
He suggests that the incident and the generally admiring response to it in the West raise essential questions about how warfare will be carried out in the future. A tactic of disguising weapons as “normal items” and distributing them through the supply chain creates a whole new level of moral risk, he argues.
“No matter how clean we think this tool is going to be,” there would be no way to ensure they would not in the end harm noncombatants, he says. “It’s a devastating…horrific thing to to bomb a building where we know there are civilians,” Father Corrou says, even when the site can be construed as a military target. “But to create something where we at the end have no control over the use of that thing…”
According to the United Nations, more than 90,000 people have been displaced by the spiraling conflict in Lebanon, a figure in addition to the more than 100,000 who have already fled the south. The government is struggling to respond to this overwhelming number of newly displaced Lebanese, Father Corrou says, attempting to coordinate emergency shelter at schools and other civic sites with the support of nongovernmental organizations that have long been active in Lebanon.
“We’re right now working on some emergency housing in the Jesuit community and other places for a small number of staff who live in the south and whose houses were nearly bombed earlier today.” But Father Corrou says the shelter needs of just his JRS employees are beyond his agency’s capacity. With hotels and shelters overwhelmed, local media reports that the newly displaced are sleeping in parks, cars and along the side of Lebanon’s roads.
Lebanon is already reeling from historic economic blows and humanitarian catastrophes. It has become a nation of the vulnerable, with 50 percent of its own native population now displaced by conflict or jeopardized by the nation’s faltering economy and public services.
It is also for years hosted hundreds of thousands of Syrian, Palestinian and Iraqi refugees, but at the bottom of this hierarchy of woe are migrant workers and refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people from Africa and other regions—Sudanese, South Sudanese, Ethiopian, Nigerians, Kenyans, Filipinos and Sri Lankans. Father Corrou wonders how this population, with no one to advocate for them, will be cared for if a full-blown war begins between Israel and Hezbollah.
For now, Lebanon’s Christians appear ready to hold on, but Father Corrou wonders for how much longer. Neighboring states like Iraq and Syria that have likewise endured years of conflict have essentially been abandoned by Christian communities that had endured in the region since the first days of the church. Lebanon maintains the region’s largest Christian presence, at about 25 percent of its population, but Father Carrou wonders how much longer it will be before a tipping point may be reached there as well.
He notes that fewer Christians are appearing as students at St. Joseph’s University in Beirut and that many who do achieve degrees there have one foot out the door to jobs in Europe, Australia and the United States. Families devastated by years of economic chaos have come to rely on overseas remittances from their young people to get by.
The Lebanese, who have survived years of internal strife and government dysfunction, are renowned for their resilience, and there are moments as they grapple with this latest crisis that Father Corrou says he can still feel that determination to endure. In past periods of strife and upheaval, the expectation has been that its young people will be back to invest their wealth and talent in Lebanon, according to Father Corrou. He is not so sure that will be the case anymore.
Between the conflict that is hanging over everything now and a grim parade of economic and political crises since 2019—the Beirut port explosion, the banking collapse, Covid-19 and chronic government incapacity—“there’s a sense of fatigue and that nothing can change,” he says. “There’s a sense of just being done with it.”
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.
More from America
- A safe haven for displaced Christians as the war between Hezbollah and Israel intensifies
- Lebanon is being used as a pawn in Middle East geopolitics—and its Christians are caught in the crosshairs
- Lebanon’s economy was already reeling. Coronavirus may push it into collapse.
A deeper dive
- What is Hezbollah and why is Israel attacking Lebanon?
- The history of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel
- What Is Hezbollah?
Correction (Sept. 26): A characterization of the government response to the internally displaced people crisis was clarified.
