Eight days in hell… The Mail’s CHARLIE FAULKNER sends gripping despatch from bomb-hit Beirut
As the war in the Middle East entered a terrifying new phase this week, with the Israeli air force bombing the Lebanese capital Beirut, the Mail’s Middle East correspondent CHARLIE FAULKNER was at the heart of the action. Here is her harrowing diary of eight days in a living hell…
Friday September 27
The flight from London landed in Beirut at 7:30 PM on Friday. After reaching the tarmac, as soon as I turned off my phone’s flight mode, I was flooded with messages and updates.
‘IDF focused [Hassan] Nasrallah. It’s not yet clear if they have it. Welcome to Lebanon,β read one message from a colleague.
While I was still trying to understand the implications of the strike, I messaged a Lebanese friend in Beirut.
‘Landed. Are you okay?’ I said.
‘Yes. They hit Dahieh [the suburb where Hezbollah had established its base] bad. βI saw it,β he said.
This was big. My Lebanese colleague and I got started. The updates were non-stop. The questions and the predictions. The analysis of Hezbollah’s behavior and whether this meant that the terror group’s leader was actually dead. If he were to do so, it would be a huge turning point in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that has ravaged Lebanon over the past 12 months.
Charlie Faulkner, The Mail’s Middle East correspondent, was at the center of the action last week
Smoke rises amid flames after an airstrike on a neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs
The waterfront promenade of Corniche Beirut is full of people with nowhere to go
Saturday
More than a million people have been displaced as a result of the escalation in the south. The idyllic waterfront promenade of Beirut’s Corniche, lined with palm trees, is now packed with people with nowhere to go.
Families sleep on thin mattresses or in cars, exhausted friends sit together and many seek the shade of a palm tree to avoid the heat of the day.
We met Nada, 46, and her family. They had already fled the bloody attack once β moving a week ago from their home in Nabatieh to Beirut, some 40 miles from the Israeli border.
Last night they were again forced to flee when Israel issued evacuation warnings.
βWe are hungry, we are shocked, we are tired and we are scared,β Nada said. βPoor people like us who have no money, what should we do? We can’t even go to the toilet. We know we have a long road ahead of us, we are desperate. We have no hope anymore. We’re terrified of more missiles.’
When rumors of Nasrallah’s death were confirmed, the news was met with disbelief by both supporters and opponents. Screams of grief rang out throughout the city and gunshots echoed off the walls of buildings.
Sunday
It’s a very different scene at Beirut’s marina, where people with the means to pay are fleeing the conflict on luxury yachts.
The skipper in charge of the operation used to offer trips on party boats, but things started to change a few months ago when the airport was closed for a few hours for the first time during an Iranian missile attack on Israel.
His boss saw an opportunity and, with the airport closed, used TikTok to make his boat trips safe. In recent weeks, his phone kept ringing with calls and messages from people desperate to get out.
When we visited the site of a rocket attack in southern Beirut later that day, panicked people fled in cars full of belongings β including mattresses, waiting to sleep on the streets.
Scores more when evacuating the area on mopeds. βDon’t film, we’re all drug dealers,β shouted a man on a bicycle with a big smile as he balanced a fan between his legs. ‘Do you want some? I have a few.’
Displaced families bring mattresses in anticipation of having to sleep on the streets
A man walks past the rubble of a building destroyed after Israeli attacks in Dahieh
Monday
Overnight, Israelis invaded central Beirut for the first time in this conflict, killing four people, one of whom was a civilian.
βThe doors were shaking, my master closet was shaking. It felt the same as when we had an earthquake last year,β said Amer Tabsh, 45, co-owner of homes next to the affected building. βI immediately checked on my wife and son and checked the house for damage. I smelled a very strong smell of acrid burning and the street was covered in thick, dark gray smoke.’
βWe had had Israeli drones overhead for the past 48 hours and on the last day they were very close. The buzzing noise really bothered us because it was so loud, which meant it was very close and may have been filming the area.β
His 14-year-old son had urged his father to leave the building on Sunday. βHe’s a gamer, so he knows what the drone overhead means,β Tabsh said. βHe told me we had to leave the house all day yesterday. I reassured him that the area was safe. The strike really affected him. He’s in shock.’
Tuesday
We go to Saida, a town 44 kilometers south of Beirut, where a residential building was completely razed to the ground by an Israeli attack on Sunday. Just a few days earlier, many families who fled the Israeli bombardment in the south had thought they had found safety here.
They were still searching for two missing children in the rubble. An eight-year-old girl named Zahra, whom I met at the hospital, told me that, while playing in the building’s garden, she had finally felt safe after months of bombings. Then the missiles hit.
In the same hospital, a seriously injured man sat outside. He had what looked like deep purple veins running down his face like tree roots. They were actually cuts that were still healing.
His hand was so bandaged that there wasn’t much left of it, and two of his fingers were also wrapped up. This man, who did not give his name and could barely speak because his face was so swollen, fell victim to the pager and radio blasts two weeks ago. He clearly still had a long recovery ahead of him.
On the way back to Beirut we had a close call. A building overlooking the highway had just been hit by an Israeli attack. If we had arrived a few moments earlier, who knows what would have happened to us?
Debris from the building had spilled onto the road, destroying the metal barricades and spraying the pavement with a layer of glass shards. We heard them crack as the tires drove over them.
Wednesday
Columns of thick smoke rose along the rolling green hills of southern Lebanon overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli airstrikes have gradually penetrated deeper into Lebanon.
Nearly 30 villages south of the Litani River β 30 kilometers north of the Israeli border β were given evacuation orders by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) this morning ahead of further attacks, effectively making it a no-go area and leaving the city of Israel was cut off. Band.
‘We cannot enter or leave Tyre at the moment, it is too dangerous in the surrounding villages. There are strikes every hour,β Lebanese journalist Nabil Mamlouk told me.
In the Christian town of Jezzine, about 70 kilometers northeast of Tire and above the Litani River, a woman in her 60s named Marie said she was deeply concerned about the nearby strikes.
‘I hear the bombing at night. It is frightening that the IDF has crossed the border into Lebanon. I’m afraid they will stay here and then it will lead to another war to throw them out,β the retired teacher said.
Hundreds of people from surrounding villages have poured into the Jezzine district over the past ten days to seek refuge from the Israeli bombardment. Khalil Harfouche, Jezzine’s municipal leader and mayor, told me that on the first day of the Northeast wave they found about a thousand people on the streets. The district now operates a total of twenty public shelters.
βMy information is that Christian areas are safe unless we have Hezbollah militants, and so far so good. It’s very difficult to know, but the intelligence officer in charge of this area has assured me that they are making sure there is no one here.”
Thursday
Every night there are bombings all over Beirut, shaking the city and spreading fear. One of the seventeen attacks that hit the capital last night took place mainly close to where I stay, just half a kilometer away.
The target was a Hezbollah-linked civil protection agency, killing at least seven paramedics. In the past three days alone, about 40 rescue workers have been killed by Israeli fire, the Lebanese Health Ministry said today. That is 40 percent of all rescue workers who have died since October 7.
News also began to pour in that some journalists had been injured while trying to cover the strike. Tensions are incredibly high right now and many people here are feeling paranoid and on edge, suspicious of the abnormal and angry about what is happening to their country.
Friday
It’s been a week since the massive attack that took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and I just woke up to the news that Beirut was rocked overnight by another massive attack, this time targeting his successor Hashem Safieddine. There are reports of a meeting between some leaders in an underground bunker. We are all waiting to see if the strike was successful.