IT WAS not your ordinary airplane announcement: “Due to bombings in Beirut, we will wait over the sea.”
But the French military plane – which was transporting pallets of humanitarian aid, Handicap International workers, a Dutch embassy entourage, and several journalists, including myself – did not wait for long. A half hour later we touched down on one of the remaining intact strips at the Beirut airport.
Only minutes after we had disembarked, a plume of smoke mushroomed in the distance. This last day before the ceasefire – the 33rd day of air strikes – was not panning out to be a quiet one.
A French embassy van, which had a giant French flag draped over the roof to dissuade Israeli pilots, then dropped me off near the French embassy. From there, I took a taxi to a hotel in the Sunni Muslim quarter of Hamra, where I met with Matthew Demetriades and Stefanos Kouratzis, two members of the Cyprus chapter of Doctors of the World.
The two-man team of Demetriades and Kouratzis had arrived several hours earlier on the Canadian-chartered Princessa Marissa. This was the second humanitarian aid mission that the Cyprus Doctors of the World had sent to Lebanon since the onset of the offensive.
The streets in the Hamra neighborhood were not deserted: kids were kicking footballs in the streets and the stores were open. The only sign that this was not an average late Sunday afternoon was that a couple of teenagers were siphoning petrol out of a Mercedes. I later saw another fancy car that had a hole drilled under the fuel tank door. Petrol had become difficult to come by.
It was not until later, while I was unpacking in the room of my hotel, that I heard a loud blast. I grabbed my room keys and rushed into a surprisingly silent hall and then down to reception. It was as if there had been no explosion.
“Did you hear that?” I asked the attendant.
He laughed amiably. “That one was nothing. Earlier the glass door was shaking from the bombs.”
As the day went on, I understood why there was so little reaction. The sound of explosions became background noise, like heavy thunder in the distance. In fact, that sunset, as I was standing on the roof, listening to the Qu’ran being broadcasted out in wailing song from the tops of mosques, I momentarily thought there might be a lightning storm in the distance. Under a dense cloud cover I saw a flash of light and then moments later heard a rumbling sound. But then I saw the cloud of smoke rise up and knew it was no storm.
Later that night at the hotel bar, a veteran war photographer, who had been chasing bombs over the last few weeks to get the post-explosion photos of Red Cross workers and of casualties, told me these bombs were some of the most powerful he had ever witnessed.
“There’s an incredible vacuum effect when they hit.
“You can wear a helmet and a bulletproof vest but the shrapnel will get you in the face and the neck. These bombs are scary. The first three weeks here I was fine but now I hear the explosion and my heart jumps.”
But if it did affect him, he certainly didn’t show it. A minute later a bomb went off. “There goes another one,” he said in the same flat tone and sipped at his beer.
The next morning, an explosion jarred me out of sleep, beating my alarm by seven minutes. The ceasefire was still an hour and a half away.
I put on a pair of shorts and a shirt and climbed the stairs up to the rooftop. I saw no smoke anywhere, but suddenly noticed what looked like a flock of small birds swirling in a cloud in front of the rising sun. It was leaflets by the Israeli military warning that they would return if Israel were attacked.
At 9am, I accompanied Demetriades, Kouratzis, and the Secretary General of the Lebanese Branch of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Dr Mohammad Osman, to the Health Ministry, where they filled out some paperwork, and then to the Beirut port. The Greek military vessel Chios had arrived, bringing with it the 21 pallets of summer clothing gathered by Doctors of the World.
After these had been forklifted onto trucks, Osman drove us towards southern Beirut to see the effects of the bombs.
There were armed men everywhere and tanks remained stationed outside key buildings, but the ceasefire had held so far. People were beginning to return to the evacuated, bombed-out Shia suburbs.
The roads were busy as we neared the southern suburbs but Osman told us that on Sunday it was deserted here. People were beginning to return to the homes, if they still remained, that they had evacuated.
He drove us to one house that looked like it had been strafed with heavy gunfire. “This is my house. It wasn’t hit, but the buildings next to it were.” Shrapnel alone had wrecked his building. Those that had suffered direct hits were generally nothing more than mounds of rubble.
The devastation was phenomenal. It was hard to imagine how anyone could be anywhere in the vicinity of such a strike and survive. It was also obviously a residential area.
We could only drive up to a certain point as Hizbollah had blocked cars from going further. Osman said that the heaviest devastation was about 500 metres in. He said around 40 buildings had been dropped in one area.
It brought to mind something that the photographer last night at the bar had told me:
“There are places where it looks like Hiroshima.”
