fbpx

This Is A War We Cannot Resist With Humor

Hazem El Amin
Lebanese Writer and Journalist
Lebanon
Published on 24.10.2024
Reading time: 4 minutes

For some reason, we no longer hear the sounds of the airstrikes, even though the southern suburb is no more than two or three kilometers from our homes. The images we see the next day of destroyed buildings suggest that massive amounts of explosives are being used.

We no longer wake up to the sound of airstrikes targeting the southern suburbs of our city, whether we are residents of Beirut or displaced individuals who have taken refuge here. Instead, in the early morning, we check our phones for news of the bombings and their locations before we drag ourselves, burdened with a heavy sense of dread, to work, cafes, or the safe streets we have been frequenting since the war moved to our doorstep.

We now go to bed earlier than we used to before the war crept into our lives. Our days are charged with a mix of news, the hum of reconnaissance drones, different types of explosions, and the sonic booms of American aircraft roaring above our heads. By evening, we find ourselves struggling to keep our eyes open until we eventually succumb to a state that feels more like fainting than sleep.

As we fight off this overwhelming sleep, Avichay Adraee begins sending out his ominous tweets, warning us that streaks of fire will light up our night. At the same time, WhatsApp groups start buzzing. In the early days, we would engage, respond, and share what updates we had, but after more than a month of this exhausting cycle, our responses dwindled. Some of us became passive recipients of messages and news, while others chose to distance themselves from their phone screens altogether.

For some reason, we no longer hear the sounds of the airstrikes, even though the southern suburb is no more than two or three kilometers from our homes. The images we see the next day of destroyed buildings suggest that massive amounts of explosives are being used. Yesterday, we finally got an answer to this mystery when a video emerged showing a missile striking the foundations of a building in Tayouneh, a neighborhood between the southern suburb and Beirut. The building collapsed instantly, in a precise, calculated manner. It seems that the ground absorbed the sound of the missile, preventing it from reaching us.

We no longer hear the sounds of all the missiles, but we have begun to imagine their reverberations. We search each other’s faces, trying to trace the impact of the explosions in the tremors of our expressions. When we arrive at the office, we ask each other about the slight puffiness that has appeared on our faces. Some of us stayed up all night, haunted by Adraee’s tweets, while others slept more than usual, leading to swollen eyes. We no longer have the energy to laugh at the misery we are enduring, as we did in previous wars. Eventually, we stopped asking our colleagues how their night went.

This war, however, does not target the city and its suburb alone. Television screens began showing us images of our villages in the south being destroyed, scenes unlike anything we had ever witnessed throughout the wars and invasions that marked our upbringing as people from the “front-line villages,” as they are now called—what used to be known as the border villages. The destruction has been broadcast into our homes in the capital and in the cities and towns where we have sought refuge.

The exhaustion that precedes our sleep also stems from our villages, which we were displaced from long ago. The catastrophe has reached them, too, and the plan to erase the “front-line villages” has already begun, with significant progress made toward this goal.

Relatives send us satellite images of our villages from Google Maps, showing the houses that have been destroyed and those that remain intact. Our home still stands, but a house behind it has been leveled to the ground, which means our house has not been spared entirely; cracks caused by the airstrike on our neighbor’s home are likely there. We are still at the beginning of this war, and the map of destruction will expand, with our home unlikely to escape the decision to flatten the village.

Living has become exhausting even in the parts of Beirut that are not under direct attack. Contrary to what we are used to, fake news is less terrifying than real news. False reports fade away like a bad joke, but verified news is heavy, laden with real corpses and destruction, and we prefer to postpone hearing it until morning, storing it until the next evening. My cousin Zein’s office was in the area targeted by Adraee’s warnings. He didn’t wait for the airstrikes to learn the fate of the building. He went to sleep, and in the morning he received the news that his company’s office had been destroyed. He chose not to tell his children, preferring that they hear it from someone else.