In a curious attitude, a man and a woman on a motorcycle with two small children stop the vehicle when they see each other in front of the wall that has been making headlines since the day before in the country’s news. When the children finish counting the six holes that Israeli missiles left in an apartment building on the fourth and fifth floors, the adults smile at them in approval and return on their path. On the outskirts of Beirut, where you can travel for kilometers of urban sprawl without finding roads intact after last year’s Israeli offensive during the war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, the scar left Sunday by the assassination of the group’s military leader, Haytham Ali Tabatabai – buried this Monday – blends in with the others.
Dozens of men dressed in black T-shirts, members of the Shiite movement that acts as the de facto authority in the area, nervously secured the site of the attack on Monday. The attack in Haret Hreik, one of the municipalities on the outskirts of Beirut, raises questions to which Hezbollah has no answers.
Despite the existence of a ceasefire since November 2024, Israel bombs southern and eastern Lebanon daily as punishment for the militias’ refusal to disarm during the truce. It does so without Hezbollah having ordered a single attack in 12 months. The pro-Iranian organization promulgates the commitment with its interpretation of the truce, which only requires disarmament in the border area with Israel, leaving the country’s defense in the hands of the Lebanese authorities. This scenario puts the focus on Lebanese institutions and allows them to buy time, easing the pain of their large community of followers, brutally affected during last year’s conflict in Shiite-majority areas.
Now, the political assassination of one of the organization’s greatest figures, something unprecedented during the 12 months of truce, suggests an Israeli military escalation that catches the militia off on the wrong foot, without a prepared response, and forces it to choose between standing by in the face of a latent offensive, like the current one, or taking action and facing another devastating one, like the one that has killed more than 4,000 people since the truce.
“Both decisions are very difficult,” reflects Layla Tarhini, 31. The woman chases a sense of normality in her working day at Libreria Filosofía, while the men in black bring order on the other side of the window. The shop is located in the building next to the one that received the attack in which Tabatabai and four other people died, as well as leaving 28 injured. And it resides in the parallel street.
The novels by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Luisa May Alcott, displayed on the shelves, trembled during the bombings along with the walls of the premises, which like the entire suburbs of Beirut are filled with images of Hasan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for 30 years – half of which was hidden – until an Israeli attack killed him in September 2024.
“The Resistance will make the best decision,” says the young woman, using the term with which her followers refer to Hezbollah and the group of actors at odds with Israel. “But I don’t think they will respond right now. They are thinking about civilians, who are our greatest strength against the enemy.”
According to Tarhini, Hezbollah is aware of the moment in which its followers are suffering, with the Lebanese press “turning against them”. “They blame us for starting the conflict,” he says in relation to October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah fired on Israel in supposed solidarity with Gaza, linking Lebanon’s fate to that of the Strip. “But the conflict started long before Hezbollah was born (in 1982), which is just a reaction to it.”
Despite her beliefs, Tarhini is “always scared.” He says he broke down in tears the night before, and was frustrated that “many Lebanese don’t understand” what it means to live in communities that Israel can bomb at any time. Far from Shia-majority areas, where destruction and portraits of Hezbollah fighters killed in combat abound, Lebanese municipalities where other social groups, such as Christians, Sunni Muslims or Druze predominate, remain outside of the main Israeli hostilities.
This unequal treatment causes some Lebanese in intact areas to disagree with seeing Israel as a threat, and some even embrace the idea of normalization with the Jewish state. But for many Shiites the prognosis is ominous.
“If you give them a centimetre, they will ask you for a kilometre,” warns Hussein Rayshouni, 30. He is an engineer and serves EL PAÍS from a half-ruined building in Ghobeiri, another peripheral municipality of Beirut. Rayshouni is leading the reconstruction of the block, which was hit by Israeli bombing last year. The surrounding streets are a sea of people attending Tabatabai’s funeral ceremony, held just a few meters away.
The funeral, at a time when there is speculation about the organisation’s weakness, is the only moment left for Hezbollah to demonstrate its strength, projecting an image that continues to attribute to it the hegemony of the country. On Monday, thousands of followers joined a congregation whose top representative was the leader of Hezbollah’s executive council, Shekh Ali Daamoush, whose speech did not dispel Hezbollah’s doubts. But the organisation’s general secretary, Naim Qassem, who has been living in hiding since taking office after Nasrallah’s death, did not show up.
“There is frustration and anger,” complains the engineer. He claims that Israel “bombs Lebanon daily” and that “it seems that the Lebanese government can do nothing about it.” “We are losing our loved ones, our homes and the sense of security in our country,” says the young man, denouncing a sense of impotence present in the militia seen by analysts as the prelude to a violent reaction. “We are marginalized,” he concludes.
