Up in Flames
With Hezbollah's rockets still falling, Israel is not nearly finished with its efforts to remove the threat
Normally at this time of year, tourists would be swarming Lebanon's famously well-preserved Temple of Bacchus. But last week, the god of fertility and good cheer was nowhere to be found in Lebanon. Instead, the area around Roman ruins at Baalbek is eerily empty, patrolled only by a detachment of tired and jittery Hezbollah fighters. Everything is closed, except for a food stand selling shawarma and hamburgers to the fighters. The ruins remain intact, but a number of buildings in the town have been reduced to rubble by Israeli missiles. The gunmen grudgingly admit that Israel has been precise; only five civilians were killed in the first week here. But they aren't taking any chances. At night, they retreat to a series of caves carved out of the surrounding ridge. At night, Israel tries to bomb those, too.
The scene in Baalbek is deceptively placid compared with the worst-hit sections of Beirut and the bulk of southern Lebanon, which have been hit by a withering Israeli air assault. These are Lebanon's new ruins--entire city blocks, reduced to skeletons of buildings, and whole villages in the south, a Hezbollah stronghold, flattened. Huge swaths of Lebanon's modern infrastructure--bridges, highways, even a big power plant--are gone. At the same time, many of Beirut's tonier areas, including its famous luxury shops, remain largely unscathed. Most shops and restaurants are closed, but the few bars that remain open are packed.
It is, after all, not quite an all-out war. For the first week of the conflict, most of the fighting was conducted at a distance--Israeli airstrikes were answered by salvos of Hezbollah rockets. But the battle--sparked by a Hezbollah raid into Israel that killed eight soldiers and resulted in the capture of two more--is poised to escalate at any moment. Israel is pursuing slightly conflicting objectives--crippling the Hezbollah militia without taking down Lebanon's government as collateral damage. "We didn't remove the gloves completely," says a top Israeli military official.
Civilian toll. Still, in the first week, Israel's Air Force bombed over 1,000 targets; more than 300 people were killed in Lebanon, many of them civilians. The ferocity of Israel's assault, at least in the short term, deflected some of the blame from Hezbollah for provoking the crisis. The militants, with the apparent support of Iran and Syria, want to rally the Muslim world by surviving the onslaught and making it as costly as possible for Israel. Hezbollah has kept up its barrage of Israel, flinging more than 700 rockets indiscriminately toward Israeli towns, killing more than 30 Israelis.
Lebanon's government was merely a bit player, caught between two juggernauts. But for a country that had clawed its way out of a lengthy sectarian bloodletting back into the modern world, the siege was particularly demoralizing. "Not only has its economy been shattered, but Lebanon is a disaster area," says Robert Rabil, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, who was in Beirut with his wife and 13-month-old child when the fighting broke out.
The human cost is high on both sides. More than 500,000 Lebanese have been forced from their homes. Many are taking shelter in schools, where Hezbollah is delivering food. There is growing concern about water and food shortages, as supplies are scarce with so many bridges destroyed and ports blocked by the Israeli Navy. Still, many are putting on a brave face. "This is Lebanon--we'll find a way to get what we need into the country," says Hassan, a young Lebanese Sunni in Beirut. "but we'll charge tons of money for it."
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