On the Outskirts of Beirut, a Crowd Watches the War, and Waits for Its End

The crowds gather every evening on a scenic hillside on the outskirts of Beirut. Young men, old couples and local journalists, all drawn by the unobstructed view of the Dahiya, the cluster of neighborhoods south of Beirut that has been pummeled by Israeli airstrikes over the past two months.

As dusk settles, people seated on motorcycles and atop cement barriers anxiously wait for the war to unfold in front of them. When there is a thunderous boom of an Israeli airstrike, they quickly scan the skyline for a plume of white smoke curling into the air — the first clue as to what may have been hit.

“Look, look at the balcony, there. Do you see it?” Osama Assaf, 43, said one recent evening, pointing into the distance.

“Where? By the highway?” a young man standing beside him replied.

As the war between Hezbollah and Israel has escalated, the gathering at the escarpment has become a nightly ritual in Baabda, a mountainous suburb on the southeastern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. In peacetime, the area is a picnic spot, where old friends and young lovers smoke fruit-flavored tobacco through water pipes and watch a deep red sun melt into the Mediterranean Sea. These days, the hillside offers a window into the war that has decimated the enclave south of the city in the Dahiya.

A cramped patch of high-rise apartments, office buildings and narrow one-way roads, the Dahiya is home mostly to Shiite Muslims and is effectively governed by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group and Shiite political movement in Lebanon. Airstrikes that Israeli officials say are targeting Hezbollah military facilities in the Dahiya have transformed the area into a bombed-out ghost town coated in gray ash and littered with rubble.

The hillside overlooking the Dahiya first drew local TV reporters who offered grim updates about the war. Soon, Dahiya residents who had fled the area began converging there as well. Some are desperate to know firsthand if their neighborhood will survive another day. Others are bored, their usually busy lives upended by the war. Occasionally, young Christian men who live nearby come to cheer on the destruction of the mostly Shiite neighborhoods — a glimpse of the sectarian tensions always simmering Lebanon.

But mostly people are drawn by a morbid fascination — an urge to hear the rattling booms and see the billowing smoke, if only to make real the horrors of the war.

“Look, there’s more smoke rising from where it hit,” Hussein Qazem, 56, said one recent evening, pointing to where an Israeli airstrike had landed minutes earlier. Pulling out his phone, he checked the two maps issued with the most recent Israeli evacuation orders warning of imminent airstrikes in two Dahiya neighborhoods. “This must be the al-Hawraa strike,” he muttered.

An hour earlier, Mr. Qazem was eating a late lunch with his family in an apartment they had rented after fleeing the Dahiya when they saw the evacuation warnings flash across their phones. The warnings had become a near daily occurrence since the war escalated, but this time, one of the maps included the apartment he had spent 30 years working in Saudi Arabia running an import-export business to purchase.

His 17-year-old nephew, Wael Wahab, said they should go back quickly — one final visit to say goodbye. The pair jumped on Mr. Wahab’s motorcycle and made a mad dash into the neighborhood, whizzing past the shops they once frequented, the storefront windows now only jagged edges of glass, he said. It was only a few minutes — they didn’t know how long they had until the strikes would hit — but it was something.

From the Dahiya, they came to the hillside as a bluish haze was settling over the city. “A plane’s coming,” Mr. Wahab said, nodding at a commercial flight as it landed on the runway of Beirut’s international airport — a surreal reminder of life carrying on despite the war. A few minutes later, an Israeli warplane roared overhead, followed by the thundering boom of another airstrike.

“That must be the one targeting our street,” Mr. Wahab said.

They paused for a second. “OK, it’s gone,” Mr. Qazem said.

Farther up the escarpment, a gaggle of local television crews had set up shop, lining the curb with their tripods and the thrumming generators that powered satellite dishes. The sidewalk was littered with cigarette butts and empty bottles of water and energy drinks — the fuel of their long nights.

Mohammad Farhat, a 68-year-old resident of the Dahiya, paced behind the reporters, flipping his car keys in his hand. A retired employee of Lebanon’s Education Ministry, he and his wife, Leila Farhat, 65, come here most nights — it’s the best way to get the most up-to-date news on the war, directly from the journalists gathered there, they explained.

“Here we survive on hope — and information,” Mr. Farhat said.

As he spoke, Ms. Farhat rummaged around in the trunk of their car until she found a plastic bag of mixed nuts and liter of 7-Up. She handed him the nuts, poured the soda into clear plastic cups and passed them to others who had gathered there. “It’s like the new Corniche here,” she said jokingly, referring to the city’s popular seaside promenade.

The pair have been married for nearly 50 years, since Ms. Farhat fled her hometown in the south during the country’s bloody civil war and went to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where she met Mr. Farhat. “I saved her the drive back to her village,” Mr. Fahat joked.

“We’re retired now, we’re supposed to be relaxing. It’s our time to rest,” Mr. Farhat said. “I’ve been to Germany, to the Netherlands, I saw retired people like us there, how they go on vacations. They aren’t thinking about these drones,” he added, nodding up to the sky at the incessant hum overhead.

“The drone never stops, it never gets tired,” Ms. Farhat interjected wryly. “It stays in the sky for 30 hours straight.”

As the sun sank below the skyline and darkness fell, the outlines of the Dahiya became clear: The cluster of neighborhoods turned into a swath of darkness, its buildings mostly empty and its electrical lines damaged in the strikes. The Dahiya’s de facto borders were illuminated by the lights of Beirut proper. Behind it were the fluorescent white lines of the airport’s runway and the warm yellow specks of apartment buildings in the city, which has remained mostly untouched.

Down the road from the pack of reporters, Iman Assaf, 46, unloaded a foam mattress from the back of her family’s car onto the sidewalk, where she planned to spend the night with her husband and son.

They were among the tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims who fled the Dahiya as the strikes intensified and spilled into other parts of Beirut. The influx transformed the demographic map of a city often defined along sectarian lines, where neighborhoods are synonymous with a religion and sect.

Ms. Assaf said she had felt welcome for the most part in Baabda, a mostly Christian town. Though, occasionally, young men on motorcycles with Christian crosses around their necks and alcoholic drinks in their hands will stop at the outlook and yell, as if encouraging the strikes on the mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhoods.

“Yalla, yalla, yalla!” — “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” — they yell, offering a crude reminder of the sectarian tensions. Ms. Assaf brushed those tensions aside, as if describing them as fleeting might help bury them for good.

“The people are united — it’s war on all of us,” Ms. Assaf said.

Then she took her seat on the dusty mattress. She placed a kettle on her small, portable stove and looked out over the view of the Dahiya, watching the war and praying for its end.