Victory in Lebanon

As the war continued, the suspension of normal life dissipated into a sludge of endurance. No one I met in Beirut could even be bothered to speculate any more on what the Israelis would do next, or whether Hezbollah would be blamed for the war and its toll on civilians. After a month it looked likely to escalate still further. The Israelis stepped up their assaults in the south, and Hezbollah continued to fire rockets at Haifa. But then a UN resolution was finally reached, and a ceasefire heralded for the following Monday. It seemed tenuous, too much to hope for, even unlikely; on the phone Haidar said he didn’t believe it.

At eight a.m. that Monday morning in the middle of August, the hour of the ceasefire that no one yet trusted, we went back to Tyre. We drove over makeshift wobbling planks that were the only river crossing into the city. The roads were empty, the atmosphere uncertain, the route to Tibnine, in the interior south, not yet open. These were bomb-scarred villages, still littered with smoking ashy gaps of collapsed buildings and smashed petrol stations. Fields of concrete rubble were strewn across the road. We inched behind the Caterpillar diggers clearing wreckage from the final, overnight bombardment. Hezbollah men driving beat-up BMWs, bearded, serious, cagey, with walkie-talkies in their back pockets, pointed out scattered cluster bombs and told us to drive cautiously in the tracks of the diggers. I watched the diggers’ claws drag broken electrical cables to the side of the road. A knot of local teenagers with sparse beards gathered, blinking in the sun of the strangely peaceful morning, and commented on their survival.

‘By the Resistance we are safe!’

‘At night it was hard. From eleven-thirty, you couldn’t leave the house.’

‘We won! It was a world war and we won!’

They smoked and thanked God, laughingly, that they still had tobacco.

In Tibnine there were cluster bomblets everywhere, little metal canisters with a projecting loop no bigger or more interesting than any other bit of debris — brick chunks, twisted metal rods, broken glass — scattered under the tyres of parked ambulances, in the dent of kerbs, rolled under bushes. You had to watch your step. No one was quite sure where the Israelis were. The next hill? Beit Yahoun, Hadatha, Tiri? At the Red Cross headquarters I found the director of operations, Mohammed Maki, tall, authoritative, originally from Tibnine, a Seyyed but secular. I had met him after two ambulances had been hit ferrying wounded from Tibnine to Tyre during the war. He had joined the Red Cross in 1982, the year of the Israeli invasion, and he said that in all the conflicts he had seen since, the hardest moments were when he had to listen to his own volunteers over the radio — injured, bleeding, running out of blood — and wait for the all-clear to pick them up. Maki didn’t subscribe to the ‘us and them’ of the Shi’a and the Israelis. He remembered when everyone in the south had welcomed the Israelis with rice in ’82, grateful that they had come to evict the Palestinian fighters. He remembered that in the early 1980s, before the Occupation turned sour, buses took Shi’a villagers across the border to Haifa for day trips. He told me, shaking his head at the righteousness of Hezbollah’s violence, ‘The Lebanese are a stupid nation! Muslims think Israel is the enemy. I don’t know why they think like this, even though I am a Muslim myself.’ Now he was coordinating dozens of ambulances sent to ferry the stranded wounded and dig out corpses.

‘Israeli soldiers are still in places, we don’t know where,’ he said. He looked at his map, answered his phone, listened to the reports coming in over the radio. He gestured at the view across a valley. ‘My house here in Tibnine,’ said Maki, ‘all the windows are smashed. They hit an ambulance right in front of it — ’ His radio crackled. ‘I have to see where the Jews are — in Beit Jbail?’

One of the Red Cross volunteers who had been injured — lightly; his hand was bandaged in a splint — in the ambulance in front of Maki’s house took us down to the basement garage of the adjacent unfinished block, which they were using as a temporary morgue. Four corpses tied up in thick plastic sheeting were laid out. As I stood there, shoe scuffing concrete, contemplating the repetitive dullness of rubble, an ambulance backed up and they began to unload a body on a stretcher. A Hezbollah fighter, face blown off the night before.

A sandy-haired man appeared to one side. He had red eyes, blood under his fingernails and a walkie-talkie in his pocket. He said the dead man was his cousin. He had found his body at dawn.

‘He was twenty-eight years old. He had three children. He was born in Hariss and he never left his village. He fought for his village and died in his village. Yesterday there was a battle from eight p.m. until the ceasefire this morning.’ He recounted all this in a quiet monotone.

That first day of ceasefire was a slow waking, a reckoning. Peace seemed a half-forgotten thing. The fighters appeared by the side of the road, at rendezvous beneath a cracked minaret, on the steps of the hospitals, tired, drawn, often wounded. In the villages people began to look about themselves and take in the scale of destruction.

In the late afternoon I went back to the hospital in Tyre. A black SUV pulled up with a group of four wounded fighters dressed in khaki trousers, T-shirts, desert boots and trainers. They limped across the car park in the golden late-afternoon sun, one with his trousers rolled up and both calves bandaged, one with cotton wool stuffed into his ears. A few streets away some kids had set up giant speakers that were booming patriotic chants under Hezbollah flags, and people were handing out sweets to the returning refugees stuck in traffic. But inside the hospital there was no sense of victory, only a hobbled respite, pride and weariness. Relatives searched, met, embraced, wept or wailed at news of death or deliverance. That day more than a hundred fighters were admitted to the main hospital in Tyre; for the surgeons it was a gore of gangrene, worms and amputations. I walked to the elevator past a woman chanting a Shi’a mourning lament.

On the third floor a fighter in a wheelchair had learned that his brother was lying in a hospital bed down the corridor, also injured, with a blasted foot. He was so overcome to see him alive, he tried to walk. ‘My brother is here, really? It is my brother?’ He levered himself out of the wheelchair but he couldn’t stand; the nurse came to help him. He made it to the edge of his brother’s bed, held his brother’s hands, kissed them and kissed his forehead.

‘How was your situation?’

‘Rahid was martyred!’

They began to talk about their battles, puffing their exploits. ‘I saw twelve Israelis torn apart on the field!'

‘Where I was, I tell you there were fifty bodies of Israelis!’

Outside the emergency room another fighter, slight with a lined face covered with scabs and one eye heavily bandaged, sat waiting on a stoop. A missile had blown up in his face. He asked me if I wanted to see his wounded eye and I nodded, so he pulled up the bandage. His eyeball was bright blood red; pus wept in the corner. He would need an operation, but they said he would keep his sight. When he said his village was close to Tiri, I asked him if he knew anything about Hiba and Haidar’s brother Amin, but he didn’t recognize the name. He told me he had been attacked with missiles six times. I tried to josh as gently as I could. ‘Well, you had some help from above, I think.’

He smiled back modestly and pulled out a length of prayer beads around his neck, kissed them and looked up to God in heaven. ‘Imagine one man hiding under the trees and the fighter plane is looking for him, the fighter plane that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it cannot find one man one hundred and seventy-five centimetres tall, sixty kilograms in weight…’