Beirut, Lebanon (CNN) – When Israel attacked central Beirut in the early hours of Thursday, it appeared to eliminate what little sense of security remained in the Lebanese capital.
For almost a week, Israel has been bombing Hezbollah-dominated residential neighborhoods in Beirut’s southern suburbs. However, this attack in a Shiite neighborhood near the parliament building, a part of the city that had been avoided since the 2006 war with Israel, indicated that the reach of Israel’s campaign could be expanding rapidly.
Windows all over the horizon lit up just as the roar of the missile woke people from sleep. A dark column of smoke rose from the heart of the capital, as people frantically called their loved ones trying to find out where Israel’s bombs had landed this time.
The attack bombed an office belonging to the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Authority in the central Bashura neighborhood, killing nine people, including seven doctors, according to the Ministry of Health and the Islamic Health Authority itself.
On the street affected by the attack, people wandered around dazed. Women cradled babies in their arms as they made their way through the carnage. Unlike the southern suburbs and other parts of the country, there was no warning to evacuate this Shiite-majority neighborhood.
At the end of the street is the Mohammad al-Amin mosque, a colossal landmark in the city, now an emblem of the constant state of movement of approximately 1 million people displaced by Israel’s air offensive in Lebanon that began last Monday.
Families fleeing the attack in central Beirut on Thursday headed to the mosque grounds. Just as they arrived, many of those who had already camped there were packing their belongings to flee again.
The newly displaced replaced those who had already been left homeless, who were now seeking safer places north of the city.
“The entire mosque shook. People fled thinking they were going to be bombed,” said a middle-aged woman named Fatima. She was sitting on a folded cardboard box, leaning against a column. “And just as they fled, others arrived.”
“If I wasn’t so sick, I would have left too. But I don’t have the energy to be displaced again.”
The Mostafa family from Beirut’s southern suburbs share three mattresses between them amid the mosque’s towering colonnades. “I can’t afford to leave this place,” Mostafa Mostafa said. “Isn’t what happened a shame? We were a proud Lebanese family with a roof over our heads. Our home gave us dignity. Now look at the state we are in.”
Israel’s offensive in Lebanon has left more than 1,300 people dead since it began on September 17, according to a CNN tally of statements by Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Israel’s war cabinet said it aimed to repatriate 60,000 people displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire in the country’s northernmost territory. Hezbollah, for its part, said it would only accept a ceasefire on the Israel-Lebanon border when the Israeli offensive in Gaza ends.
Israel says its attacks have targeted Hezbollah’s weapons depots, command and control structures and its general infrastructure. But many of the dead are believed to be civilians, according to the health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. An air warfare expert told CNN that the ferocity of the campaign in Lebanon already matches that in Gaza, where a ground, air and naval offensive leveled large parts of the besieged enclave.
The war here may have reached another dangerous point. Israel has amassed its troops on the border and has begun its ground war. Artillery and drone strikes have rained down on the area, forcing people to flee as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seek to pave the way for an invasion of the country’s south and establish a buffer zone.
However, they have faced fierce defense from Hezbollah fighters, whose native mountainous terrain poses challenges to an invading force. According to multiple reports, Israeli forces have violated the armistice line between Lebanon and Israel several times in the past two days, conducting raids and suffering casualties, and then withdrawing.
Meanwhile, Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah’s civilian arms, such as the health authority on Thursday morning and its media center later in the afternoon, expanded the scope of its stated goals of destroying the group’s command and control. backed by Iran, as well as its arsenal.
It has raised the specter of mission expansion, pushing the country, which is no stranger to conflict and crises, into uncharted waters.
“Now we are literally paralyzed. We can’t do anything,” said Mahdi, a former student at the American University of Beirut, a five-minute drive from the site of the attack on the Islamic Health Authority.
Mahdi had fled his home in Beirut’s southern suburbs for western Beirut and was taking a job around his old campus. “We have a blank idea about our future,” he added.
“They are getting scarier because it seems like day by day, things are escalating, and we really don’t know which area is safe now,” said Hadeel, a medical student at the university, established by American missionaries nearly 200 years ago.
“Will it continue like this? Will the West speak, or are we just another country in the Middle East?”
