I am begging Hezbollah to leave to keep citizens safe, says bombed-out Lebanese city’s mayor

Israeli air strikes have repeatedly hit Zahlé and nearby villages in Bekaa Valley, a stronghold of militant group

Her hair tied back in a ponytail, five-year-old Rayan Shuaib looked on solemnly through the fringe falling across her eyes as they buried her family on Friday.
A little over 24 hours earlier she had been celebrating with them. It was her younger brother Ali’s birthday and their father was determined to celebrate it, despite the Israeli missiles that had upended normal life since the start of the week.
The party, like any good Lebanese party, was still at its height at 1am on Thursday morning when at least one Israeli missile struck the building in which the Shuaib family lived in the Karak district of Zahlé, the main city in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
By the time the smoke cleared, Rayan was the only one still alive in the house. Her brother, father and mother had all died, along with 12 other members of the extended Shuaib family.
Along with southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, much of the Bekaa Valley is a Hezbollah stronghold and has been repeatedly targeted by the Israeli military in recent days.
With few of Bekaa’s towns and villages unspared, many civilians have either fled the valley altogether or made for the comparative safety of Zahlé, perhaps believing that being in a predominantly Christian town would afford a degree of security.
Zahlé is hardly safe, though. Villages on its outskirts have been struck repeatedly, while districts in the more religiously mixed south-east of the city – places such as Karak – have also been targeted on several occasions.
The Israeli Defense Forces have been sending text messages and voice recordings to residents in the Bekaa Valley warning them to leave dangerous areas and move into nearby schools.
Whether in response to those messages or simply because they were terrified of the falling bombs, some 15,000 people have fled to Zahlé in the past three days, according to Assad Zogaib, the town’s Christian mayor.
More than 3,000 of them have taken shelter in Zahle’s schools. Among them are 350 who have crowded into the Mixed Public School of Maalaka, where Rayan’s father, Haydar, was working as a volunteer to care for the newcomers.
Why Haydar did not move his family to the relative safety of the school, a 10-minute walk from his home, is unclear.
Perhaps he believed that his house, on the outskirts of Karak, was safe or that his family would have been in just as much danger at the school. Or he may have calculated that home was more comfortable than a place where many are sleeping on hard classroom floors without mattresses.
All Alya Aboudeih, a local government official in charge of the Maalaka school shelter, knows is that her colleague set off home on Wednesday evening and never came back.
“He left a happy man,” said Ms Aboudeih. “He was proud that he was going to be able to host his son’s birthday even at a time like this. And then, as they celebrated, the whole house was destroyed and three branches of his family were killed – except the little girl.”
Emotions at the school were perhaps unsurprisingly raw. Furious at the deaths of friends, forced out of their homes and still living in danger, those seeking shelter vented their fury at Britain and the United States, accusing both of complicity in Israel’s actions.
“People are very angry,” Ms Aboudeih said as she sought to calm flaring tempers. “Neither Arab countries nor Western ones are standing up to Israel or trying to help us.”
“In Gaza they hit hospitals and schools just like this one and no one did anything about it. Now the same thing is happening here and no one cares. We will go to sleep tonight not having any idea if we will wake up tomorrow.”
Those at the school insisted that Haydar Shueib was not a member of Hezbollah. But Mr Zoghaib, the mayor, said “we have no way of knowing” if there were members of Hezbollah in the house.
He said that he feared Hezbollah members were in the city, living among – and therefore endangering – the civilian population.
“We have been asking refugees to tell any members of Hezbollah to stay away,” he said. “If they want to fight Israel, that’s up to them – but let them stay away from civilian areas so that they can protect their families and their neighbours.”
For those living in and around Zahlé, the past few days have been fearful ones for Muslims and Christians alike.
As Mr Zoghaib spoke, smoke rose in the distance from an Israeli air strike on Masnaa, a town in the valley below that straddles the Syrian border, while reports came in of another attack on Bednayel nine miles to the north-east.
“It’s not the explosions that I mind so much, it is the sound of the missiles going overhead because you don’t know where they are going to land,” said Moura, a Christian woman living in Ferzol, five miles outside Zahlé.
“Every time it happens, your heart races and your legs turn to jelly. But for me what is worse is how terrifying this is for my eight-year-old daughter.”
Not only does Moura live in a place surrounded by villages targeted by Israeli forces, but she also has to drive around Karak every day to get to work in Zahlé – a once-routine commute that is now terrifying.
“I used to drive through Karak,” she said. “Now I take the highway around it and really put my foot to the floor when I’m close to it.”
Lebanon, as it perhaps always has been, is a tale of two countries. In parts of it one can almost forget that the country is suffering one of the most intense bombardments anywhere in the world.
Drive through the Christian resorts of the Mount Lebanon range and life still has a veneer of normality to it. But that veneer quickly vanishes as one drops down into the Bekaa Valley, where the traffic thins, shops and businesses are shuttered and smoke rises from air strikes in the distance.
The Maatam Hajji restaurant in the hillside village of Hezarta affords stunning views across the valley, but it was deserted on Friday.
Sitting in the gloom, Amal, the elderly proprietress, ate lunch with her son and grandson, who have all chosen to remain at home despite the growing danger.
There have been several attacks on the outskirts of Hezarta, including one on a farmstead along the road that killed the couple living there and two relatives who had fled southern Lebanon, assuming they would be safer there. It was a terrible miscalculation.
Despite the dangers, Amal and her family have no intention of fleeing. Here at least, she said, pointing to the jars she fills daily with olives and dried cherries, she had something to eat and a bed to sleep on.
Many of those sheltering in Zahlé’s schools have no such luxuries.
Mr Zoghaib says the catastrophic financial crisis that has devastated Lebanon’s economy and caused its currency to crash meant that the £30 million the mayor’s office had in its bank account was only £375,000 today – not enough to deal with such a crisis as has now befallen the city.
For Amal, that is all the more reason to stay put.
“Where would I go anyway?” she said. “I’m not scared. When your time comes, it comes. If God wants you to live then you will live, even if the Israelis bomb you.”