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.