It's a little past midnight at the end of Monday, moving into Tuesday a.m. There hasn't been a major strike in Beirut since maybe 6 p.m. this afternoon.
That's in sharp contrast with yesterday and especially two nights ago, Saturday night, when an hours-long, post-midnight attack leveled whole blocks of residential buildings in the southern part of the city, across town from my place. I don't know how widely images of the destruction of those non-evacuated neighborhoods have circulated. See here.
So far over 200 Lebanese have been killed in six days of Israeli bombing. On the Israeli side the count is 24. (Lebanon's air force, they say, is wholly comprised of a handful of US-made Vietnam-era helicopters. And that's if government forces were engaged, which they're not.) I heard there have been protests in Israel against the bombing of Lebanon.
It's not only about the death toll. The government says the strikes have displaced 400,000 people in Lebanon. That in a country of not quite 4 million. On Saturday I visited a public school here in East Beirut (where there are more churches than mosques) and talked with some evacuees from the southern suburbs (where there are more mosques than churches). The families had just arrived to the shelter.
Employees from the equivalent of the Department of Sanitation were sweeping up trash in the courtyard where the evacuees would sleep. There were stacks of foam mattresses and wool blankets. A row of faucets but no water. They didn't know where their food was going to come from. They had no suitcases. They laughed when a shell hit and a reporter I was with jumped a little.
A few minutes ago a friend stopped in - I'm at the East Beirut home of a local reporter from the US - and said she heard on TV that Israel had threatened to strike downtown Beirut after Hizbullah hit the northern Israeli town of Haifa with rockets tonight, again.
Downtown's close, three avenue blocks I'd say. But the rumor of the threat isn't worrisome, for how impossible it seems. No infrastructure to target there, no Hizbullah.
There was a boom. I'm less jumpy than I was. That one was outside of town, loud enough to have a physical impact but not loud enough to rearrange your haircut like the ones the other night.
The US government is slowly getting it together to evacuate some citizens, reports have it. France had a ferry going today; Australia is busing people to Syria; 400 Germans; 2,300 Danes going (after the February riots there were still 2,300 Danes here?). Indonesians went. There are about 30,000 Filipinos in Lebanon, mostly working as housekeepers and cooks and nannies. No plans yet for them.
Earlier today the US embassy Beirut sent an email that was nearly a carbon copy of the last few I've got from them. In short it said we're working on this, a few medical cases and children separated from their families and elderly have left on helicopters, we'll know more soon, keep your passport handy. It mentioned that Beirut International Airport "remains closed" - must be related to the cratered runways and huge fuel fires there?
For people like me it's not an easy decision. On the one hand there're the air strikes and the prospect of a prolonged and possibly escalating war. On the other hand there's the prospect of submitting to an evacuation orchestrated by the federal government. Look what happened last time-those people are still in trailers.
There was another two. Those were loud. No way to know what they're hitting. No cable TV here, at this house, meaning no Lebanese Broadcasting Channel, no New TV and certainly, since the Israelis took out their offices, no Al-Manar, the Hizbullah station (which is the best to watch for practicing classical Arabic because there's a lot of sermonizing and no modish sitcoms).
Maybe they're hitting the port again, which is north of here. It wasn't a hit on Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs.
Wow there were three more. "That didn't sound like Dahiyeh," my friend said. Closer. I just texted a friend who lives over the hill to the south - with a TV - to ask what she knew. She just replied, "Dahiyeh."
So those were no closer than the ones last night, it's just that not hearing them for some hours you forget how loud they are. There was another one. If you go to the site above you'll see how hard they've already pounded the area. So what's tonight about?
From the balcony: clear night. A half moon, perfectly halved, right down the middle. Down the street two bats flying in a tight circle twelve feet off the ground. No cars, no people. A yellow cat walking the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, nonchalant.
I've seen some pretty freaked out cats the last few days. There are strays everywhere here - soon after I arrived in Beirut at the start of the year I saw an especially sick one on the American University Beirut campus, it had open wounds.
A little girl, a toddler, was tugging on her mom's hand, trying to pet it. Her mom was paying attention to something else and then right when the girl was almost touching the thing - I didn't have time to yell - the mom turned and saw and grabbed her kid so fast.
3:15 a.m. Six big ones just now, and sound of jets - a bad sound, over a country without an operable airport. Dahiyeh. Part of the idea is to kill people. Eye for an eye. Part of the idea, they say, is they're trying to nail an arsenal. And part of the idea, the reason they space them out, and concentrate the attacks at night, is to prevent people from sleeping.
It works. Most people I've talked to are running on four hours a night and less. Some are running on much less and, like one security guard at the paper, are really showing it, drunk with sleep deprivation. I managed to fall back asleep after the 6:30-ish strikes this morning (Monday morning) and catch up a little.
You want to fall asleep just to foil what you know is their plan, to prevent you from sleeping. But falling asleep, as an act of defiance, is hard to pull off.