War between Hezbollah and Israel drags Beirut back into despair

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. BEIRUT—From his tiled terrace in the foothills overlooking Beirut, Mohammed Dayekh is watching a place he once loved go up in flames. A 34-year-old director and screenwriter with jet black hair and tattooed forearms, Dayekh grew up in southern Beirut.

Four years ago, he moved to the hills above the city after Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group, tightened its grip on his old neighborhood and made it more conservative. More women started wearing the Iranian-style chador instead of Lebanese-style headscarves, and men talked up Tehran’s influence. Now, Dayekh feels a flood of complicated emotions as he watches Israeli airstrikes hit the neighborhood.

He had yearned for change in Lebanon, he said—but not like this. “This place that I destroyed in my own mind is being destroyed by someone else," he said, as fires from the strikes rose above the Mediterranean. Beirut has staggered through war, economic collapse and a port explosion in 2020 that leveled much of the city center.

Now, the latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, is dragging Beirut back into a cycle of violence, just as it was beginning to stabilize after years of chaos. Israel says its airstrikes are targeting Hezbollah’s infrastructure, including what it says are weapons storage facilities and bunkers used by the group’s military wing underneath Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah-dominated neighborhood where Dayekh grew up. Israel’s military also says it is targeting the group’s economic lifeblood, including branches of a U.S.-sanctioned microlending bank that is part of its sprawling network of social services.