Bahaa Sahel picks up items from her damaged shop in Tyre, southern Lebanon. Clothes, footwear and accessories fill a yellow plastic bag too heavy for her to carry over the rubble.
Tyre, Lebanon’s fourth-largest city, has been pummelled by Israeli airstrikes in recent weeks as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a ground operation into the country’s south.
“We fled the town two hours earlier. If I had stayed, I would have been here,” Bahaa says, pointing to the heaps of crumbled cement behind her.
Two Israeli missiles leveled three adjacent buildings killing at least five people, her neighbors explain.
Hassan, who owns a café down the road, says when the first missile hit, he saw a building blow up in the air. It happened 10 days ago, but he says he is still shaken and traumatized.
The blast destroyed vehicles and threw a couple of cars across the street.
Bahaa only got back to her shop and home street on Wednesday to save what she could of her shop before the expected rain. It is a chance to mourn the friends she lost.
“I’ve owned and run this shop for 35 years. These were my neighbors, my friends. I knew the mother, the father and their children,” she says.
It’s not her first war, but she’s praying it will be the last.
“During the Israeli invasion in 1982, a three-story building collapsed over our heads. My cousin died, but God saved my sister and me,” she recalls. She has a similar story for every war Lebanon has gone through.
“So many tragedies,” she says. “I don’t know how many more wars we would live through. But history repeats itself.”
Bahaa and her sister walk over the rubble to reach her apartment two blocks down the road. She says she’s leaving again to the mountains near Beirut the following morning even though the sounds of Israeli airstrikes on the capital scare her every night.
“Maybe this war would be the last one. Maybe God would have mercy on us. We can’t take it anymore,” she says.
