In Lebanon, Israeli Attacks Marked the Last Days of Ramadan

The women bring in skewer after skewer of lamb and chicken from the veranda, still smoking from the charcoal grill. Aida, the grandmother and matriarch of the crowded living room, unfurls a blue mat on the floor, then plates, then more plates, topped with salads and stuffed koussa. 

Suddenly, the sound of the mosque from outside; sunset call to prayer. In a few minutes, the women and girls in this south Beirut living room will break their Ramadan fast for the day and eat their iftar meal. 

In some ways, sisters Batoul and Zahraa al-Sayed, stuffed between cousins and aunties, are lucky they’ve made it this far. The girls, 15 and 12, are from Burj Qalawayh, a village in south Lebanon that for the past year and a half has been in the eye of the storm of deadly Israeli airstrikes. 

It started in the days after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led fighters from Gaza unleashed a shock attack on Israeli territory. Israel launched an all-out assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, targeting hospitals, homes, and displacement camps in an act of genocide that has killed more than 50,000 people. 

Israel would also turn its guns on Lebanon, after Hezbollah and allied militants began firing into Israeli territory in support of Hamas’s attack. 

To date, more than 4,000 people have been killed in Lebanon — mostly in the south and southern Beirut suburbs where Hezbollah holds sway — but elsewhere too, as fighters and everyday civilians alike fled further north for some safety. 

Israel and Lebanon reached a tenuous ceasefire back in November, halting the worst of the onslaught — though Israeli bombs have continued at a steady tempo since then in the south and parts of Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. 

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The dust has only barely settled in time for Ramadan, the month-long Islamic holiday of fasting, great food, questionably good late-night TV binge-fests and quality time with family. 

That’s where I found the Sayed sisters last week, in Laylaki, a vibrant working-class neighborhood south of Beirut that suffered under Israeli strikes last year. They’re up here visiting from their south Lebanon village, to celebrate Ramadan with relatives. To reach them, I passed several concrete apartment blocks still crumbled and mangled where they once stood, others blacked by the fires that erupted during their destruction. 

In the Sayed family’s own living room, the women dig into their iftar beneath the “martyr” poster of a relative on the wall — a smiling young man killed by an Israeli airstrike in their home village shortly before the ceasefire. 

The family is cheerful inside the Laylaki living room but later, out on the veranda, the girls say Ramadan doesn’t feel quite so happy this year. “I don’t know if it’s because of the war or because we’re getting older,” Batoul, the older of the two sisters, tells me. 

“I just want everything to be safe,” Zahraa says.

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Lebanon is already suffering from six years of financial crisis that decimated its currency and vaporized people’s life savings. 

Now, reconstruction and recovery costs following the war are at a whopping $11 billion, the World Bank said this month. On top of that, 96,000 people are still displaced, according to the UN’s refugee agency, eking out a life away from their homes amid soaring rent and food prices. 

Hezbollah has promised a total $77 million in cash payments to registered families the war with Israel has affected. As of December, it had already handed out $50 million, the group’s leader Naim Qassem said at the time. Iran is the main financier of the cash aid.

Khalil Tarhini is one of those recipients. He says Israel bombed both his house and his clothing store, his sole source of income, in Nabatieh. The shop is “completely destroyed” with $100,000 worth of clothing stock under the rubble, while his house is repairable. 

Hezbollah “gave me $3,379 for the house, but the repairs cost $12,000,” Khalil says. The store could cost thousands of dollars to repair, if he decides to bother with yet another reconstruction. 

It’s a painful loss. Since 1990, when Khalil decided to return home to Lebanon from Saudi Arabia and rebuild a life here after the end of the civil war, his clothing shop has been bombed three times. “Three times it’s been destroyed completely.” Once in Israel’s 1996 “Operation Grapes of Wrath” incursion in Lebanon, another time in the 2006 war, and now in the latest, deadliest war to strike Lebanon. 

“This time is the worst … and back then, I was 50. Now I’m 70. I don’t have the encouragement I did before.” 

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Today Khalil is staring down the barrel of nine grandchildren whom he can’t afford sweets and presents for this Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that falls at the very end of Ramdan. 

Still, he’s trying. He rented out a small shop near the rubble of his destroyed clothing store, where he’s trying to make some income to pay for expenses — like the $3,000 per month he needs to pay for his adult son’s medical treatment. 

Otherwise, like in the rest of Nabatieh’s destroyed souk, there are some decorations and Eid bazaar stalls amid the rubble. He and others are simply doing what they can. “Ramadan is happening. Eid is happening. But is anyone happy, to enjoy Ramadan or Eid? No. There are lots of martyrs, lots of injured.” 

My own colleague, João Sousa, who took the photos for this article, lives in a south Lebanon village with his Lebanese wife and young daughter. They were enjoying iftar this past week as I wrote, when they heard the unmistakable buzz of another Israeli spy drone above them. An hour later, yet another airstrike nearby. 

“Within minutes, there was news of another ‘martyr’ all over social media,” João told me. After more than a year covering wartime Lebanon together, we know the sound of each bomb likely means death.

So does Youssef Darwiche, 11 years old. Like Batoul and Zahraa, he’s from Burj Qalawayh. Since the beginning of Ramadan, he’s been gathering with the local boy scouts group to pray and recite Quran in the hours leading up to iftar time at sunset. 

The time hasn’t been without loss. Last year, an Israeli strike killed one of his scout troop leaders. Now, “we talk about him and remember him together.” 

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Youssef’s scout troop leader is one of so many others who have died this past year leading up to the holiday. “It’s okay, we’re used to it,” Youssef says, simply, over bowls of garlic sauces and tenderized lamb meat with his family.

Still, up in Laylaki, in the southern Beirut suburbs, sisters Batoul and Zahraa are upbeat tonight. There’s just a week left of Ramadan to go. They say it’s the first time they feel they’ve been able to relax in months. 

When the strikes intensified last year, the girls and their parents fled first to northern Lebanon, where they bounced between rural villages and Tripoli before heading across the border to Syria and then Iraq. They point out a black SUV out in front of the veranda that looks like it’s been through tough roads. “That’s the car that took us!”

Finally, after weeks on the road, the ceasefire came in November. The family immediately started driving across hours of desert in Iraq and then Syria, to make it back home to Lebanon. 

It’s time to finally relax for Ramadan — at least for a bit, with some hesitation. 

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Now, time for jokes, laughter and food. Batoul points out a pot of vegetable-noodle soup. “First we eat that one to get our stomachs ready for all the food,” she says. Next come the tabouleh and fattoush salads, then an unending stream of chicken and meat skewers.  

An avalanche of dirty dishes to wash and then, finally, argileh time. The women remove their hijabs and relax around the floor, hoping the youngest of the children will fall asleep soon. 

Outside, down kilometers of highway that once clogged with displaced families seeking shelter from the Israeli strikes, some of the bombs continue, hitting near the womens’ home villages in south Lebanon. In just four days, Israeli forces will significantly ramp up the bombing, striking a building just minutes away in broad daylight, next to two full schools. 

For now, though, a bit of restful quiet.

** All photos by João Sousa. Sousa is a photojournalist based in Lebanon and focused on social issues.