Can Lebanon’s ‘Safe Areas’ Stay Safe as Israel Deepens its War?

Inside the walls of Saint Joseph Church in March, hundreds of people filled the pews, praying and singing. Among them, the parish priest, Bassem Kiwan, saw scores of new faces.

In recent days, he had met with some of them. On Feb. 28, Israel and the United States launched what has become a weeks-long war on Iran. Meanwhile, Israeli forces went back to war in Lebanon. Since then, Kiwan said, 100 Christian families displaced from southern Lebanon had sought refuge in the area, a densely crowded suburb of Beirut known as Bourj Hammoud. With a largely Armenian Christian population unaffiliated with Hezbollah, Bourj Hammoud is seen as one of the unofficial “safe areas” in the Lebanese capital city.

But a series of Israeli attacks on so-called safe areas has eroded people’s sense of security.

When I visited the suburb a few weeks ago, life at first glance seemed almost normal. The streets were crowded with cars, and on sidewalks and in front of stores, people walked and chatted. There was little to suggest that just a few kilometers (miles) away, adjacent suburbs were regularly bombed by Israeli war jets, and that a few hours south, fierce ground fighting raged between Hezbollah and Israel.

It was only when you began to talk to people that you saw the apprehension and unease tucked behind the veil of normalcy.

Kiwan put it succinctly when I spoke to him. 

“Fear has begun to affect our children and our women,” he said. “We are afraid.”

For decades, religion and sectarian politics have shaped life in Lebanon. Within the tiny country’s 10,452 square kilometers (4,036 square miles) of territory, more than a dozen sects of Muslims, Christians, and Druze coexist in a fluctuating state of peace, tension, and conflict. From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon fought a devastating civil war fueled by sectarianism.

In the Hezbollah-Israel conflict unfolding now, sectarian demographics have taken on a life-or-death dynamic. With Hezbollah largely representing Lebanon’s Shia Muslim community, which makes up an estimated third of the population, Shia neighborhoods, villages, and cities bear the brunt of Israeli military attacks.

Parts of the country inhabited by Lebanon’s other religious sects  — Christians, Sunni Muslims, Druze, and Alawites — have largely been spared, at least until recently. As Israel’s war against Hezbollah rages on amid a wider regional conflict with Iran, areas once seen as safe are finding themselves under fire, including Bourj Hammoud.

Kiwan had just finished leading a second liturgy service when I met him in the back of Saint Joseph, a landmark Eastern Catholic Maronite church that sits along one of Bourj Hammoud’s main streets.

As he changed from his purple vestments to more casual clerical clothing, Kiwan told me about the families displaced from southern Lebanon that he had been meeting with. They were among the more than 1.2 million people uprooted from their homes since the start of the war on March 2. While many displaced individuals have ended up in overcrowded centers or on the streets, the families in Bourj Hammoud seemed to be faring slightly better. Kiwan said they were staying with friends and family or renting homes.

As he visited families, Kiwan said, he took time to get to know them and to understand how the church could provide assistance. It was an approach that seemed to be based as much on charitable values as it was for security. In addition to the Christian families, Kiwan noted that many displaced Shia families had also arrived in Bourj Hammoud. While sympathetic to their plight, he also hinted at the concerns that their presence raised.

“It’s true that (Bourj Hammoud) is safe, but among the displaced there are people whose identities are unknown,” the priest said.

His comments echoed what I heard from other Lebanese in Bourj Hammoud and across the country: a fear that a member of Hezbollah or one of its allies would be among displaced families, leading to an attack on the area.

“That’s why we hope that only displaced people from our Shia brothers who are not involved in the war will come,” Kiwan said. “We fear that trouble will rise among people and that innocent people will be caught up in the crossfire because of those who are causing the war.”

His concerns were not without precedent. Around a week earlier, two Israeli airstrikes targeted a residential building in Bourj Hammoud where a Hezbollah member was allegedly staying.

In a half-asleep slumber, Hagop* thought he heard one of the attacks before drifting back to sleep. Later that morning, the 26-year-old social media manager awoke to texts from friends and family asking him if he was okay. As it turned out, there had been a strike less than two kilometers from his home.

Some 24 hours later, Israel bombed the same building again.

To Hagop, the strikes were a one-off, but they were also something he always thought was possible. While much of the population in Bourj Hammoud is Lebanese-Armenian, the building that was targeted stands in Nabaa, a neighborhood with a large Shia population.

“I always knew it was a possibility to have someone (from Hezbollah) here,” he said.

Israeli strikes on so-called safe areas tend to be accurate and far less destructive than the attacks it carries out on Shia communities and Hezbollah-aligned areas, where entire buildings are often destroyed, even when civilians are inside. In attacks like the one in Nabaa, Israel utilizes highly precise ordinances with smaller payloads that seem intended to mainly damage and kill people in specific apartments within a building.

But even in these more reserved strikes, civilians are sometimes injured and killed. The back-to-back attacks on the building in Nabaa killed at least one person and injured four others. On Sunday evening, March 5, an Israeli strike on a largely Christian town outside of Beirut killed three civilians, including an official in the Lebanese Forces, a Christian political party that is staunchly anti-Hezbollah.  

Such attacks have inflamed Lebanon’s social tensions as some areas have moved to enact strict security measures and restrict or ban Shia families from renting homes. When I met Hagop a couple weeks ago, he said there was no indication that such measures had been put in place in Bourj Hammoud, at least officially. But residents did fear that more attacks like the one in Nabaa could follow. 

Hagop, however, seemed a bit more relaxed.

“Here, you know almost everyone,” he said. “It’s such a small place, and it’s mostly Armenians here, so it’s very unlikely that we would have Hezbollah facilities or anything like that.”

Still, that reassurance didn’t mean he was unaffected by the war.

The sound of airstrikes sometimes kept him awake at night. With social venues closed or feeling it was insensitive to post on social media, he had less work. And in the somber atmosphere of war, he and his friends weren’t going out much.

Like many Lebanese Christians, Hagop saw himself as caught in the crossfire of a conflict that wasn’t his and that he never wanted.

“I don’t feel like this is Lebanon’s war,” he said. “Definitely it’s Hezbollah’s war. We are just caught in the middle.”

After the end of Lebanon’s civil war, all of the various militias involved in the conflict were required to relinquish their weapons — except for Hezbollah, which, though not specifically named, was allowed to keep its arms under the auspices of fighting the Israeli occupation in the country’s south.

In 2000, Israel withdrew its military forces, winning Hezbollah widespread popular support and legitimizing its claim to fame as a resistance movement. Over the next two decades, Hezbollah held onto its weapons as it grew in power with support from its patron Iran.

But its rise did not come without controversy. Hezbollah’s de-facto control over national security issues and its intervention in neighboring Syria led to widespread opposition towards the group and calls that it be disarmed, especially in the wake of its decisions to enter into conflict with Israel.

While Hagop is one of the people who would like to see the government strip Hezbollah of its weapons, he is doubtful that it can. “The state is not super effective, they’re not super capable,” he said. “It’s long been known that the army doesn’t have good enough weapons, or enough soldiers, or enough anything to disarm Hezbollah.”

Such cynicism is widespread in Lebanon, especially in the wake of a controversial government plan cautiously launched by the Lebanese military to disarm Hezbollah.

“I don’t think the army really engaged in a serious disarmament process of Hezbollah,” said Michael Young, a Lebanon analyst at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center think tank in Beirut. “The simple reason is that the army was not willing to get into a military confrontation with Hezbollah. It’s as simple as that, because I think the army believes, probably correctly, that it would not be able to prevail in such a situation.”

But inferiority was not the only factor that gave the military pause. In a country still carrying the trauma of civil war, there is little desire for another one. To confront Hezbollah militarily, Young noted, would also mean to confront the Shia community. “The Lebanese state is not going to enter into a civil war with one of its communities on behalf of Israel and the United States,” he said.

With Israel expanding its military campaign in Lebanon, the government finds itself between a rock and a hard place as Israeli officials issue a dire ultimatum: disarm Hezbollah, or suffer a fate similar to Gaza.

In recent weeks, the Lebanese government seemed to bend to pressure as it issued a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities and declared Iran’s ambassador persona non grata, ordering him to leave the country before the end of March. But with Hezbollah continuing to launch attacks and the ambassador refusing to leave the country, such measures seem to be little more than symbolic.

Still, some Lebanese fear that they could push the country towards a civil war. 

On a cold, wet night in March, Mano Ashodian sat in his shop in one of Bourj Hammoud’s labyrinth of narrow streets, tinkering on a few gems at his desk. 

The diamond setter had far less work now than before the war. So did other jewelers in the suburb. Fear and uncertainty had disrupted supply and demand. It had also led shop owners to move their gold from display windows to closets, worried that an airstrike could destroy the glass and make them vulnerable to theft.

Several days prior, rumors suddenly spread that Israel would bomb a popular gold and currency exchange provider in Bourj Hammoud. Panic ensued, employees went home, and shops closed. But no airstrike ever came. The rumor, it turned out, was nothing more than a rumor. 

“In this situation, you don’t know which news is fake and which news is real,” Ashodian said. “You’re afraid.”

But as terrifying and challenging as the conflict may be at times, what Ashodian fears even more than the war now is a return to civil war in Lebanon. 

“If this becomes a civil war, it will be a very, very bad situation,” Ashodian said. 

While people disagree about whether a civil war will erupt, domestic tensions have risen in recent weeks. Some of those tensions have occurred most clearly in Lebanon’s media landscape. MTV, one of the country’s largest Christian television stations, has been accused of promoting pro-Israeli narratives in its wartime coverage, particularly after a controversial report in which the channel alleged certain buildings were used by Hezbollah for military purposes. Such reporting has prompted widespread criticism, leading to threats against its journalists and accusations of deliberately stirring sectarian strife.

All the while, Hezbollah continues to resist the government’s calls for it to disarm, arguing that such moves serve Israeli interests.

Many Lebanese, Ashodian included, speculate that a civil war is exactly what Israel wants. But there is little that the 43-year-old father feels that he can do in a country that he has lost hope in. And so he waits to see what will come next. In the meantime, he leans on his faith, the only thing that still gives him hope. “I don’t have a plan,” he said. “All I can do is trust in Jesus Christ.”