As Israel attacks, many Lebanese feel dragged into someone else's war

Annaya: When Hezbollah announced that its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, the talk among many of the group's Shiite Muslim followers was of defiance and vengeance.

But many others in Lebanon say that this is not their war to fight.

"How is anyone benefiting from what's going on?" said Rana Khalil, 45, an owner of a small clothing and accessories store in Beirut, the capital. "We're the ones being injured. We are the ones being killed."

Hezbollah, the Iran-allied militia, began launching rockets at Israeli positions a year ago. It said it was acting in support of Hamas, the Iran-backed Palestinian armed group that controls the Gaza Strip and came under blistering assault after carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

A conflict largely confined to the border region had simmered ever since. But in recent weeks, Israel has unleashed a dizzying series of back-to-back attacks aimed at erasing the threat Hezbollah poses to northern Israel -- killing a string of commanders, bombarding large swaths of the country and staging a ground invasion. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians have fled their homes, and the bloodshed has now reached parts of Lebanon that had been totally calm.

A small Mediterranean country half the size of Vermont, Lebanon has 18 officially recognized religious groups in a population of only 5.4 million. Now, no matter their opinions on Hezbollah, they all find themselves caught between Israel's onslaught and the weakened militia's decision to fight on.

Many people are outraged that Hezbollah is dragging Lebanon into a war that can only spell more disaster for their crisis-wracked country, already frail after one of the world's worst economic collapses and years of political paralysis.

In Annaya, a Maronite Christian village in the mountains north of Beirut, residents were spooked last week by the boom of a strike on a neighboring Shiite village. Where else could Israel strike?

"This is between the Palestinians and the Israelis," said Ibrahim Ibrahim, 55, the owner of a small grocery store in Annaya. "Why do the Lebanese have to pay the price? Let them fight each other over there."

Lebanon's fractious political and social mix includes Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Christians of various denominations and Druse, who once all battled one another in a blood-soaked, 15-year civil war. Sectarian hostility is never far from the surface.

Armed with a vast arsenal, Hezbollah answers to no Lebanese authority -- not to the government, the courts or the nation's weak military. Many Lebanese in the Shiite heartland of southern Lebanon and in the Dahiya area on the outskirts of Beirut still see Hezbollah as their sole protector in a country where they have been historically marginalized by those in power.

The group has long provided support and social services for its constituents. But for Ahmed Issa, 33, who fled the south for Beirut with his family and dozens of relatives last week, it was his confidence that Hezbollah was fighting for their homes that really mattered.

"People think we in the south just love death and war and blood," he said. "That's wrong. We love life. But at the end of the day, this is the reality forced on all of us."

Khalil, who co-owns the clothing store in Beirut, is also from southern Lebanon. But she could see only doom ahead if the war in Lebanon continued.

"I understand the need for the resistance. I understand the need for Hezbollah," she said. "We're loyal to the leaders of the resistance, to Nasrallah, but we are not willing to sacrifice our children's lives."

She looked out onto the street, where a black SUV had been parked on the corner for hours. A family appeared to be sleeping inside it. She guessed they were among the hundreds of thousands of people who had fled recent airstrikes.

"We're all going to die," she said, shaking her head. "Christian, Sunni, Shia, everybody's going to be affected. We're all going to be homeless, like these people."

For her and others, opposition to Hezbollah's decision to keep fighting was far from the same thing as siding with Israel. Many people interviewed around Beirut and in Christian-dominated villages over the past week blamed both sides for accelerating toward a full-fledged war.

"Both of them had their chance to stop it, and they didn't," said Marina Matta, 15, who was working in a cafe in Annaya while she waited for the school year to start. But it has been delayed because of the war, leaving her, like the whole country, in limbo.

For many across the sectarian spectrum, the killing in Gaza and Lebanon has hardened attitudes against Israel.

"I'm with anyone who fights Israel," said Yasser Tabbara, the owner of a small grocery store in Tarek al-Jdideh, a Sunni neighborhood of Beirut. Using a common honorific for Nasrallah, he added, "Maybe we've had disagreements with Sayyid Hassan, but I'm shoulder to shoulder with him when it comes to fighting Israel."

As the violence and the displacement has intensified in recent weeks, Lebanese of all sects have rushed to help the displaced, who, so far, are mainly Shiite.

Standing outside a shelter for displaced people, Mohamed al-Atrash, 53, who evacuated his home in the south last week -- days before Nasrallah was killed -- noted that since exploding pagers and walkie-talkies owned by Hezbollah members killed and maimed thousands of Lebanese, people of many backgrounds had donated blood, opened their homes to displaced families and banded together to marshal aid for shelters.

"From the outside, you'd look at us and say, 'These people are going to kill each other,'" he said. "But when it comes to crisis, we're all one people, and we're here for one another."

For all their sympathy, many fear the crisis will stoke tensions -- always quick to erupt -- among Lebanon's sects.

When Hezbollah announced Nasrallah's death the week after the pager attacks, some in Beirut burst into tears. Others shot their guns skyward, celebrating. Some Sunnis and Christians in Beirut and elsewhere have pushed displaced Shiites out of their neighborhoods over the past week, seeing their sect as partly responsible for bringing bloodshed to the rest of Lebanon.

"We haven't learned to live with each other," said Bassam Sawma, 61, who sells flatbread and homemade jams in the Christian mountain village of Mechmech, near Annaya. He and his neighbors have friends in the nearby Shiite village, he said.

Yet even if the Lebanese draw distinctions among themselves, he said, the war's effects do not. "They say the conflict is with Hezbollah," he said of Israel, "but they're attacking everyone."