Day 4

I slept like a baby. The night was calm in Beirut. It was not in the south. The balance of terror is back on track perhaps which means that any Israeli attack will be paralleled with a response from the resistance, hopefully acting as a preventing factor for any large scale raid.

Last night was filled with events. As I went back home from Hamra, the Security Council was in session and rhetorical speeches were competing. Of course the Lebanese representative was a disgrace contrarily to the Israeli one, who made a very good presentation setting Israel as a concerned friend of the Lebanese people. They are bombing us for our own good. The Security Council did not even call for a seize fire – why should they? Israel is defending itself. From what? No one knows.

Later that night we heard 2 big blasts, a minute passed and there was a third one. Everyone thought it was in Beirut, it was the Cola bridge. People came out from their houses and stood on their balconies maybe they could get a glimpse of the explosion. Some minutes later news came that it was not the Cola bridge, it was another raid on the southern suburbs, this time a plane raid.

We were having dinner. Fattouch, a Lebanese salad, perfect for the summer, we even have a deputy with the same last name but he is not perfect for the summer.

At night I was tired, I needed sleep. The TV announced that Nasrallah the secretary general of the Hezbollah will be making an announcement. Everyone was waiting for it, when he speaks it is definitely to say something important. The time finally came.

It was by telephone, for security reasons. The Israeli planes had struck the Hezbollah headquarters earlier and his private household, of course no one was there. He was to reply to the Saudi comment, which he did, and to the Israeli escalation, which he countered. The speech was a media event, a whole spectacle. At the end after saying that now since Israel wants an open war we will give it an open war, a last spectacular phrase: ‘ and now the battleship which is stationed in the Beirut sea, and which was bombing the city and its houses, look at it, look at it burn. This is our first surprise.’

Indeed it was burning. The moment the call ended I heard volleys of fireworks and machine guns, cheers and screams of relief as many of the people felt a glimpse of hope. We had been looking at the battleship so closely stationed in the sea, a bold and violent figure, for the last 3 days feeling incapable of doing anything. It was threatening our nights and homes. It was no longer a divine presence; it was again a broken piece of metal. Now everyone expected the Israeli revenge. It did not come that night on Beirut, it came on the south.

Today we are having a picnic, an urban one.