Day 9

It was 9am when I opened my eyes. At 11am there was a march from the UN headquarters to the EU headquarters. Many were hoping it would be successful, but naturally, since hope has forsaken this land long ago, it was not.

Some 200 people were there, they were split into 2 groups within 10 minutes. Some marched towards the EU HQ, others remained. As the crowd marched I couldn’t help overhearing many disappointing words. People were angry; others were just having a good time.

I was filming the action and partly participating. At a certain point the crowd passed in front of a wall on which was written ‘Beware, danger of collapsing’, the scene was more than emblematic it was insightful.

After this episode I had met some friends of mine and we went to help a group of young leftists who are distributing food and other material to the many refugees now living in the schools of Beirut. They call themselves ‘Mouwatinoun’ (citizens). We took the sandwiches that were already prepared by some volunteers and went in the car to distribute them to 2 schools which some 350 people were now calling home. Many do not accept the help and consider themselves more fortunate than others, and therefore prefer to leave their share to those who they regard as more needy. Others are so grateful that one feels bad about it.

Later still we went back to the headquarters, an abandoned house in front of the central park of Beirut, the Sanayeh Park which has been transformed into a relay station for the refugees before they are sent to some school which still has some capacity to welcome them. These people are perhaps what the media calls terrorists, these are the Hezbollah: poor rural families who spent the bigger part of their lives as refugees, because of the so many Israeli raids and the uncounted attacks their villages have known. These families are the infrastructure of the Hezbollah, they are the Hezbollah. They are neither radical, nor are they bloodthirsty, they are warm, loving and attached to their land, so attached that they care not about death.

After I left the HQ, I went to meet some friends to have a drink. The night starts early and ends early now. One of them had managed to escape the forsaken southern Lebanon last night; he was literally a war survivor. We celebrated his safety and had more drinks. It was 7pm and everyone was drunk. At 9 we went home. At 9.05 the raids over the southern suburbs greeted me home.

On the field, today was calm in the suburbs until 9.05pm. However in the south things were not: many Israeli attempts to go into Lebanon; however they faced very hard resistance and were unable to cross the line, fortunately for us. The Bekaa was the subject of the now daily air assaults which left a yet undetermined number of casualties. On the level of human rights doctors in Sida, the capital of southern Lebanon are complaining about receiving strange kinds of dead bodies: some of the victims of Israeli raids on the southern villages are neither burned, nor injured, they are just blackened bodies with a horrible smell, even the blankets with which they are being covered have no blood stains. In short these are symptoms of Israeli use of banned weaponry, weapons for which Saddam was called a terrorist. The written report gets shorter and shorter; however a visual one is in process of development.