Zeinab al-Maoula, 60, shot in the shoulder

More than two dozen people have been struck by stray bullets so far in Lebanon this year, according to a count by L’Orient Today. The below testimony is part of a project by L’Orient Today and L’Orient-Le Jour to document the problem.

Click here to see our stray bullet tracker and read other testimonies.

OUZAI, Beirut — It happened in an instant.

Sixty-year-old Zeinab al-Maoula was sipping tea one evening with her only son on their balcony in a crowded corner of Beirut’s Ouzai district. Just steps away, past a cacophony of tiny clothing shops, butcheries and dukkanehs, was the nighttime summer sea.

“We didn’t hear anything,” says Zeinab’s son M. Z., a 30-year-old graphic designer and fashion photographer. He asked that L’Orient Today publish only his initials to protect his privacy.

Suddenly, M.Z. saw his mother grab at her right shoulder in pain, unable to shout for help. He moved her hand out of the way and saw the unmistakable tiny, bloody hole of a stray bullet. He still doesn’t know where it came from.

M. Z. and his mother drove to the closest hospital but, within about 15 minutes, he says, she was dead.

A commercial street corner in Ouzai. Dec. 7, 2023. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today)

Zeinab was killed in July. Her death came and went with one lone headline in a local news site’s short story but was otherwise forgotten. She was one of dozens of people hit by stray bullets in Lebanon this past year.

Yet the empty spaces Zeinab left behind still haunt M. Z. and his father.

One afternoon in early December, M. Z. sits in an Ouzai mukhtar’s office, where he has agreed to meet with L’Orient Today over coffee and cigarettes.

M. Z. says he remembers the meals he and his father no longer eat, because Zeinab would be the one to cook them. Instead, now they eat “fast food.” There are the cups of coffee and tea they no longer share as a family, the empty chairs Zeinab used to sit in.

“Sometimes we sit [in them], sometimes we cry,” M. Z. says, adding that his father is especially heartbroken. “There’s an emptiness in his life.”

Asked if M. Z. has any favorite photos of his mother still saved on his phone, he shrugs; she didn’t like having her picture taken. There’s just one, he concedes later — Zeinab crouched over her fluffy orange-and-white cat in a doorway, her face obscured by a brightly colored headscarf.

M. Z. and his father still have the cat, he says.

‘Why scare and upset people?’

According to one Ouzai mukhtar, who enjoys a few cigarettes next to M. Z., stray bullets are a common problem in the neighborhood. The mukhtar spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his safety.

“It’s common at holidays and weddings,” he explains, when people shoot their guns into the air to celebrate. But, of course, the bullets have to land somewhere. Often, they simply fall into the sea.

A commercial street in Ouzai. Dec. 7, 2023. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today)

Other times, they land among the houses and shops, or on people’s balconies.

It wasn’t always like this, the mukhtar says. “Zaman,” a long time ago, in his family’s home village of Shaat near Baalbeck, “they’d shoot just three or so shots into the air, and only at the orchards.”

But now heavy celebratory gunfire with automatic weapons is commonplace across the country — including in densely populated urban areas.

The mukhtar says he’s been trying to discourage celebratory gunfire in recent months, using his social status as a local official to pressure people against the practice.

“If there’s a wedding with shooting, I won't go — even if I’m invited,” he says. And if he’s already at an event and shooting begins, “we leave.”

So far, the mukhtar claims, his method seems to be working — if nothing less than to get his point across. “It sends a message.”

After all, he asks, “Why scare and upset people?”

M. Z., too, says he and his father no longer attend events where they know people will fire celebratory bullets into the air. Recently, he says, “there was a funeral, and my father and I didn’t go. They told people not to shoot, but people were shooting [anyway]. So we didn’t go.”

Meanwhile, M. Z. says he and his father are finding comfort elsewhere. “Sometimes, I think: ‘My mom didn’t become old and sick.’ It was so quick and easy for her to die like this. There was no pain.”

“Sometimes I hope that I can die like this — not from a bullet, but for it to be quick and easy,” M. Z. says.

“My family are logical people. What else can we do but say ‘alhamdulillah’?”