Displaced people at the Makassed school in Beirut. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine/L’Orient-Le Jour)
It's a dead end street in Karm al-Zeitoun, a working-class Christian neighborhood in East Beirut, where three-story buildings are so close that residents can see straight into their neighbor's living room. In this forced intimacy, nothing goes unnoticed. On the night of Sunday, March 1, when Israel began striking Beirut's southern suburbs, about a dozen frantic people took refuge on the ground floor of a modest building. The noise of their arrival quickly alerted the entire alley.Mireille*, the building owner, was awakened at dawn by anxious calls from her neighbors. She repeats, incredulous: never would she have imagined Shiites coming to seek refuge ... "in the stronghold of the Jnoud al-Rab" (the "Soldiers of God"), a far-right Christian vigilante group."It's my tenant who took them in. I asked...
It's a dead end street in Karm al-Zeitoun, a working-class Christian neighborhood in East Beirut, where three-story buildings are so close that residents can see straight into their neighbor's living room. In this forced intimacy, nothing goes unnoticed. On the night of Sunday, March 1, when Israel began striking Beirut's southern suburbs, about a dozen frantic people took refuge on the ground floor of a modest building. The noise of their arrival quickly alerted the entire alley.Mireille*, the building owner, was awakened at dawn by anxious calls from her neighbors. She repeats, incredulous: never would she have imagined Shiites coming to seek refuge ... "in the stronghold of the Jnoud al-Rab" (the "Soldiers of God"), a far-right Christian vigilante group."It's my tenant who took them in. I...