(Credit: Mohammad Yassine / L'Orient-Le Jour)
It came with time. Without realizing it, and without wanting to. From one war to the next, Ziad E. learned to distinguish the sounds. Zzzz, chiiiiioooo, kaboom. There is artillery fire, cluster bombs, surface-to-air missiles, drones, fighter jets, bombers, and intelligence tools. The muffled rumble of shells fired from ships and the whistling of projectiles coming from the sky. Warning strikes, light explosives, and daily bombardments.And then there are the special operations. The out-of-the-ordinary calibrations. The ones that sweep away everything in their path, for miles around. Like those bunker-busting bombs that unload hundreds of kilos of explosives onto entire blocks of buildings – like the one that targeted Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27, 2024, and Hashem Safieddine, six days later. On those days, the man in his fifties understood...
It came with time. Without realizing it, and without wanting to. From one war to the next, Ziad E. learned to distinguish the sounds. Zzzz, chiiiiioooo, kaboom. There is artillery fire, cluster bombs, surface-to-air missiles, drones, fighter jets, bombers, and intelligence tools. The muffled rumble of shells fired from ships and the whistling of projectiles coming from the sky. Warning strikes, light explosives, and daily bombardments.And then there are the special operations. The out-of-the-ordinary calibrations. The ones that sweep away everything in their path, for miles around. Like those bunker-busting bombs that unload hundreds of kilos of explosives onto entire blocks of buildings – like the one that targeted Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27, 2024, and Hashem Safieddine, six days later. On those days, the man in his fifties...