‘Inevitably Heading Towards War’: LA Times Bureau Chief In Lebanon On Aftermath of Massive Israeli Strike On Hezbollah HQ

CNN’s Bianna Golodryga spoke to Nabih Bulos, the Middle East bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times , on Friday following an Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Beirut, which reportedly targeted Hassan Nasrallah.

“Well, I mean, it was just a huge, huge site. It’s just the attack site was really, I think it’s about six buildings, is what I’ve heard, but I really only saw part of it, to be honest with you. And it was I mean, it was like it was basically just overturned. I mean, you had no sense that there were buildings there,” Bulos began when asked to explain what he saw at the blast site. He added:

Was mostly just dirt had sort of flipped around as if the ground itself had turned over upside down. And on one side of it, you know, you could see, almost like, also a crevice in the ground where a tree had fallen and the sort of front, edge of a building had to have been, had been torn off. It really. I mean, the scale of destruction is just really hard to describe because it was so much. And right now, I mean, they’re just digging through.

We’re hearing initial reports of 76 wounded. But of course, I mean, I’m sure that’s going to be much, much, much more because, you know, they’re still digging through the rubble and they will almost certainly have many people. It should be clear this is a very, very populated area.

“Yeah,” added Golodryga.

“In fact, right near it, there’s a big refugee camp, and everyone there was just leaving en masse. I mean, I saw a big exodus from that refugee camp with people just escaping and taking all their stuff and finding anywhere else to go,” Bulos continued.

“Are there were you able to get close to the buildings themselves? This targeted site, as we know, six buildings we’ve reported have been leveled by this. How close to the area of destruction were you able to get?” Golodryga followed up.

“We were at the very edge of it. I mean, we were led, you know, Hezbollah cadres in the area, and we were led into the very edge of it where rescue crews were working, and you could see excavators digging in the size people going through it. Of course, there was still a fire going on. But they said this was the edge of the site and it’s quite large. So I mean, it was, you know, a piece of larger of the city block. So, you know, we’re going to get a screen and get a full view of the destruction is what it amounts to,” Bulos replied.

“Did you feel the blast yourself?” Golodryga asked.

“No, but I heard it. Certainly. I mean, I was home and I just heard a successive, you know, like a number of successive booms. And they really shook the apartment, my cats ran away, of course. And you could hear all the glass shaking in the house. It really was, it was quite different from other attacks that we’ve heard in Beirut. This one seems to have been the big one,” Bulos responded.

Golodryga then turned to regional politics and asked, “And what are your biggest concerns, as we’re waiting to hear whether or not, there is confirmation that Nasrallah was killed or whether he managed to avoid this assassination. A larger picture in the days and weeks to come. What are your biggest concerns as of now?”

“I mean, the fact of the matter is, whether Hezbollah, I mean Nasrallah has been killed or not is somewhat irrelevant to the greater point. I mean, I mean, other general secretaries of the group have been killed in the past, and it hasn’t helped, just as that’s been the case with other groups as well,” he replied, concluding:

But but I expected that it will cause a massive escalation. It seems now that we are very much we’re just inevitably heading towards war. And that’s something that I would like to have not been able to say. But that’s the way it is.

Watch the clip above via CNN.