Tensions high but beaches full as Lebanon readies for war

The azure sky above Tyre beach looked clear as glass, but that was an illusion. “We were swimming like one hour ago and they shot a missile or something,” said Maha Mrad, pointing down the southern Lebanese coastline, stretching out in the distance towards Israel.

An Israeli jet, lurking high beyond view, had bombed a Lebanese village about 20km from the beach, the latest in a 10-month campaign of tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah that appeared closer than ever on Sunday to full-scale war.

“But it felt so – cool,” Mrad said, now face-down on a sun lounger. “Like, oh, there’s a strike. Say hi! We kept swimming.”

This is summer 2024 in Lebanon: peak tourism season, peak tensions with Israel, a war-scarred, party-loving country at the peak of its contradictions.

Many Lebanese are avoiding the south, according to Dalya Farran, the owner of a beach club on the shore. But not completely: “Some of them, instead of coming to [my club] Cloud 59 every weekend – they come every two weeks, or once a month.”

The massacres happening in Gaza are right next to us. Psychologically, you cannot just be having a party time

Dalya Farran

The club is busier than usual on Sunday afternoon, a day after a rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights killed 12 people , including several children, playing football. Israel has blamed the strike on Hezbollah and promised it will “pay a heavy price”. Hezbollah “firmly denies” targeting the village.

“It’s bizarre,” Farran admitted, to relax on sand a few kilometres from destroyed, abandoned border villages. “It takes you some time at the beginning. But you eat some good food, have some beers – or juice – and then go for a swim, and the sea washes away your worries and stress.”

Related: Inside a Lebanese village where war with Israel has already arrived

Hezbollah triggered these latest tensions last October when it started firing on Israeli-held territory “in solidarity” with Palestinians, a day after Hamas’s attack on Israel and just as the obliterating war in Gaza was getting under way.

The killings in the Palestinian territory are felt deeply here. “The massacres happening in Gaza are right next to us,” Farran said. “Just nearby. Psychologically, you cannot just be having a party time.”

Clashing with Israel over the war has allowed an Islamist organisation that wears many masks – Shia militia, political party, proxy of Iran – to present to the Lebanese people its best face: national defender. “Hezbollah doesn’t vibe with – this ,” Mrad said, gesturing at the sunbathers behind her drinking and playing beach tennis on the sand.

“And I don’t vibe with their lifestyle, I don’t vibe with their mindset. But I trust they’re going to protect us, protect this land, because they aren’t foreigners. They’re protecting their homes, their land, their country.”

More than 7,000 Israeli rockets and missiles have landed in Lebanon since October, but life in Beirut uneasily goes on. There has been barely a dent in the planeloads of Lebanese expats making their summer pilgrimage home, according to the country’s tourism syndicate. Beachside towns such as Batroun, north of Beirut and regarded as outside the fighting arena, are booming.

Cars idle in traffic jams below anti-war billboards – reportedly funded by Lebanese businessmen in the Gulf – showing a mourning family and the words: “Enough. We’re tired. Lebanon doesn’t want a war.”

Related: In southern Lebanon on the brink of war – podcast

For some, the biggest inconvenience is that Google Maps regularly malfunctions – Israel is suspected of jamming the country’s GPS system to confuse Hezbollah targeting – or the Israeli warplanes that regularly shatter the sound barrier, producing shock waves that rattle doors and windows tens of thousands of feet below.

Quietly, though, preparations are under way for the worst. From her office in Beirut’s Rafik Hariri university hospital, Wahida Ghalayini watches news reports from Gaza closely, sometimes pausing to take pictures with her phone.

“We look at their emergency rooms – how much blood do they have on the floors? Just to prepare our scenarios,” she said. “In one of the cases [on TV], the nurse was doing CPR with a patient while the stretcher was moving. That’s not easy … So we did the training for that.”

Ghalayini manages a national-emergency centre that has been trying to brace 118 state hospitals across Lebanon for a war that Israel leaders have threatened would take the country “back to the stone age”. One early lesson from Gaza: people were presenting with terrible burns, not just wounds. “And we know in Lebanon we don’t have enough burn centres,” she said.

Paramedics are being trained for the grim aftermath of bombings where victims may be harder to track. “In case you have to deal with body parts – they have to be identified,” she said. “Just so you can give something to the families.”

As in Gaza, she is planning for the prospect of hospitals being bombed; where possible, the entire patient load would be shifted to underground car parks divided up like wards. “There is a risk from the shrapnel, from the bombing, from the breaking glass, so it’s not safe to keep them here.”

Medical facilities have been flooded with more than 50 tonnes of extra supplies, but this latest Lebanese crisis builds on an ongoing financial collapse that hobbles the health system even in more peaceful times.

“For example, look at how dirty this is,” Ghalayini said, pointing to a hospital lobby floor covered in plastic wrappers and dust. “We are facing major problems with housekeeping. We haven’t paid them. We’re having to clean our own offices. We’re not even in a war yet, but we’re doing it.”

As the prospect of war becomes more concrete, western embassies have urged their citizens to leave the country while they can. Israel is thought likely to strike Beirut’s airport and main seaports, and plans have been drawn up for evacuations by military ships for some countries but by private ferries for most. Supplies of food, water and medicine within Lebanon are thought not to exceed two-to-three weeks. Diplomats conceded that, for all their preparations, a mass evacuation would inevitably be chaotic.

But visitors are still coming, including to one of Hezbollah’s newest tourist attractions, the Jihad museum, an olive-green building draped in netting and perched above the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek, where the “Party of God” was founded in the crucible of an Israel invasion in 1982.

“We’re here to learn about the history of Lebanon,” said one museum-goer, Mustafa al-Ajouz, visiting from Switzerland. The museum features a panoramic timeline of the group’s history – with a rolling count of operations against Israel – and outdoors, dozens of captured tanks, armoured vehicles and even speedboats equipped with machine guns.

“Made in America,” says the museum’s head, Khalil Bazaal, smacking the side of one tank. “We have many more, of course. But this is a tight space.”

Related: ‘I’ve seen many wars’: residents along Israel’s Lebanon boundary brace for conflict

The most recent acquisitions are old Syrian and Iraqi army tanks and vehicles, captured from Islamic State when Hezbollah intervened on the side of the Syrian regime during the country’s civil war. Analysts say the fighting there taught Hezbollah to operate like a modern army, co-ordinating its attacks with air forces and mechanised tank divisions. The group’s stockpile of missiles and rockets is thought to exceed 130,000, and could overwhelm Israel’s anti-missile defence systems.

As tensions ratchet up, most in the country can only get on with life, waiting for news of their futures from leaders in Tel Aviv, Tehran and Hezbollah’s redoubts in Lebanon. “What we can do?” says a police officer, who asks to use his first name Ahmad, one of about 90,000 Lebanese displaced by the firing. “The big countries – America – can’t do anything. The people running the war don’t know how to stop it.”

He rents a home in Tyre, assisted by a $200 subsidy paid to displaced people by Hezbollah, and spends his days working with hundreds of homeless families at a school-turned-shelter a few minutes’ walk from the beach. “We thought we’d only be staying here 20 days a month,” he says.

He is frustrated, but certain he will return to his heavily damaged village, Dhayra, eventually. After all, he says, there are about 60,000 Israelis from border towns who have fled their homes as well. “That’s the most important thing,” he says. “What’s keeping us quiet is that they’re displaced, too. Otherwise, it would be hard. But we’re equivalent. There is a balance.”