The ancient Lebanese valley suffering under Israeli bombs

The blast from the Israeli bomb that landed near the entrance to Baalbek’s Roman ruins was so deafening that Um Hussein, hiding out in a nearby church, could still hear it ringing in her ears days later.

It was powerful enough to shatter the windows of all the buildings in the area, lodging glass into the bodies of her relatives and neighbours; powerful enough to send her seven-year-old daughter flying across the church kitchen where she was brushing her teeth before bed.

“I thought we were all going to die,” the young mother of four said, her words echoing throughout the dark church hall where she and dozens of others have lived since Israel began its intensive bombing of Lebanon in late September.

“Maybe dying would have been better than living like this,” Um Hussein said, looking at the pile of thin mattresses and her family’s few scattered possessions in the corner.

She is one of a few thousand Baalbek residents who have stayed despite Israeli calls to evacuate the city more than two weeks ago, when its air force began raining down a relentless barrage of strikes on the ancient city.

When cross-border hostilities broke out between Israel and Hizbollah in southern Lebanon more than a year ago, Baalbek and the wider Bekaa Valley were largely spared. But in recent weeks, Israel has increasingly turned its sights eastward, laying waste to the fertile yet impoverished region known for its agriculture, vineyards and Roman temples.

Hizbollah was founded here 40 years ago, and draws support from the Shia-majority communities that populate its plains and depend on its patronage. The Bekaa’s proximity to the Syrian border has made it a strategic corridor through which weapons, contraband and military personnel flow between Lebanon and Hizbollah’s allies in Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Israel says it is targeting Hizbollah fighters, weapons and military infrastructure in order to decimate its capabilities, along with fuel depots and border crossings with Syria it says are used to arm the group. The Jewish state says its aim is to ensure that 60,000 residents, displaced by Hizbollah rocket fire that started after Hamas’s October 7 attack from Gaza last year, are able to return to their homes in northern Israel.

On a recent visit to Baalbek and several nearby villages in the Bekaa, the Financial Times saw chaos and devastation in every corner, roads and villages pockmarked with demolished buildings and piles of knee-high rubble, the residents having long since fled. 

The FT visited the sites of several Israeli air strikes in the Bekaa in a trip facilitated by Hizbollah. While its officials were present for parts of the visit, they did not arrange, oversee or take part in any interviews, nor did they review any reporting.

In Baalbek, a city continuously inhabited for the past 11,000 years, the historic souk — its market place — is empty, while most shops, cafés and restaurants are shuttered. Only around 30 per cent of Baalbek’s original population of 100,000 remain.

“The streets where people know Hizbollah has a presence or an office — those are empty,” said Ali Al-Asidi, a 52-year-old sweet shop owner.

Those who stayed have neither the means nor the social networks to go elsewhere, he said. “We hunker down and pray for survival when there are bombs and come out of our hiding places when it’s quiet. What else are we supposed to do?”

Asidi spoke in front of the Baalbek citadel, its 2,000-year-old stone walls blackened by ash from the explosion that targeted an Ottoman-era building and ripped through the adjacent visitors’ parking lot earlier this month. He was marching a herd of goats through the rubble, his only source of income since Baalbek’s souk closed down.

Back at the nearby Greek Melkite Church of St Barbara, Um Hussein agreed: “Nowhere is safe, even in this church, we almost died. Israel has no mercy — they won’t tell you that X area is safe, so you can go back. They’re just hitting their targets at random.”

Most of the 106 people sheltering at the church are Shia Muslims who have fled other parts of the city. Father Marwan Maalouf, from the local Greek Melkite archdiocese, opened the building to fleeing families when the first strike hit Baalbek, filling all of its available space. On the worst days, the numbers can swell to 300.

In the absence of government help, he has managed to provide food and shelter to his guests, with the help of NGOs and local volunteers. His Muslim guests have even helped out with mass, replacing the usual volunteers who have long since fled.

“Muslim, Christian — it doesn’t matter. We are all brothers and it is our duty to protect each other,” Fr Marwan said.

Like most people running informal shelters across the country, which house some of the 1mn people displaced by the war, Fr Marwan said he screens new arrivals with military intelligence to ensure they have no connection to Hizbollah. “Israel will use any excuse to target places and I don’t want to be held responsible for a massacre here,” he said.

Most strikes take place without warning, leading to enormous destruction and a mounting civilian death toll.

As of Saturday, there had been more than 30 strikes across the area over the past week, with at least 52 people killed. In several incidents, multiple generations of families were wiped out, their bodies found in scattered pieces.

The relentless pace of attacks has overwhelmed medical workers, who said the majority of the casualties they have treated have been children and women.

“This is what it’s like every day: we hear the planes or the drones, then a huge boom or two, then it’s screaming people trapped under the rubble, multiple times a day, seven days a week,” said one rescue worker, as he jumped into an ambulance heading to the scene of a nearby strike.

Last Thursday night, an Israeli air strike on a civil defence centre in the town of Douris killed 15 paramedics and five bystanders, bringing the total number of emergency workers killed by Israel to more than 200 — most of them in the past two months. “We’ll probably be killed soon too,” the rescue worker said.

In Nabi Chit, the hometown of Hizbollah’s first leader and co-founder Abbas al-Mussawi, local officials said at least 36 people had been killed since September in more than 105 Israeli air strikes. With most of its 16,000 residents gone, the village was quiet bar the wail of ambulance sirens.

Local officials said that in the first few weeks of the assault, the vast majority of the targets were Hizbollah military infrastructure and weapons. But since then, Israel has moved on to target civilian areas — mostly homes and apartment blocks.

“It’s not just our boys that are being killed on the southern front,” said Hassan al-Mussawi, the village mayor, referring to locals who went to fight for Hizbollah near the Israeli border. “There are men, women and children who are dying in their homes or in the shelters they have sought refuge in.”

Israel denies it targets non-combatants, and accuses Hizbollah of embedding itself in civilian areas. Some officials acknowledged that the strikes on residential homes have killed Hizbollah rank-and-file, “usually low or mid-ranking, with particular expertise in some aspect of [Hizbollah’s] operations”, said one official not affiliated with the group. 

Ali al-Mussawi, a neighbour and driver of a tuk-tuk rickshaw whose home was damaged and family injured in an air strike that killed two men next door, said he believed one was a low-ranking Hizbollah member. “Even if he was, how can this enemy justify killing even one civilian for this man?” he said.

Rather, the majority of people here believe the strikes on civilians are designed to weaken morale among Lebanon’s Shia Muslim communities, who are a deep well of support for Hizbollah and rely on its vast social welfare network.

“The enemy is not distinguishing between civilians and fighters. It’s all to create pressure on the Shia so that they pressure [Hizbollah] to capitulate,” Hassan al-Mussawi said. “But we are used to sacrificing: we have given many martyrs to this cause and we are steadfast. Victory will be ours, whatever the cost.”

Cartography by Steven Bernard. Additional reporting by Sobhiya Najjar