Inside Tyre, a Lebanese City Bombarded by Israel
‘I Can’t Endure This’: Inside a Bombarded City in Southern Lebanon
In Tyre, a city on Lebanon’s coast, near-daily bombardments by Israel have killed and injured civilians, and left many searching for shelter.
The mother sat on the curb outside a hospital in southern Lebanon, holding her phone and pleading with a photo of her sons on its screen.
“I’m waiting for you, answer me, answer me,” the woman, Fatima Kholeif, cried. “I’m your mother, just answer me.”
Her relatives huddled around her, unsure of what to do. When one tried to coax the phone from Ms. Kholeif’s hands to calm her down, she just clutched it harder. Didn’t they understand? The photos were all she had left of her sons — the sons who had just bought her hair dye so she could color her wispy, gray curls, a respite from the Israeli bombing. The sons who had kissed her cheeks that morning as they left for work harvesting oranges in an orchard nearby. The sons who were killed on that orchard in an airstrike.
“I can’t endure this,” she cried, her voice trailing off. “Two of my sons, two, two, two.”
Within minutes, a frenzy erupted around her as news arrived that the Israeli military had issued a warning about imminent strikes near the hospital in Tyre, a coastal city within the large swath of southern Lebanon where Israel has told residents to flee north. Other families waiting outside the hospital scattered, racing away on motorcycles toward the seaside. “Come on,” Ms. Kholeif’s neighbor said, lifting her off the curb and shuttling her into a car before Israeli warplanes arrived overhead.
Ms. Kholeif’s sons, 23-year-old Abdul Rahman Jadour and 30-year-old Ayman Jadour, were among several Syrian farmworkers killed in the strikes, according to relatives, hospital officials and rescue workers. They were the latest casualties in a war that has consumed Tyre. The fighting began after Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, fired on Israel last month in support of Tehran, prompting Israel to bombard and invade Lebanon.
Ever since, Tyre has been transformed by fear. The city’s population is predominantly Shiite Muslim, the same sect as Hezbollah. Its busiest streets have emptied, the metal shutters have been pulled over storefronts, and residents are wary of leaving their homes.
Despite a fragile cease-fire in Iran, Israel has vowed to keep striking Hezbollah and on Wednesday launched a barrage of airstrikes across Lebanon that killed more than 300 people. It was the deadliest day since the war began.
Littered across the roads are the remains of Israeli airstrikes. There are buildings with their facades sheared off. Entire rooms of apartments were hurled across the road and lie on top of mounds of rubble. Poking through the wreckage are signs of the lives once lived there: A doll with blond hair. A black and bright green roller blade. The severed half of a headphone.
Tyre is within the large swath of land south of the Litani River — around 10 percent of the country — that Israel says it plans to occupy after its ground invasion ends. That rhetoric has stoked concerns among residents that if they abide by the evacuation warnings and leave their homes, they may never be able to return. Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, has said that Israeli forces will not allow Shiite residents who flee north to return south until the “security of northern Israeli residents is ensured.”
That fear has pushed many more residents of Tyre to remain in the city compared with the previous hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel in 2024, according to municipal officials. Even in the surrounding countryside, which has been battered by airstrikes, around 5,000 residents have stayed in their villages — twice as many as during the 2024 war, the officials said. Nearly 20,000 more have fled southern villages for Tyre rather than head north of the Litani River.
“People are saying that if we leave, it will make it easier for them to occupy,” said Daher Habib Baher, 59, referring to Israeli forces. Mr. Baher left Tyre during the 2024 escalation, but chose to stay in the city this time in a school turned shelter that felt safer than his neighborhood.
“We have roots here,” he said. “We have to do whatever we can to keep our land.”
Mediterranean
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For those in the city, daily life has been upended. The thunder of warplanes has echoed overhead along with the clap of outgoing artillery fired by Hezbollah fighters. White plumes of smoke from Israeli airstrikes and artillery hitting the hinterland billow over the horizon as Israeli ground forces inch closer to the city, stoking fears that it could soon be invaded or besieged.
One recent afternoon in central Tyre, Zeinab Judi, 55, watched as her brother tried to untangle the spider web of electrical wires that had come crashing down after a strike hit her neighbors’ apartment building.
In the two days since, all she could focus on was furiously cleaning up her home. She swept glass off the floors, fixed the doors that had flown off their hinges and searched in the broken porcelain tub for her missing shower head — small tasks to regain the sense of control that the war had stripped from her.
“I want to go back to how life used to be,” Ms. Judi said, bursting into tears. “How can we live like this?”
Around the corner, her neighbor, Salwa Mamlouk, 35, looked on as she patched a broken pipe that was still spouting water.
“We are still paying the price from the last war,” Ms. Mamlouk said.
Still, she said, any frustration she felt with Hezbollah for firing on Israel and kicking off the war had been replaced by anger at Israel for the devastation it has wrought, and by exasperation with the Lebanese government for being unable to stop it.
“Hezbollah is the only one defending us against Israel,” she said. “The government is just sitting by and watching.”
That sentiment is widespread in Tyre, where Hezbollah maintains a large base of support and where they have made their presence known. The highway leading into the city is decorated with yellow and green Hezbollah flags. In recent weeks, posters with photos of Iran’s slain leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, have cropped up across the city.
So, too, have temporary graves for civilians and Hezbollah fighters killed in the war, whose bodies cannot be transported to the border villages that Israeli forces have captured. Instead, they are placed in plywood coffins, lowered into trenches beside a shopping mall and marked with numbers spray-painted in red on cinder blocks.
Much of the life that remains in Tyre takes place in the city’s Christian enclave by the seaside, the only area that has not been included in the evacuation warnings. There, Christian residents mix with Shiites from other parts of the city who have slept in cars or city-run shelters.
Inside one broken-down school bus, 7-year-old Jana Fadi Muhana looked up when she heard the thud from Israeli strikes one recent afternoon.
“There’s a sound! There’s a sound!” she cried out. She paused, looked to the bus door, which was jammed shut, and then asked her sister to pull her out through the driver’s side window and take her to their mother.
“Sometimes she collapses or cries when she hears the planes and the drones,” her father, Fadi Muhana, 50, muttered as he stood nearby. By the time the family decided to leave their house, the shelters had filled up, so his boss lent him the bus to sleep in after the restaurant where he worked shuttered.
“What can we do? Where can we go?” Mr. Muhana said.
Down the road, Yousef Ghafary cut through plywood in his carpentry shop, among the only businesses open on the street. A Christian whose family has lived in Tyre for generations, Mr. Ghafary said that Tyre’s minority Christian and Sunni Muslim residents had been tightly integrated with its Shiite population for decades.
But the war has strained that delicate social fabric. Many Christians now decline invitations from their Shiite friends for fear that they could become collateral damage in Israeli attacks targeting Shiites.
“You know they are the ones under threat, and you worry about exposing yourself to it by being with them,” Mr. Ghafary said.
“I just don’t see an end to this war,” he added."
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