Mehdi Moussawi believed his own building was collapsing a few streets away in the Dahieh, a suburb of Beirut.
The 45-year-old cab driver and his wife Zahraa, who requested that their identities be withheld for the purposes of this article, saw from their balcony as a dense layer of dust and smoke covered everything in their immediate vicinity. They could hear the familiar buzz of an Israeli drone overhead and the sound of rubble falling down in the distance.
Over the past three days, the drones had become so ubiquitous over Dahieh that they were almost perceptible. Dahieh, a predominantly Shia district south of Beirut, was once again.
Mehdi pointed to the arc of a projectile falling to the ground as he remarked, “The missiles come down from the sky, and suddenly everything you have is gone.”
On the outskirts of Martyrs’ Square in the heart of Beirut, where the couple and their teenage boys currently reside, he was seated on a filthy, sun-baked patch of sidewalk. Hundreds of people, many from Dahieh, were in similar situations around them. The area has been hardest hit by the recent Israeli bombing of Beirut, which has caused almost all of its residents to flee in large numbers.
