Many in Lebanon fear they will be caught in Hezbollah-Israel crossfire

By Nabih BulosForeign Correspondent

July 12, 2024 3 AM PT

RMEISH, Lebanon — From her balcony on the edge of this Lebanese border village, Greta Nakhleh-Allam, 33, can see Israel in almost every direction.

And every morning, as the shelling between the Israeli army and Hezbollah militants starts anew, she wonders whether the clashes will end or turn into an all-consuming conflagration.

“I’m tired of this war, tired of the life we’re living,” said Nakhleh-Allam, watching her 11-year-old son Jacob chase the family dog, Bella.

“We thought it would last a week. Then we thought a month. Christmas passed. New Year passed. Easter passed. And we’re still waiting for the fighting to end. And now they say it will get bigger.”

Three men in white religious robes stand facing a statue of Christ on a cross, with a ceiling depicting Jesus

That question — will the fighting end or escalate? — is being asked across Lebanon these days, but perhaps nowhere with more urgency than Rmeish. This village of about 11,000 people, the largest of the dozen Christian areas scattered across the Hezbollah-dominated south, finds itself on the front line of a fight that few here see as theirs.

“It’s not our cause. It’s not our business to do this for [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar,” said Said Allam, a 42-year-old onetime soldier and now supermarket owner. Sinwar is believed to be the mastermind behind the Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and sparked a ferocious counteroffensive in Gaza that health authorities there say has claimed more than 38,000 lives.

The day after the Israel-Hamas war erupted, Hezbollah — a Shiite Islamist paramilitary group and political party that is part of an alliance with Hamas — fired missiles into Israel in a “solidarity campaign.” Israel retaliated, and Allam watched half his neighbors join the more than 90,000 Lebanese displaced by the violence; in Israel’s north, roughly 60,000 have been evacuated.

And the tensions have since reached fever pitch.

On Saturday, a rocket struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams, a Syrian Druze town in the occupied Golan Heights, killing 12 children. Israel blamed Hezbollah — a charge the group denies — and launched strikes overnight.

Economic life in Rmeish ground to a halt. Most tobacco farmers couldn’t reach their fields, losing not only their crops — the main source of income here — but also the chance to plant for next season. Summer engagements and weddings, bringing in an annual $2 million in business for restaurants, were canceled or relocated. And the Lebanese expatriates who would crowd the village during vacations and holidays have mostly stayed away.

Huge clouds of black smoke rises over buildings

“I’ve invested half a million dollars in this store and I’m just watching it lose money,” Allam said, pointing to a row of well-stocked shelves.

As if addressing Hezbollah, he added: “You want Jerusalem? Go get it, but not like this, because you’ve destroyed everyone along with you.”

Allam’s frustration — shared by many here — cuts to the core of the schism over Hezbollah and, in broader ways, Lebanese society’s support for the Palestinian cause.

Hezbollah has a long history of clashes with Israel. Its support for Gazans has won it praise among Lebanon’s Sunnis and the wider Arab world, where people contrast the group’s activism with the inaction of their own governments.

But many Lebanese also remember the late 1960s, when Palestinian factions turned the south into what some called “Fatahland” — a reference to Fatah, the largest of them — and used it as a staging ground for attacks against Israel.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in a bid to rout Palestinian fighters and create a buffer zone — a campaign that metastasized into an occupation that prompted the rise of an Iran-backed Shiite Islamist group that came to be Hezbollah. After the Israelis withdrew in 2000, Hezbollah — by then not only a guerrilla force, but also a well-organized political and social party — kept its weapons, arguing that “Islamic resistance” was the only deterrent against future Israeli assaults.

People in fatigues shout while holding yellow-and-green flags

The two sides faced off again in 2006, in a devastating war that killed around 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and saw wide swaths of Lebanon obliterated by bombs before it ended in a stalemate. Rmeish suffered damage, though nowhere near as much as Shiite villages loyal to Hezbollah. Instead, it became a sanctuary for about 30,000 fleeing the violence.

The war’s end brought relative peace. Until nine months ago, the two sides had kept a wary but cordial distance, with only an occasional tit-for-tat shelling.

If a wider war were to erupt, Israeli officials have vowed to inflict greater destruction than in 2006. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently threatened to “turn Beirut into Gaza.”

But Israeli military planners acknowledge that Hezbollah — with more than 100,000 fighters and advanced weaponry — would be a far tougher foe than Hamas, one that could strike deep into Israel. And Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has said any Israeli offensive would spur combat with “no restraint and no rules and no ceilings.”

Nevertheless, Hezbollah has to take Lebanon’s other communities into consideration, said Michael Young, a Lebanon expert with the Carnegie Middle East Center.

“Everyone knows a war is the worst option, and yet Hezbollah has embarked the country on this conflict,” he said. “Hezbollah is aware that if the situation spun out of control, their position would be damaged. They want to avoid this.”

A man in a white T-shirt peers through the jagged opening of his broken window

Among residents displaced from the now-emptied Shiite villages in the south, support remains strong — at least outwardly.

“We, the people of the south, it’s our sons, sisters and loved ones who are getting killed, to protect our country,” said Balqis Dawood, a 50-year-old homemaker from Kfar Kila, one of the towns hardest hit by Israeli barrages.

A huge crowd surrounds a coffin draped with a yellow-and-green flag, topped with a wreath

At the funeral of a senior Hezbollah leader assassinated by Israel this month, Dawood was defiant, saying that though her house had been destroyed and her family displaced, they would return and rebuild. To those among her compatriots who questioned Hezbollah’s fight, she said: “We’re the people of the resistance. Those who don’t like it should leave Lebanon.”

Standing nearby was Ali, 33, who works at a protein supplements company and serves as a reservist with Hezbollah. Dressed in fatigues and a crimson beret, he said he would fight in the south if called.

“If someone comes into your home and invades it, do you do nothing?” he said. “The Israelis have said after Gaza they’re coming here. So we’re going to stop them.”

There has been talk in Israeli political circles of reoccupying southern Lebanon as a buffer zone against Hezbollah, a situation that would certainly see Rmeish fall under Israeli control.

It wouldn’t be the first time. During Israel’s occupation, southern Lebanese villages such as Rmeish became part of an Israeli-backed mini-state. Fighting age males were obliged to join the South Lebanon Army — many did so willingly — and ran security operations alongside Israeli troops, including the imprisonment and torture of their compatriots.

Others forged economic ties: About 4,000 Lebanese crossed the border every day to work in farms and industrial areas in the Galilee and Tel Aviv.

“All the fancy houses you see in Rmeish were built with that money,” said Najib al-Amil, the 72-year-old priest of Rmeish’s Maronite Church.

“If you shouted in Hebrew in the street, three quarters of the people here would answer you back,” said one grocer, who didn’t give his name to avoid harassment.

Few would welcome another occupation.

“I know Israel has designs on the area, but I can’t stop them with a rifle,” Al-Amil said, a note of exasperation in his voice. “Escalate or stop, either war or no war. But now there’s no war and no peace. It cannot stay like this.”

Young, of the Carnegie Middle East Center, said that reoccupying to create a buffer zone ignores the long-range arsenal Hezbollah has at its disposal, rendering moot any security cushion the Israeli army can realistically carve out in Lebanon.

“There will be no stability in northern Israel unless there’s stability in southern Lebanon,” Young said. “The best thing that the Israelis can hope for is a negotiated settlement or a return to the status quo.”

So far Rmeish has remained removed from the fighting, even as Hezbollah uses forests and grasslands on the village outskirts to wage attacks on Israel. In March, when armed men came to set up a mobile rocket launcher in the village, residents rang church bells to scare them off; Hezbollah denied it was involved but agreed with village leaders to keep Rmeish out of its operational area.

That has provided some solace to residents, though less so as the months drag on and hostilities escalate.

The carcasses of goats lying on the ground in a hilly landscape

“If it stays like this, it’s fine, so long as we’re not displaced,” said Allam, the supermarket owner. Still, he had taken precautions: He was sending his two sons, 21 and 18, to Munich, Germany, to find work.

“I wanted them to stay here and build something together in this village, which we all love. But everything is telling me there’s no future,” he said.

Allam said he sees his presence in Rmeish as a matter of preserving Christianity in the area. He would be staying no matter what, he said, pointing to bullet wounds in his shoulder and stomach he sustained during his army service in 2007.

“These should have killed me, so now every day is a new life,” he said. “Whatever happens, I won’t go.”