The road to Tire is lined with the yellow and green flags of Hezbollah. The billboards are filled with the faces of fighters who lost their lives in the many wars with Israel over the years.
We are in the southern evacuation zone Lebanon Israel told everyone to leave. And it won’t be long before we see the increasing human cost of the recent conflict that has engulfed this community.
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A crowd of mourners gathers by the side of the road in a makeshift cemetery. Huddled around the makeshift memorials, some weep, some embrace, others stare blankly ahead. They are here to bury four men who they say are doctors and social workers. He was not a fighter as he claimed to be.
They had to use the site because the men’s hometowns were no longer safe, says Ehsan Dbouq, the group’s cleric.
“We cannot bury our martyrs on the front lines in their villages,” he says. “We are dealing with an enemy that does not differentiate between killing combatants and killing civilians.”
That enemy, they claim, represents an existential threat. Israel would frame an Iran-backed group banned as a terrorist organization in the UK in exactly the same way. There is no sign of backing down anywhere.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has rapidly expanded the evacuation zone here. Three days ago, it stretched from Israel’s southern border to the Latani River. It has now extended further north to the Zahrani River, about 25 miles from the border, raising fears of a ground invasion.
More than 800 people have died in the country so far and millions have been displaced. But Ehsan dismissed accusations that Hezbollah was dragging the rest of the country into a war it did not want and could not win.
“The displaced are part of the resistance,” he says. “Hezbollah was born from the homes of the fathers and mothers of the frontline fighters.”
You can see how battle-hardened the rest are. The IDF is fighting more than a force in Hezbollah – it is fighting a mentality. And after months of Israeli strikes in the middle of a cease-fire, Hezbollah’s supporters believe now more than ever that they are fighting a just war.
Nada Harb, a mother and Hezbollah supporter, tells me: “I don’t go back, I wasn’t in the previous wars. I was born in a war. But like Hezbollah, there was no resistance. The Israelis came at night, broke down the door, they kidnapped my brother, my father, my sister, my uncle, and nobody was allowed to say anything.”
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At her home, she takes us out to her balcony to show us three buildings hit by airstrikes. She is open, vulnerable, but determined. The IDF insists that Hezbollah’s infrastructure and leadership were targeted here.
But the civilian impact is already huge. The bridges used by Hezbollah are also critical for civilians. And hundreds of thousands of people have already been forced to flee this war – many with no power, no shelter and no telling what will happen next.
