Lebanon's citizens cling to brittle hope amid the rubble

As a fragile ceasefire holds, Bel Trew talks to residents of the capital Beirut who are struggling to imagine a peaceful future

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Dwarfed by destruction, Imad Shami, 60, a Lebanese barber, stoops to feed an injured cat: an absurd snapshot of life against the graveyard of obliterated buildings around him. The smashed landscape of the heavily populated Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut largely under the control of Hezbollah – shows it was the focus of Israel’s ferocious bombardment.

Behind the father-of-five, civilians looking to salvage belongings scramble through the skeleton of a half-destroyed tower block, which tilts into the ground at an alarming 45-degree angle. In front of him, the ash covers a moonscape of bomb craters.

Imad was one of a handful of civilians who stayed during the near-14 months of bloody conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, because he wanted to feed the 70 or so stray cats in the surrounding streets. He remained even during the final hours before the ceasefire, when Israel pounded these streets into oblivion. The truce has since silenced the explosions, but Imad worries it won’t end the crisis.

“Lebanon and the Lebanese don’t have a future; we jump from catastrophe to catastrophe,” he says bleakly, emptying cans of cat food next to a tangle of concrete that was, until Monday night, a seven-storey building housing multiple families. A family photo album, dentistry exam papers in English, and a child’s neon backpack are among the only signs that humans lived here.

“I am 60 years old. When I was a kid, my mum showed me the tracer fire and lines of bullets. All my life has been like this,” says Imad. “Every 10 years, we have war or catastrophe – we try to stand up, and we get crushed.”