Few signs of life can be seen along the highway in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. Nearly every shop lining the road is shuttered and the sidewalks empty. The red-and-white painted barriers of some Lebanese army checkpoints are vacant, abandoned by the soldiers guarding them. Even the road is mostly quiet — save the occasional car racing out of the valley.
Scattered along the way are remnants of the Israeli airstrikes that have pummeled the area in recent days. Where factories, stores and houses once stood, there are piles of cinder blocks, twisted pieces of metal and shards of glass. Emerald green shrubbery is coated in dull gray dust, and power lines — yanked from their metal posts in the blasts — dangle over the road, swaying with the breeze.
“Every strike feels closer and closer and closer. You don’t know where to hide, where to escape,” said Mariam Saleh, 23, who was visiting relatives in the Bekaa Valley village of Britel when the strikes began this week.
The bombardments across the Bekaa Valley are part of the more than 1,000 airstrikes that Israel has launched against Lebanon since Monday in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese military group. The campaign is one of the most intense in contemporary warfare, experts say, and led to the deadliest day in Lebanon in decades.
So far, about 700 people have been killed and over 100,000 others forced to flee their homes because of the strikes.
While the heaviest bombardment has been in the south, Israel has also struck across the Bekaa Valley, a patchwork of farmland, wineries, olive groves and villages nestled between Lebanon’s two mountain ranges. At least 160 people have been killed in Bekaa over the past week, according to the local authorities.
The strikes have decimated pockets of the valley, one of Lebanon’s poorest regions, where Hezbollah holds immense sway and has a significant support base. Thousands of residents have fled the area since the strikes began on Monday, seeking shelter in relatives’ homes in the capital, Beirut, or crowding into hotels on its outskirts. By Wednesday, nearly all of the hotels in Chtoura — a major town on the western edge of Bekaa — were fully booked.
Two New York Times reporters and a photographer visited the Bekaa Valley this week on a two-day trip. The Hezbollah authorities allowed entry to the region on the condition that Hezbollah members could accompany the reporting team and could restrict its movements.
Hezbollah did not listen to interviews with local residents and had no say over what would be published. While the trip revealed the bombardment’s civilian toll, it did little to illuminate how much the strikes had damaged Hezbollah’s military activities, including its fighters and their capabilities, with Hezbollah keeping any such damage from view.
While thousands have fled the region, hundreds have also flooded into the valley’s medical centers, threatening to overwhelm health care workers, hospital administers say.
The Dar Al Amal University Hospital in Douris — two miles southwest of Baalbek, a city that has been frequently targeted in the Israeli airstrikes — received around 100 patients wounded in the strikes between Tuesday and Wednesday night, according to the director of the hospital, Dr. Elie Maubard. Around 40 of those patients were children, he said.
In the pediatric ward of the hospital, Sabrin Sharaf, 46, sat at the foot of one bed where her 9-year-old daughter, Zainab, lay unconscious under a dark green blanket, her long brown hair held back by a surgical hairnet.
When strikes began to rain down on the valley on Monday night, Ms. Sharaf gathered Zainab and her five other children in their kitchen. The room was the farthest in the house from the main road and, she hoped, it would be the safest.
But around 9 p.m. that night, she and her children were suddenly thrown to one side of the room — landing in a pile under shards of tiles and pieces of stone. Choking back dust, Ms. Sharaf took stock of her children: She saw her 11-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son climbing out of the rubble. She spotted her 6-year-old twins, crying for help, alive. But she could not see Zainab.
“Zuzu! Zuzu! Where are you, Zuzu?” she recalled screaming, using her pet name for her daughter. After her 14-year-old son found Zainab under the rubble, they rushed her to the hospital in a neighbor’s car. Zainab has not regained consciousness since.
Standing nearby in the pediatric ward, Ali Rawad Hamzi, 41, said he had lost four of his nieces and nephews when an airstrike leveled their house on Tuesday night. His 16-year-old daughter lost both her eyes in the strike. His 7-year-old son, Hussain, who had been playing with his cousins, survived. He lay in a bed in front of Mr. Hamzi, his right eye swollen shut and jagged lines of blood etched across his face.
“He survived by a miracle,” Mr. Hamzi said in a hushed tone, gazing over at his son.
The sudden onslaught of destruction and mass displacement stunned many across Bekaa, which had been largely spared from the tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel over the past 11 months.
It has also brought the deep sectarian and tribal divides in the region to the forefront. Bekaa has long served as one of Hezbollah’s most fertile recruiting grounds as young men with few job prospects have joined the Shia movement to take part in its fight against Israel and in turn have received access to its extensive social welfare system of schools, hospitals and clinics.
But it is also home to many Lebanese Christians and Sunni Muslims who are less likely to have benefited from Hezbollah’s social safety net or to support its cause — and have now found themselves trapped in the group’s escalating conflict.
“Of course, I don’t want this war, I have children,” said Abdo Akiki, 55, a Christian who lives in Douris Village in Bekaa and whose 3-year-old daughter, Tala, had been seriously wounded after his house was struck on Monday night. “But what can we do, it’s up to them to decide,” he added, referring to Hezbollah.
On Tuesday evening, Mr. Akiki sat next to his daughter in Rayak Hospital in the valley, gently stroking her hair between the beep-beep-beep of a heart-rate monitor. When she seemed to drift off to sleep, he lifted his palm — only for her to cry out and reach her small hand toward him. He leaned forward, placing his forehead against her and cradling her head in his hand. As he comforted her, he could hear the thundering roars of airstrikes in the distance.
Tala was always his most boisterous child, her father said, who played rough with the boys next door and loved sitting on his lap whenever he drove around the village. Looking at her in the hospital bed, the decisions he made the night his house was struck played over and over in his head.
When he first heard the airstrikes, he tried convincing his wife, Souad, that they should leave, but she was sitting on the floor with their 1-year-old daughter, paralyzed with fear. He tried telling her to try standing on the count of three: One. Two. Three. But she would not move.
As the night wore on, the sounds of the thuds grew louder, closer. Mr. Akiki stopped trying to coax his wife into the car. Even if they did leave now, he thought, he wouldn’t know where to go. “How do you escape when there’s bombing behind you and bombing in front of you?” he said.
Around 10 p.m., the back wall of his house came crashing down — burying Tala under a pile of rubble, only a corner of the red blanket she slept with peeking out. She suffered a head injury and two days later — though she was alert and able to be carried by her father — was still struggling to fully recover, her doctors said.
“I was about to lose my daughter, I was about to lose my whole family,” Mr. Akiki said. “What are we getting from this war?”
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