Fresh from his evening shower on May 15, Ibrahim Nehme was settling onto the couch to watch the news in a quiet neighborhood in Tyre, an ancient city in southern Lebanon. There was a lot to catch up on. A Lebanese delegation had just met with Israeli officials in Washington, part of the first direct negotiations between the two countries in decades. In theory, the talks had been positive: The two sides had agreed to meet again in June and to extend the month-old cease-fire between them for 45 days.
But just as he tuned in, he heard a crackle of nearby gunfire.
“I started hearing people shouting and screaming, and people started shooting in the air,” Nehme told me. The shooting could mean only one thing: An Israeli strike was coming. He grabbed his shoes, his teenage daughter and their cat, and hurtled down the stairs.
Minutes later, a missile crashed into the building next door. The blast sheared off the wall of the room Nehme had been sitting in; the sofa tumbled onto the ashen debris five stories below. Shards of glass blanketed the twin beds in his daughters’ bedrooms, and deep fissures snaked up the apartment’s exterior walls. He and his family had no idea why this placid, upscale neighborhood of elegant apartment blocks was bombed. It was a tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone, and the notion of Hezbollah fighters being among them was absurd.
“We are civilians,” Nehme, an architect, told me the next afternoon as he surveyed the damage to his home of 25 years, where he and his wife had raised four daughters. “Why attack us?”
Like Nehme and his tumbling sofa, Lebanon has found itself in the wreckage of an epic battle not of its own making. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades. After it fired rockets into Israel in March as vengeance for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Israel launched a brutal counterattack, killing almost 3,500 people and wounding more than 10,000, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
There is a cease-fire in place but also a war on. Israel regularly bombs residential areas it claims harbor Hezbollah militants, and Hezbollah attacks Israeli troops, who occupy an ever-expanding swath of Lebanese territory. Last week, Israel widened its ground assault and pushed deeper into Lebanon. This week, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered strikes on the Beirut suburbs, before pausing them apparently at Donald Trump’s behest. Peace talks are underway between the Lebanese and Israeli governments, even though Lebanon is not fighting Israel.
The result is an atmosphere of unreality, a bewildering and surreal condition I saw again and again in my travels across the country. It was there on Beirut’s famed corniche by the glittering Mediterranean, where shirtless men played hard-fought games of padel as young women in hijabs looked on, puffing away on fragrant shisha pipes. The roar of military aircraft and the low buzz of drones drowned out the gentle lapping of the sea.
Less than a mile away, just beyond a marina bobbing with gleaming yachts, hundreds of displaced people huddled in makeshift tents. They are the residents of border villages or suburban apartment blocks that have been reduced to rubble by Israeli air and drone strikes in the past three months, a mere handful of the more than 1.1 million Lebanese forced to flee their homes. In the south, makeshift gravesites dot the cities, their slapdash nature testifying to a stubborn vow to rebuild the ancestral villages razed by Israeli troops.
Those who are displaced run because of evacuation orders that arrive on social media from the Israeli Army’s Arabic spokesman. These orders have their own surreal quality. A foreign military, operating inside the territory of another nation, declares that “in light of the terrorist Hezbollah’s violation of the cease-fire agreement, the defense army is compelled to act against it forcefully.” These messages elide who, exactly, this “defense army” is defending.
The regional situation has never been so febrile. Each day brings news that seems to upend the news of the day before: The war in Iran is ending, or escalating, or both. Everyone, meanwhile, seems to be learning the hard lessons that only war can teach. Iran’s proxies did not protect it from American attack. Israel’s maximum force doctrine has, paradoxically, produced more resistance. America’s power was shown to stop short at the Strait of Hormuz. Nobody knows what comes next.
Yet what struck me, over the course of a week in Lebanon in mid-May, is how united so many Lebanese seem in their exhaustion. Whatever their creed, they can no longer stomach being in the cross hairs of foreign powers. Instead, there appeared to be a tentative consensus emerging, even among those most likely to blame Hezbollah for the country’s woes, that the people of Lebanon must find a way to share political and economic power. It was a hope, muted and precarious, that in place of absurdity and surrealism could come clarity and realism.
Elias Jarade typifies this changing mind-set. An Orthodox Christian member of Parliament from south Lebanon, Jarade defeated a Hezbollah politician in 2022 as part of a list of candidates seeking to break down sectarian divides. If he might once have been sympathetic to Israel’s fight against Hezbollah, that changed after Israel used booby-trapped pagers to attack Hezbollah leaders two years ago. Jarade, an eye surgeon, was horrified by the gruesome injuries he saw in civilian patients and disgusted by Israel’s celebratory response to the attack, which injured thousands.
“They congratulate Netanyahu for what he has done,” Jarade told me. “Let them come see the children, the elderly, that were blinded by these pagers. How come you are congratulating them? You know what the impact will be. There are two crimes that happened at the same time, the pager attack and the silent attitude of the whole world.” For Jarade, the atrocity put Hezbollah and Israel side by side as terrorizers of innocent civilians.
Tarek Mitri, an Orthodox Christian politician who serves as the deputy prime minister, also seemed keen to move past old divisions. He told me that efforts to portray Hezbollah as simply a tool of Iran, with no legitimacy in Lebanon, will backfire. “Hezbollah had a role, a major role, in driving the Israelis out of the south,” he told me, referring to Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after nearly two decades of occupation. “They were hailed in Lebanon, not just among the Shiite community, but among all of us.”
Hezbollah’s popularity certainly waned, even among Shiites, since the group decided to join Hamas in targeting Israel after Oct. 7, and again after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier this year. But the ferocity and indiscriminate nature of the Israeli assault have revived Hezbollah’s image as a protector of Lebanese sovereignty, for all its deep ties to Iran.
“I think we missed an opportunity in the year 2000 of restoring the full sovereignty of the state,” Mitri said. “From there on, Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory or Hezbollah operations into Israel have given each other pretext to interfere.” There is simply no military solution to the problem of Hezbollah, he told me. Instead, he said, its resolution will inevitably involve not just Iran and Israel but also other major players in the region. “Lebanon cannot be extracted from the conflict with Israel, unless there is a regional peace achieved.”
A couple of days later, I traveled to the region hardest hit by the conflict: the Shiite heartland of southern Lebanon. On my way south, I stopped in to visit a member of Parliament named Halima Kaakour in her ancestral village of Baasir. In a sprawling compound perched high above the sea, she made me a lunch of traditional Lebanese flatbreads topped with ground lamb, zataar, homemade cheese from a family dairy and freshly chopped tomatoes and herbs grown in a nearby garden.
“My ancestors used to do this, and now the new generation, they don’t want to work like that,” she said, stoking the glowing embers inside a wood-burning oven. “We are struggling to keep it alive.”
That is not the only thing Kaakour, a professor of international law and a Sunni Muslim, hopes to preserve. She has dedicated her life to the dream of a pluralistic, secular and united Lebanon. She was first elected in 2022, pledging to bring secularism, feminism and an emphasis on human rights to Lebanese politics. She has long been critical of Hezbollah but, like the deputy prime minister, rejects attempts to paint it as an alien force bent on destroying Israel. Her focus, instead, was on Israel.
“Israel tells us that it is going to transform Lebanon to Gaza, it’s going to occupy our land, destroy our land,” she said, referring to the approach laid out by officials including Israel’s defense minister. “Under international law, the threat to violence, not only the violence, is a crime itself.” Israel’s right to self-defense cannot come at the expense of Lebanese civilian lives, she argued, and killing a handful of Hezbollah fighters cannot justify the occupation and destruction of vast tracts of a foreign country.
I left Kaakour’s home, driving toward the coast and then south, crossing a half-destroyed bridge over the Litani River that demarcated the most active zone of Israeli military strikes. Turning off the busy north-south coastal highway, I headed inland toward Nabatieh, a city nestled among rocky hillsides that Israeli strikes had pummeled for weeks despite the cease-fire. Suddenly, I was in the only car on the road, speeding past shuttered storefronts and ghostly piles of rubble. Almost everyone had left, heeding Israeli evacuation orders.
I drove to a hilltop hospital to speak with the skeleton crew of medical workers that remained behind, tending to those who were unable to flee or who chose not to. Among them was a paramedic named Hussein Dakdouk. A few days before, he told me, in the aftermath of an airstrike, a man pulled up to the paramedics’ headquarters, his leg badly injured by the blast. Two paramedics rushed toward the man with their emergency gear, and Dakdouk ran to the ambulance to prepare it to transport the man to the hospital. As he turned the key in the ignition, he saw a rocket tear into his colleagues.
“I saw them being blown into pieces,” he said.
Two medics and a member of the administrative staff were killed in the strike, he said, three of more than 116 people killed by Israeli strikes on health-care facilities since March, according to the World Health Organization. Rescue workers and journalists across southern Lebanon have been killed in so-called “double tap” strikes, in which an Israeli rocket hits a target, and then another rocket is fired once people arrive to provide medical aid and document the scene. Such strikes were a hallmark of the Gaza war.
“Whenever separate previous incidents follow the same pattern, this makes us believe that this is not something random that is happening,” Dakdouk told me.
He sent the rest of his family north for safety, but felt compelled to remain to help those left behind. His house had been destroyed in the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2024, along with his small farm. But no amount of force could compel him to leave.
“This is our land,” he said. “We are not immigrants.”
About a week after my visit to Nabatieh, strikes on the area intensified as Israeli forces appeared to be encircling the city. Among the many buildings leveled was the headquarters of Dakdouk’s ambulance team.
In theory, the Lebanese Army should be in control of this terrain. But it is underfunded and underequipped. Partly this is a result of Lebanon’s own shambolic economic situation, but it is also a product of American policy that seeks to keep regional armies weaker than Israel’s. The notion that this feeble force could completely disarm Hezbollah — as Israel and America demand — strikes many Lebanese as laughable. If Israel’s high-tech army, backed by the United States, cannot defeat Hezbollah, how would the Lebanese Army be able to achieve it?
I asked a senior Lebanese Army official if the army could disarm Hezbollah. He waved his hand in dismissal, saying that would split the military, many of whose members are Shiite, and lead to a new civil war. “It is not a military question; it is a political one,” he said, requiring deep reform of the country’s sectarian political system and full implementation of the country’s constitution. “Arrangements dictated by the occupier will never work,” he declared, referring to Israel.
Back in Beirut, I met with a man named Nawaf Moussawi, a longtime Hezbollah politician who was a close ally of Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s charismatic leader, who was assassinated by Israel in 2024. Moussawi was once a central figure in the movement, serving as the head of its foreign relations department, but has an independent streak that has led to clashes with the current leadership.
Moussawi sat flanked by the Lebanese flag and Hezbollah’s yellow banner, festooned with a green fist holding an assault rifle, a symbol of the group’s militant bona fides and its claim to be the only reliable guarantor of Lebanese sovereignty. Despite the relentless Israeli assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, he argued that the aftermath of the Iran war has left Israel weak and isolated, as well as revealing powerful truths about the limits of American military power.
“We see that the international developments and the regional developments are going to be in the interest of the Lebanese people and its national resistance,” he told me. “Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, they feel the danger of Netanyahu becoming victorious in this war.” He continued: “The world has to come to grips with the fact that the problem does not lie with the Lebanese or the Palestinians or the Syrians. It’s with this settler-colonial, aggressive, expansionist Israel.”
But at times in our conversation, he sounded almost conciliatory. At one point he interrupted his translator to correct her: Instead of the common Hezbollah formulation of “the Israeli enemy,” he had said “the Israeli occupier.” This might sound like a small distinction, but — as one Arabic speaker explained to me — the difference between these words in Arabic is stark. An enemy is categorical and eternal, something that must be defeated. “Occupier” is a more legalistic term, suggesting a state of affairs that can be remedied. Unlike Sheikh Naim Qassem, the current secretary general of Hezbollah, Moussawi did not predict the demise of the state of Israel.
“The bigger picture of finding a solution in the whole region is a one-state solution, one democratic pluralistic state, where all coexist,” he said.
This formulation, in the eyes of the Israeli government and its supporters in America, is hardly a concession. It would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and so, some might say, it is merely a more politely phrased version of the Iranian chant of “Death to Israel.” But Israel’s maximum-war doctrine in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has eroded its standing across the globe, making Moussawi’s position — that Israel should be a single pluralistic, democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians — something closer to an emerging global consensus.
To other powerful figures in Lebanon, the broader regional questions are none of their business. Late one afternoon toward the end of my visit, I met with Ghassan Hasbani, a leading member of the Lebanese Forces party, the political descendant of a Christian militia that demobilized at the end of the country’s brutal 15-year-long civil war, which ended in 1990. A guard ushered me through a locked gate and between the elegant stone columns of a hilltop mansion, into a wood-paneled office. Hasbani, a former telecom executive and an Orthodox Christian, laid the blame for Lebanon’s current troubles squarely on Iran.
“Things were quite good until Hezbollah, under the instruction of Iran, decided to enter the war in support of Hamas,” he told me. “This Iranian regime has been building its position to hijack the world for the last 40 years, and the world had left them unchecked for too long.”
I asked him if he worried about Israel becoming a hegemonic power in the Middle East or the plight of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian Christians. “It is not the job of Lebanon,” he replied.
“Lebanon,” he said, “has paid as much, if not more, than the Palestinians themselves in terms of price for this conflict.”
The spiraling crisis in the Middle East could produce many outcomes.
Iran’s stubborn endurance in the face of American and Israeli attacks could produce an even more dangerous and empowered Islamic republic; or Iran could yield to new agreements with its Gulf neighbors that require it to scale back its regional ambitions.
Israel’s inability to force regime change in Iran could lead it to lash out even more ferociously at its neighbors; or it could find itself exhausted and isolated, hemmed in by a loss of unstinting American support. Trump could fully return to his reckless war on Iran, abandoning faltering peace talks in search of an elusive military victory, whatever the cost; or he could face the reality that Americans have no wish to continue this tragic misadventure.
Whatever happens next, the Lebanese will be ready. Of everyone I spoke to, only Hasbani in his mansion seemed wedded to old hard-line positions. From Mitri, the deputy prime minister, and Jarade, the independent lawmaker, there was a recognition that Hezbollah — for all its problems — could not be excised from the body politic. For Kaakour, the professor, and Dakdouk, the paramedic, this recognition was paired with a commitment to a kind of national pluralism, rooted in care and conciliation. Even parts of Hezbollah seemed keen to find a route to a better political settlement forged on common ground.
Lebanon’s decades of war and strife have made it a reliable source of clichés: about ancient sectarian divides, rapacious elites bent on self-enrichment and a tragic fatalism etched in the country’s geography. But no other cliché is as persistent as the idea of Lebanon’s fabled “resilience” in the face of all these troubles. It is a word outsiders often use to describe Lebanon’s people, offered with seeming admiration.
But to my ear it is a backhanded compliment, carrying more than a whiff of condescension. By celebrating Lebanon’s ability to endure the unendurable, it both exonerates the external authors of this nation’s many troubles and strips its citizens of their agency to claim some mastery over their destiny. Despite the bloodletting and destruction, there are clear signs on the horizon that Lebanon could heal and remake itself on its own terms. It just needs to be given the chance.
William Keo is a photographer based in Paris.
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