Inside an Ancient Lebanese City Engulfed by War

Sept. 11, 2026

Since early March, Tyre, located about 50 miles south of the capital, Beirut, has lived in the shadow of the war between Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group in Lebanon, and Israel. The war began days after the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in February.

For more than two months, reporters from The New York Times repeatedly returned to Tyre, as the city and its people endured a seemingly endless cycle of deadly strikes and tenuous cease-fires.

Services, including water and electricity, were frequently interrupted. People slept on the streets and along the beach, convinced that they would be safer in the open air than in their homes.

The city’s Christian quarter, largely spared in previous conflicts, was drawn into the fighting. In July, UNESCO added some of the city’s archaeological sites to its list of World Heritage sites in danger.

The war, though tempered by a precarious truce that was first signed in mid-April, has broadly devastated Lebanon, killing more than 4,380 people and displacing over a million, with Israel occupying large parts of the country’s south and destroying entire villages and neighborhoods. Israel has said that it wants to dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure and prevent further attacks on Israeli communities near the Lebanese border.

For Rida Hijazi al-Dahab, the fighting in Tyre has exacted a devastating toll on his home, his business and nearly everything he owns. Minutes before the first cease-fire was set to go into effect, Israeli airstrikes flattened buildings in the residential block where his coffee shop was located. Israel said shortly afterward, without offering evidence, that its strikes over the previous 24 hours had targeted Hezbollah sites and personnel.

Mr. al-Dahab said he had been standing inside the cafe when the strikes hurled him against a wall and knocked him unconscious. He woke up to find that people were pulling him out of the debris from the building, which his grandfather had built decades ago.

“What did we do wrong to deserve this?” he asked in an interview in May.

On a recent evening, as the sun cast a golden glow over Tyre’s Mediterranean waterfront, water dripped from the cracked concrete where Mr. al-Dahab’s cafe once stood. Power lines hung low overhead and dust clung to the shattered walls as he looked over the scene of destruction. He said he had invested thousands of dollars into the business, money now lost.

“The candle of life has been switched off from this neighborhood,” Mr. al-Dahab said.

His neighborhood was not the only place that was shadowed by grief.

Across Tyre, death became part of the city’s daily rhythm. For weeks, the city was full of funerals, sometimes several in a single day.

For Lebanese Civil Defense emergency workers, who were hunkered down across the city and surrounding region, the toll was especially acute. Some were killed in so-called double-tap strikes, hit by the Israeli military as they rushed to treat or evacuate those killed or wounded from an initial strike, according to Lebanese health officials and human rights groups.

In many of those cases, Israel has said that its strikes were aimed at militants, without providing evidence. In some instances, it has said it is investigating the attacks.

More than 130 medical workers have been killed since the war began, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

In Tyre, their funerals became scenes of collective mourning, with relatives leaning over coffins, scattering flowers and sharing memories of those they lost, sometimes as Israeli warplanes and drones roared overhead.

One of them was Hussein al-Sati, who was killed in April while he and his team responded to the scene of an Israeli strike. At his funeral, his 4-year-old daughter, Tala, praised her father for his bravery and called him a “hero.”

As the wailing grew louder and mourners crowded around the coffins, she broke down. Turning to her mother and relatives, she begged to return to Beirut.

“Let’s leave,” she cried.

As suddenly as the violence came, it would subside, and the city would find ways to slowly stitch itself back together.

Restaurants and cafes were always the first to reopen. They served shawarmas, matcha lattes and shisha as people looked out over the calm seafront, trying — if only for an afternoon — to pretend the war had paused. Fishermen returned to mend their boats and prepare for the next catch. Clothing stores reopened. The ice cream truck rolled back into town. Families came back, carrying little more than the bags they had fled with.

Vegetable markets reopened, too, their stalls still sparse. Traders like Bassam Nuwayri, 50, said they often had little to sell because farming across southern Lebanon had been devastated.

“We will always return here,” he said on a recent afternoon. “We have to remain steadfast on our land.”

Not everyone could return.

For many displaced residents, Tyre has become a place remembered rather than one to which they can return.

Zakia al-Or, 87, fled Tyre at the onset of the war in March. She is now staying with several family members in an old courthouse-turned-shelter in Sidon, a coastal city further north.

She spoke about following the man she loved to Tyre, raising her children there and perfecting generations-old family recipes. She stayed even after her children left for other parts of Lebanon and moved abroad, chasing work and escaping war.

Much of that life is gone. Her home was hit in the 2024 war between Hezbollah and Israel, she said, and then struck and damaged again in the most recent conflict.

Ms. al-Or described the emotional pain of losing pieces of her life over and over, and how, in old age, she had hoped for just a few peaceful years. She was in physical pain, too; her medications were running out, and she could barely sit up in bed.

She said she was ready to go anywhere — Beirut, Canada, the United States.

“The wars and the desperation never end,” she said. “This whole country is sad.”

That sadness is perhaps most visible in Tyre’s hospitals, where every strike has brought yet another patient, another family, another emergency.

For months, medical workers carried on with dwindling supplies as their own facilities came under attack. Inside, there was the child, wailing in pain from the shrapnel wounds that covered her body. The farmworker, who had lost both of her legs, her husband and several other family members in Israeli strikes. The nurses and doctors, sitting stunned amid shattered wards and offices, trying to make sense of what was left.

In June, a laboratory was damaged at Jabal Amel Hospital after an Israeli airstrike hit a nearby building.

A month earlier, a strike had hit a building near Hiram Hospital after the Israeli military ordered that it be evacuated, shattering windows and damaging parts of the hospital, including operating rooms, doctors said. At least four newborns were evacuated safely, according to the nursing supervisor, Mohammad Salem.

“We are scared,” Mr. Salem said.

For now, the rhythm of life is back in Tyre. It began to come back slowly, gingerly, after another fragile truce between Hezbollah and Israel was reached in June.

Along the shore, the Mediterranean rolls against the city. Some families have been reclaiming the pleasures of summer, gathering under colorful umbrellas, sharing meals and playing volleyball by the water. In the center of town, traders are slowly returning, rebuilding and repairing.

Shelling in the city’s outskirts — and across southern Lebanon — is still rattling the ground as drones hum overhead.

For residents like Mr. al-Dahab, the coffee shop owner, a semblance of ordinary life means reckoning with what happened while trying to find a way through the uncertainty ahead.

“I lost everything,” he said. But, he added, “It’s also a miracle that I am still alive.”

Sarah Chaayto and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

The post Inside an Ancient Lebanese City Engulfed by War appeared first on New York Times.