- I lived in
Beirut for 10 years. Yesterday's explosion was so big it destroyed two of my apartments and likely condemned a third. - My former landlord was the nicest, most honest man in the neighborhood. Now, I can't get through to him or his family.
- Thousands are missing.
- The damage across the city is so great that the government said 300,000 people were made instantly homeless.
Over about a 10-year period — from 2005 to 2015 — I lived in four apartments within about a kilometer of the explosion at Beirut's port yesterday. Two of them are now completely destroyed. Two others are likely badly damaged. One of those was in such a poorly constructed building I can't imagine it will survive without later being condemned.
The first apartment, where I lived with my then-partner from 2005 to 2008, was a lovely traditional Lebanese apartment owned by a rich Lebanese-French architect, who split his time between Beirut and Paris and kept an office on the first floor. It sat on a corner next to a gas station, adjacent to the highway and the port itself. I was sitting in it filing pictures after covering a morning of airstrikes during the 2006 war — I was a foreign correspondent for Stern, Newsweek, and The Guardian — when Israeli planes hit the port just a few hundred meters away. The building violently shook in 2006. That's why, when I first saw footage of the blasts that leveled much of the city yesterday evening, I physically flinched.
Today, from what I can tell, the building is no longer standing.
That's why it comes as no surprise when Lebanese ministers announced Wednesday morning that as many as 300,000 residents were made homeless, in the blink of an eye, yesterday. As it stands more than 100 are dead — a number that can only rise — and thousands wounded. Every hospital in the country is filled to overflowing. No less than three major hospitals were knocked out of commission or badly damaged. Before the explosion, authorities were warning of an impending second wave of COVID infections threatening the health system.
It was with that context I told my friend, Marc Garlasco — who was once an airstrike targeting officer for the US military's Central Command and now investigates them for the UN and others — that the secondary blast was too big to have been intentional. I couldn't think of a single conventional weapon that could cause this level of destruction.
"Man did not intentionally set off that second one," I messaged him.
"Agreed," he responded.
Later it would come out that the Lebanese authorities had been improperly storing 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. When mixed with fuel oil, of which there is plenty in a port, it becomes a legendarily powerful explosive. It is believed this delivered the final blast, which measured 3.3 on the Richter scale, and was estimated at about quarter of the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.
While we agreed on the secondary explosion almost certainly being an industrial accident, it still didn't explain the first smaller fires and explosions that appeared to crackle, leading to speculation of a container of fireworks or small arms having caught fire, setting off the bigger blast.
US and Israeli officials have long accused Hezbollah and Iran of shipping arms and materials to
"Did you guys have something going on at the port and maybe something bad happened?" I asked.
"[Hezbollah] doesn't have nuclear weapons," he immediately replied from Beirut's Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, far away enough from the blast that the phones were mostly working.
In a sense, he was being literal, confirming that there is no stockpile of Hezbollah weapons that would explode with such force and destruction. He added that as far as he knew this was an accident and that the party's substantial emergency response infrastructure had been activated.
"Hezbollah is for the Lebanese nation, there are no [political factions] today," he said.
Talking to the commander reminded me of the second destroyed apartment, where I lived for about a year with the late Peter Kassig, a young army veteran and aid worker who moved to the region to do humanitarian work. A small clump of three-storey buildings set out on a perch overlooking the port on a grassy hillside, with nothing in between to absorb the blast.
I briefly spoke with a friend who had walked down a nearby street in the aftermath and they confirmed the worst. The building was no longer really standing. Set back as it was from the main road, it is unclear if rescuers can even access the site.
This tweet shows the current condition of my downstairs neighbor in the apartment building that fared the best:
—Rania Abouzeid (@Raniaab) August 5, 2020
Of course, it's just an apartment, one I didn't even particularly like. But the ground floor had two apartments above it. My landlord, George, his wife, and two daughters, lived on the top floor. A married son and his family were in the middle floor. St George's Hospital, one of Lebanon's largest and most modern facilities, is 300 meters away and was so badly damaged that it was forced to shut. George's family is at best homeless.
George is in his late 60s and is known throughout the neighborhood for two things: Having been a prominent commander in the Christian militia that fought in the area during the long Lebanese Civil War; and for being the nicest, most honest man in the neighborhood. The last time I spoke with him was just after Peter had been murdered in Syria by ISIS, in 2014. I myself had been arrested and deported from Lebanon months before — 10 years of aggressive reporting on the dysfunctional Lebanese state had worn out my political welcome — but had kept paying rent on the apartment to house my three cats, while I covered the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
"I'm so sorry, George we tried everything," I told him by phone the day ISIS announced it had murdered Peter.
George and his family adored Peter.
"May God protect his soul, Mitch," George told me. "Lebanon will always break your heart."
I still can't get through to George or his family. I have no idea if they're OK. There are tens of thousands of these cases right now and it will be days and weeks before the losses become clear.