Once upon a time in Dahiyeh: Israel's destruction of a people

Beirut, Lebanon – Zeinab al-Dirani remembers her cousin’s engagement party, her parents and siblings, aunts and uncles all gathered in the street in front of their ground floor apartment.

Everyone was smiling as they danced to the loud music.

She remembers her father heading regularly to the barbershop near their house so Bob the barber, whose real name is Ibrahim, could give him a clean shave and a hair trim.

And she remembers a beloved teacher, a landmark in the neighbourhood and her life for 20 years.

Al-Dirani, 25, lived in Hadath, in Beirut’s sprawling southern suburbs that Israel has bombarded heavily in recent weeks.

On September 27, an Israeli attack levelled six buildings in Haret Hreik and resulted in the assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.

A few hours later, with the public still not knowing Nasrallah’s fate, the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesman issued expulsion orders against people in swaths of Dahiyeh.

“The first nights under the bombs were terrifying,” Khodor Eido, a 26-year-old executive chef who was living in Bchamoun, near Choueifat, told Al Jazeera.

“The sounds of explosions shattered the stillness, leaving everyone on edge and filled with dread. Each thud echoed through the streets, reminding us of the fragility of our existence.”

Over the next two weeks, the Israeli military attacked Dahiyeh with incredible military force.

Lebanese news livestreamed the destruction every night, showing Israeli air strikes crashing into Dahiyeh and bursts of red and orange horror illuminating the night sky, sometimes drawing comparisons to the sunrise.

Claiming to be targeting Hezbollah weapons caches, Israel killed or displaced tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of people as their homes, shops and memories were eviscerated.

“They bombed next to my house,” al-Dirani told Al Jazeera. “It’s destroyed now. The building is still there but everything inside is …” her voice drifted off for a second before she found her words, “My room has a balcony now because of the bomb.”

And her home is better off than those surrounding it.

“All the buildings by my house were destroyed,” she said. The barbershop is gone. So too is her teacher.

“They bombed his house and his whole family inside was murdered. Him, his wife, daughter and two sons. All of them,” she said. “Every day, you see someone die.”

More than 2,500 people have been killed by Israel in Lebanon since October 2023, with most of the deaths occurring in the past month.

Dozens of those deaths have been in Beirut or Dahiyeh, while the sheer level of destruction that Israel has wrought has led some experts to call Israel’s acts urbicide, the destruction of a city, or “city killing”.

“It’s this huge obliteration of the place and the people and its memories,” Mona Harb, professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut (AUB), told Al Jazeera.

“It's tangible and intangible. But we’ve lost the intangible mostly, the practices and what people used to do in that place. It’s the destruction of what people hold in their memories,” she added.

“The attacks are severing the connection between people and their neighbourhoods, dismantling the social bonds that define the community,” a researcher with Public Works Studio, which focuses on urban planning and policymaking in Lebanon, who did not wish to be named, told Al Jazeera.

“As a result, these areas are not just facing physical destruction but a profound social disintegration, as people are forced to abandon the places where their lives, memories, and identities are anchored.”

Back in 1955, Diana Younes’s grandfather Mohammad left Baalbek, in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, and settled in the area south of Beirut.“There were no suburbs at the time,” Younes said. “It was all olive groves.”

There, Mohammad laid a foundation. Amid the olive groves, he and his wife built a home with their hands.

As buildings expanded around them, and schools and universities popped up, so too did their family and the other families who moved in.

Its official name now is Sahel al-Matn al Janoubi, but this cluster of neighbourhoods and sub-neighbourhoods is referred to simply as “Dahiyeh” (“suburb” or “periphery” in English).

Dahiyeh comprises municipalities (Ghobeiry, Bourj al-Barajneh, Haret Hreik, Mreijeh-Tahwitet al Ghadeer-Laylaki), informal settlements (Ouzai, Bir Hassan, Horch el-Katil, Hayy al-Sellom), and Palestinian refugee camps - Burj al-Barajneh and Shatila.

“It’s as large as municipal Beirut,” Harb said. “If one starts with that, one [understands] there are multiple lives there, living, working, commuting, spending free time and then we see these layers of lives.”

During the civil war, two waves of displacement brought around one million people to what would become “Dahiyeh”.

The first was in the war’s early years - 1975 and 1976 - when some 200,000 residents of Beirut’s northeastern slums were expelled, sometimes in massacres by right-wing Christian militias.

The second large wave of migration came from south Lebanon amid Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982 and the subsequent occupation until the year 2000.

That occupation, paired with fighting in the south during the country’s 15-year civil war (1975 - 1990), saw as many as 900,000 people, predominantly Shia Muslims, migrate to Beirut’s southern suburbs.

In those waves, Dahiyeh’s sizeable Maronite community was “forcibly and violently displaced”, said Harb. While some Christians still live in the area, most never returned.

Nevertheless, “churches and Christian cemeteries were restored in the 2000s”, Harb said, and “masses were held on Sundays”.

With so many new transplants, the southern suburbs became a dense extension of Beirut that is nearly as large.

As for Diana Younes’s grandfather Mohammad, each of his children got married, added a floor to their father’s home, and raised their own families.

International media often reaches for the label of “Hezbollah stronghold” when describing Dahiyeh.

Even some Lebanese see it as a Shia “ghetto, a rebel territory,” Harb wrote in an article about Dahiyeh in 2009.

However, Harb said, such a view is simplistic and ignores a lot of what makes Dahiyeh, Dahiyeh.

“Hundreds of thousands of individuals with multiple belongings and identities live there,” Harb told Al Jazeera.

“And, at the end of the day, Beirut and Lebanon are so small that it is impossible to live in Dahiyeh or Beirut and not be connected to each other.”

While a number of groups emerged in the area in the 1960s, the civil war saw it come under the control of Amal, the armed wing of Imam Musa Sadr’s Movement of the Deprived.

In 1984, Hezbollah started gaining some followers in Dahiyeh and in 1989 it fought Amal, pushing it largely to the periphery of the suburb.

Today, the group still bases many of its political and patronage networks out of Dahiyeh.

Hezbollah’s flags, among other parties, were not an uncommon sight and the group often held rallies or speeches in the area.

Many of the group’s supporters also live in Dahiyeh.

But to call an area a Hezbollah stronghold is an idea that Harb and many others reject. They believe terms like stronghold not only removes the layers of non-political and alternative political life in the area but also attempts to legitimise the violence against it.

There are “all these stereotypical, dehumanising associations that the Western media has with [regard to] whoever lives in such places,” she told Al Jazeera.

Al-Dirani, who danced in the street at her cousin’s wedding, had only moved to Dahiyeh from Kasarnaba in the Bekaa Valley for work in 2021, two years into one of the century’s most severe economic crises.

She had strong ambitions and put a lot into her career - often working 14-hour days - and her studies in chemistry and medical diagnostics.

While she says she was never enamoured with her neighbourhood, she still had “many nice memories” of sitting with her parents and recounting the events of their day, or when her aunt, who lived next door, used to pass by.

“It was home and it was good and safe,” she paused briefly and then added, “before.”

More than a million people, or 20 percent of the population of Lebanon, have been forced into displacement. Many are without any kind of shelter and are sleeping on the streets, in parks or by the sea.

“For those displaced, the trauma is twofold - not only are they driven from their homes under threat, but they are also witnessing the erasure of their cultural and physical ties to their land,” the Public Works Studio researcher said.

“In this context, the strikes are not only a means of military pressure but a deliberate attempt to erase the community’s very existence.”

The destruction of Dahiyeh is continuing. Fifty locations were attacked by Israel between September 27 and October 11.

The attacks stopped for about a week before resuming a few days ago, the nightly horror returning on October 23 said to be one of the worst nights of bombing to date.

Seventeen Israeli raids destroyed at least six buildings and took out the office of the pro-Iranian media outlet Al Mayadeen.

Mapping the destruction is difficult, but what is clear is that Dahiyeh has “endured relentless and brutal attacks on a daily basis”, the Public Works Studio researcher said.

“While earlier strikes on Dahiyeh were more targeted, the scale and intensity surged dramatically during this period.

“What stands out about the strikes on Dahiyeh is the brutal intensity of each attack and the indiscriminate violence against civilians and urban areas,” they added.

The attacks on Dahiyeh have been particularly dystopian, as the Israeli military’s official Arabic language spokesperson released nightly expulsion orders on social network X, formerly Twitter.

The orders were often accompanied by maps of Dahiyeh, with particular buildings highlighted in red.

The first night, residents were given about an hour to evacuate, as if that time was sufficient to pack up their entire lives, but even that diminished as each night the time to flee became shorter.

“Buildings, streets and entire neighbourhoods have been systematically identified, mapped and then targeted by the Israeli occupation,” the researcher said. “This mapping by the IDF is not just tactical - it [symbolises] a calculated strategy to eradicate civilian spaces.”

Al-Dirani and her family were given evacuation orders on September 27. Her family left home with her aunt.

Her parents moved in with her sister, who lives in a Christian neighbourhood, which she considers safer for the moment. Al-Dirani sleeps in a shop in Ain el Remmaneh, a predominantly Christian neighbourhood in Beirut, not far from the suburbs.

Meanwhile, the expulsions have continued, despite drawing criticism from Amnesty International for being “misleading and inadequate”.

In at least one instance, Amnesty found that the warnings were given less than 30 minutes before Israel attacked. And then some attacks have come without any warning at all.

Mazen used to run a gift and perfume store called Mazen Kado (French for gift) in Mreijeh. He lived what he described as a calm life with his beloved cat Cici, the star of his TikTok account.

When the bombing started, he sent his family to stay elsewhere while he and Cici remained. On one of the first days after the bombing began, he stepped out to buy a few things and while he was out, an air strike hit his building.

“Cici was in the building,” he told Al Jazeera. “I tried to cover my face with all the fire and smoke but I wasn’t able to go inside and bring her out. The building was 10 storeys high and it collapsed.”

In a video that went viral on his TikTok account, Mazen films the rubble of his building and sobs audibly, screaming out for Cici. The comments are mostly crying faces or heartbreak emojis.

“Everything's gone,” he told Al Jazeera. “My house is gone ... no problem, I’ll get another house. And as the days have passed, everything I owned is now gone. No problem.

“The thing that matters to me is if Cici is dead. God willing, she didn’t die.”

Mazen hasn’t given up on finding Cici. On his TikTok account, he still posts videos of the rubble that was his home and calls out desperately for his missing cat, no matter how unlikely it is that Cici survived.

“I’m out looking every day,” he said.

“I stay in Dahiyeh because I take care of the cats so they don’t die,” he said.

“I sleep in the street. One night I’ll sleep on the street, one night on a verandah, every night is different.

"I still live a calm life. I don’t care about any party or sect, I’m a Lebanese man and I love life and cats and animals.”

@cadeauxmazen24

♬ لوصلك تاقت عيوني وقلبي أناشيد إسلامية - Hamza Boudir

Dahiyeh’s once-bustling streets are now largely abandoned. Some people come back during the day, in the moments they feel air strikes are less likely, to grab clothes or check on their homes.

“The situation is a disaster,” Younes said. “Dahiyeh is gone.”

In 2006, war came to Dahiyeh once again. Hezbollah and Israel fought a 34-day war in which more than 1,220 people were killed, the vast majority of them people in Lebanon. Israel destroyed about 245 buildings and developed a tactic of disproportionate damage that came to be named The Dahiyeh Doctrine.

Despite those prior wars, Younes’s family continued to grow in Dahiyeh. But now, some family members don’t see a future there.

She said her maternal uncle’s family has decided they won’t return once the war is over.

“They’re thinking that once this all ends, they’ll sell everything they own in Dahiyeh and buy something outside the area. Nobody wants that Dahiyeh any more.”

Harb, the AUB urbanist, also grew up in Dahiyeh but left about 30 years ago. Her father, however, went to Burj al-Barajneh for bread, meat, cheese and labneh until just a few weeks ago.

“He’s not doing it because there’s no bread or cheese elsewhere. It’s because he wants to go through the streets of his childhood and needs to do this pilgrimage through the small alleyways to feel a connection to this place and see familiar faces around,” she said.

“This is one example of something close to me that has been completely obliterated.”

As for al-Dirani, she often dreamed of a life outside of Dahiyeh.

“I wanted to go away, but not like that,” she said. “I feel like all of my dreams are collapsing.”

“I’m still processing … I’m kind of traumatised,” she said, her voice solemn, soft and introspective. “I don’t want to think about what happened because I feel like I'm in a nightmare and I don't want to wake up because it’s hard to think what I'm going to do when I do.”

The good memories of home still exist in the corners of her mind. But at the moment they’re superseded by the horror of the last few weeks and the fear, or resignation, of what may await so many people living through the war in Lebanon.

“I can't even describe it but I'm trying to tell you what we experienced,” she said, reaching deep for the words.

“We’re just sitting and waiting for our day to come. It’s bad for me to say this but we wait for the time we’re going to be killed like our relatives and our loved ones.”