In the Beqaa Valley, Hezbollah’s stronghold in Lebanon: ‘Every time Israel kills a leader, a thousand more will emerge’

Abbas Osman arrived at the Mounir Abu Asli school in Zahlé, the capital of the Beqaa Governorate, on Wednesday wearing the worn-out tracksuit and old T-shirt he had put on to go shopping at the market in Baalbek, the historic city in eastern Lebanon known for its Greco-Roman sites. With only the clothes on his back, the 55-year-old Lebanese man had fled the city hours earlier with his wife and children when the loudspeakers in the town, which until now was home to over 82,000 people, warned its residents that the Israeli army had ordered them to leave “immediately” in a message posted on social media by its Arabic-speaking spokesman, Avichay Adree, which included a map showing Baalbek and the neighbouring towns of Ain Bourday and Douris; some 100,000 inhabitants, the vast majority Shias. The announcement, which even specified the routes through which the population should evacuate, made official the largest evacuation order issued by Israel in Lebanon since its army invaded the south of the country on October 1.

Israel considers the Beqaa Valley, a stronghold of the Shia party-militia Hezbollah, to be the origin of many of the fighters of its Lebanese nemesis. Several of its historical leaders came from the region: Hezbollah’s first secretary-general, Subhi al-Tufayli, was born in Brital, in the Baalbek Governorate, and its second, Abbas al-Musawi — assassinated by Israel in 1992 — was born in Nabi Chit, in the same district. The Israeli army maintains that this region, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) east of Beirut, serves as a rearguard and believes that it is there that Hezbollah’s fighters on Lebanon’s southern border, in the strip between the Litani River and the frontier with Israel, and in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahieh, are retreating. Dahieh has been partially destroyed by bombings that have killed more than 2,800 Lebanese and injured 13,000 others nationwide since the start of the Gaza war on October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah began attacking northern Israel with rockets in what it called a “support front” for the Strip.

A report by the Israeli think tank Alma, founded by a retired Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officer, claims without providing evidence that Beqaa — the site of Hezbollah’s first training camp when it was founded in 1982 — houses the movement’s “general ammunition and logistics depots” as well as “storage and launch sites for its medium- and long-range missiles.”

For the displaced people from the Mounir Abu Asli school, the reason behind the Israeli attacks is different. Israel sees their valley, says one of them, who asked to remain anonymous, as the “home of resistance to the occupation,” whether in Lebanon or Gaza.

A strategic highway

On the road between Beirut and Beqaa, a carcass of twisted metal was all that remained on Thursday of a car destroyed by an Israeli drone near the town of Araya, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the Lebanese capital, in which a man whose identity has not been revealed was traveling. The wreckage lay just a few meters from the place where, the day before, another Israeli army drone destroyed a van that, according to the IDF, was transporting weapons for Hezbollah. This route, which links Beirut with the Syrian border, is considered its main supply route for weapons, most of which are believed to come from the Shia regime in Iran, Hezbollah’s main ally and economic supporter.

Despite the importance that Israel attached to the valley — and to the road that it bombed on October 4 — in the first 11 months of the Gaza war and the confrontation with Hezbollah, before the intensification of fighting last summer, the Beqaa territory had remained largely untouched by the exchange of projectiles between Israel and the party-militia.

Until the end of August, the two sides’ respective attacks had focused on the border area between Israel and Lebanon, known as the Blue Line. However, on August 25, Hassan Nasrallah revealed that the drones with which Hezbollah responded to the assassination in July of its number two, Fuad Shukr — also a native of Beqaa — had been launched from that valley. Israel then stepped up this front. In just one week at the end of September, 160 people were killed in Israeli bombings in the region. So far this week, around 90 have died in new attacks in the area; 19 after the order to evacuate Baalbek on Wednesday, which was reiterated by Israel on Thursday.

Marat al-Fikani is one of the villages that Israeli bombings have left almost deserted. At the entrance to this locality, from which “80% of the population” has fled, according to Jalil, the false name of a person displaced by the war, Hezbollah flags flutter next to a portrait of Fuad Shukr and other militia leaders.

Khalil walks down a rubble-strewn alley before pointing to a three-storey building that was pulverised by an Israeli missile in September. The building’s pillars collapsed and its concrete shell buried its inhabitants: a farmer who earned his living growing potatoes, his wife, and their five children, aged between 14 and three. Khalil only remembers the names of two of the girls, Mariam and Safaa, and the youngest, Hussein.

Several displaced people from Marat al-Fikani are now living in the Mounir Abou Asli school in Zahlé. At the high school, where desks are stacked to make room for those seeking shelter, most of the clothes hanging on lines in the courtyard belong to children. Sara Boustani, a 19-year-old displaced volunteer nurse, estimates that of the 400 to 500 displaced people at the school, about 300 are minors.

At the school, no one mentions Hezbollah. Imad, a 60-year-old displaced person, does not mention the name explicitly either, but, consciously or not, he paraphrases Nasrallah: “When Israel kills a leader [of Hezbollah] it is not an achievement. Every time they kill one, a thousand more will emerge.”

The idea that Israel is carrying out collective punishment against the Shias in Lebanon, as in Gaza, is present in the discourse of many of these refugees. Traditionally marginalized, this community, which now makes up between one third and 40% of the country’s nearly six million inhabitants (the last census dates back to 1932), often lives in the poorest regions of Lebanon.

As is the case in the Beqaa Valley, where many Shias make a living from agriculture, like Khalil’s deceased neighbour. Data from the German NGO Welt Hunger Hilfe puts the number of agricultural workers in Lebanon living in poverty at 40%. In 2020, even before the current war, Beqaa was the Lebanese region with the highest unemployment rate, at 61%, according to official data. This barren future for many young people in the area is another reason why experts believe the valley is a breeding ground for Hezbollah militants.

Beqaa is now more of a disadvantaged region than ever before. A report published by the Independent Task Force for Lebanon, a collective of Lebanese economists and policy specialists, estimated in mid-October that of the approximately 1.2 million people displaced by the war, the majority lived on the three main fronts of the conflict, where the Shia population is in the majority: the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon’s southern border, the Baalbek-Hermel governorates, and other areas of the valley. Before the Israeli invasion, these areas “had some 50,000 registered businesses (60% of all businesses in Lebanon) and more than 70,000 agricultural holdings (40% of the total), which have been destroyed or damaged.”

Muhammad, a 38-year-old displaced person from the Zahlé school, was a day laborer before a bombing destroyed his home. He could barely support his wife and two children, he says, with the meager $10 a day he earned working in construction. A liter of milk in Lebanon costs almost $2. The family was already poor but, Muhammad laments, before “they had a home.” The war that Israel has declared on Hezbollah has left them “without a place to return to.”

Hadi, his nine-year-old son, listens, emaciated and gaunt, to his father’s account of the day in September when they fled, also with only the clothes on their backs and on foot, from their home in Riyak, in the Baalbek Governorate. A bomb had fallen “20 meters from the house,” explains the father. His cousins and their seven children died in the attack. Now, Hadi has nightmares and “has trouble concentrating.” Muhammad’s daughter, 18, has been in hospital for a month. The bombing embedded pieces of shrapnel in her leg. As a victim of the war, the Lebanese government has covered her medical expenses. Not so those of Hadi, who a few days ago fell ill with ear infections and tonsillitis, but whose treatment his parents, now without income, could not afford. “They asked us for $50 to go to the emergency room and another $100 to treat him. We had to give up.”

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