The city of Tyre is suspicious of the truce: ‘Israel’s sole objective is to fill our hearts with terror’

There is nothing normal about the lives of Tyre’s residents. The largest city in southern Lebanon — beloved by local and international visitors as a Mediterranean paradise amid banana plantations and the ruins of ancient civilizations — is currently grappling with the fear of becoming a prime target for the Israeli army. Although Lebanon is under a supposed temporary truce, Israel left its message written on four residential buildings it demolished in the city center at the last minute before the ceasefire. Now, the rubble from those attacks — one of which, described by locals as an earthquake, was a massacre, leaving some 20 dead while two more people are still missing — has instilled in residents the fear that Israel will resume the war with the same ferocity with which it paused it.

“Israel’s sole objective is to fill the hearts of the Lebanese with terror,” laments paramedic Abbas Awad, head of the civil defense team in Tyre for the Protection of the Islamic Message group. Wearing a reflective vest and carrying a walkie-talkie, he briefly leaves his duties to speak with this newspaper at his facility, where ambulances like those seen in news reports after bombings that have killed some of his colleagues are parked. Outside the compound stand the famous Phoenician columns overlooking the Mediterranean, which trembled during the attack that toppled a residential building located 20 meters from the entrance to the old city.

Awad says he knows that Israel increases the violence of its attacks when a truce is approaching. Looking exhausted, he says they had prepared thoroughly for those hours before midnight on Thursday, when the 10-day truce — which runs until Sunday — announced by the Trump administration was set to take effect. “We didn’t expect it,” he says nonetheless, while his colleagues listen in silence. “We didn’t expect the enemy to destroy an entire neighborhood in this wonderful city, which has the best beaches and people, and where there’s nothing of military value.” “This is just a crowded place,” he concludes, sitting down and speaking to the floor.

“That minute was catastrophic,” Sanah recounts. Her home and a small supermarket she runs lie amid the four buildings that were blown up that day. She feels that the violence preceding the truce was something new, as do other residents, who point to Tyre as a place they considered safe in the wars prior to the one that began in 2023. “Israeli planes were circling us,” she adds. Her body is covered with a chador, so only her face is visible, and her shop is adorned with a photograph of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general until his death at the hands of Israel in 2024.

Sanah is a strong woman: she hasn’t left Tyre during this war, nor did she during the civil war that began in the 1970s, and the spirit with which she moves through this desolate environment is uncommon. “I haven’t regained my strength during the truce because I never lost it,” she replies matter-of-factly. “When there’s a bombing, I take magnesium and that’s it,” she says, smiling.

As the conversation ends, the echo of a distant explosion reverberates through the city streets. A few onlookers peer over the Corniche, a seven-kilometer-long waterfront promenade where locals observe the daily sunset with almost religious fervor, and what they see across the bay is a plume of smoke rising over the Israeli-occupied Al-Bayada district. A stark reminder that, at any moment, such explosions could return to Tyre, signaling the collapse of the truce.

In the city, home to more than 150,000 people, many assume that open warfare will resume in the coming hours, after Pakistan granted some leeway to dialogue between the United States and Iran — the respective allies of Israel and Hezbollah — a dialogue not trusted to resolve the Lebanese front. The reality is that the truce, as it is currently structured, is unpopular on both sides of the border.

For northern Israeli residents and their government, which had promised a final victory against the pro-Iranian militia, the continued existence and operation of Hezbollah’s armed wing prevents them from bringing the conflict to a false close once again. For the militia, the ceasefire allowing Israel to occupy 5% of the country’s territory — some 500 square kilometers (193 square miles), compared to 365 square kilometers (140 square miles) in the Gaza Strip — seems like an invitation to continue fighting. Hezbollah, in fact, is demanding that Lebanese President Joseph Aoun abandon negotiations with Israel, which the Shia movement describes as “submission.” A U.S. State Department official told AFP that the two governments will resume talks on Thursday, following an initial diplomatic exercise between their respective ambassadors to the United States.

“Devastation”

Simulating the internal border with which it has seized half of the Palestinian Strip, the Israeli army has drawn a Yellow Line that traces the area surrounding the 55 municipalities it occupies in Lebanon. There, Israeli troops carry out controlled detonations, building after building, in echoes that reverberate as far as Tyre.

Haidar Rasheed Said, a 56-year-old farmer with strong hands, from which a rosary hangs, knows all too well what is happening: “Damarr,” (devastation). He repeats it again and again when asked about the situation in Majdal Zoun, his village, three miles from the border with Israel, to which he briefly returned after the truce to check on his home and tractors. “There’s nothing left,” he says, more with gestures than words, as he suddenly struggles to speak. He takes a breath. “It’s total destruction. It’s not a matter of a couple of days, but of 15 consecutive months of attacks.” He is referring to the period, starting with the 2024 truce, in which Hezbollah did not fire a single rocket while the Israeli army, which continued to occupy parts of the country, fired daily, expanding the destruction and preventing reconstruction in villages like Majdal Zoun.

According to Lebanese newspapers, which have lost count of the explosions in these villages, Israeli troops have set fire to homes in Shamaa, Al-Qantara, and Tayr Harfa. While residents are heartbroken at having to stay away, the Israeli army has also dynamited a mosque and a cemetery in Rashaf and a school in Khiam, reports l’Orient Today.

In Mais al-Jabal, Israeli soldiers detonated a sports complex on Tuesday, and the day before they set fire to ambulances belonging to the Civil Defense teams of the Protection of the Islamic Message organization. Rasheed Said speaks to EL PAÍS from the group’s facilities in Tyre, which have been partially converted into a center for displaced people. In the parking lot, women chat and children play soccer.

Said was once one of them. When he was four years old, he says indignantly, the Israeli army entered his village and committed a massacre. “It was 1974, and the resistance hadn’t even been born yet,” he says, referring to Hezbollah, founded in 1982 with Iranian support. He points to what happened in Gaza and sees Israel as unchangeable, much as many Israelis view their regional enemies. “They want us to be afraid and not fight, but we won’t give in even if we all have to die,” he proclaims. “And even if they draw lines on the ground, we will return.”

Outside, wounded by the last-minute attacks before the truce, a resident who prefers not to give his name distances himself from the general consensus, interpreting what happened before the ceasefire as a warning of what is to come when the war resumes. “Israel, Hezbollah… I picked up my dead friend from the ground,” he confesses, reenacting the action. “Why? What for? I don’t understand,” he admits. “Every 10 years we’re in the same situation.”

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