Lebanese on Edge amid Fears of All-Out Israel-Hezbollah War

A Middle East Airlines commercial aircraft flies near Beirut's southern suburbs as it approaches the airport runway on August 9, 2024. (AFP)
A Middle East Airlines commercial aircraft flies near Beirut's southern suburbs as it approaches the airport runway on August 9, 2024. (AFP)
TT

Lebanese on Edge amid Fears of All-Out Israel-Hezbollah War

A Middle East Airlines commercial aircraft flies near Beirut's southern suburbs as it approaches the airport runway on August 9, 2024. (AFP)
A Middle East Airlines commercial aircraft flies near Beirut's southern suburbs as it approaches the airport runway on August 9, 2024. (AFP)

Fears of a major escalation between Israel and Hezbollah have left many Lebanese on edge, exacerbating mental health problems and reviving traumas of past conflicts in the war-weary country.

One 29-year-old woman, who lives near the southern city of Sidon, said she dreaded the thunderous, explosive boom of Israeli jets regularly breaking the sound barrier.

"I feel the house will fall down on top of me... Sometimes I freeze... or start crying," said the woman, a contract worker for a non-governmental organization.

She was 11 years old when Israel and Lebanese armed group Hezbollah went to war in the summer of 2006, and said bombs fell near her house.

"Sometimes, unconsciously, you remember it," said the woman, requesting anonymity in a country where mental health issues are often stigmatized.

"These sounds give you flashbacks -- sometimes you feel you're back at that time," she said.

Since Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel sparked the Gaza war, Hezbollah has traded near daily cross-border fire with the Israeli army in support of the Palestinian armed group, sending tensions soaring.

Lebanon has been on a knife's edge since a strike on Beirut's southern suburbs last week killed Hezbollah's top military commander, just hours before the assassination, blamed on Israel, of Hamas's political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Iran and Hezbollah have vowed revenge, amid fears that retaliatory attacks could spiral into all-out war, with airlines suspending flights to Lebanon and countries imploring foreign nationals to leave.

- Panic attacks -

"I already had been suffering from anxiety and depression... but my mental health has deteriorated" since October, said the woman, who can no longer afford therapy because her work has slowed due to the hostilities.

"You feel afraid for the future", she said.

Before the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Lebanon endured a grueling 1975-1990 civil conflict in which Israel invaded the south and in 1982 besieged Beirut.

The current cross-border violence has killed more than 560 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters but also including at least 116 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

On the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, 22 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed, according to army figures.

Laila Farhood, professor of psychiatry and mental health at the American University of Beirut, said "cumulative trauma" has left many Lebanese with stress, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Individuals transmit their anxieties to their children as cross-generational trauma," she told AFP.

"What is happening now triggers previous traumas," causing some people to have panic attacks, said Farhood, who specializes in war trauma and its impact on Lebanese civilians.

On Tuesday, Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over central Beirut, causing intense sonic booms that rattled windows and nerves, just two days after the anniversary of a catastrophic blast at Beirut's port in 2020.

"I had my first panic attack," said Charbel Chaaya, 23, who studies law in France and is living with his family near Beirut.

"I couldn't breathe, my legs felt numb... in that very first moment, you don't know what the sound is -- just like what happened on August 4," he said.

- 'Uncertainty' -

Layal Hamze from Embrace, a non-profit organization that runs a mental health center and suicide prevention hotline, said people in Lebanon now are "more susceptible to any sound".

"Baseline, the adrenaline is already high. It's a stressful situation," said Hamze, a clinical psychologist.

"It's not only the Beirut blast," Hamze added.

"The natural or automatic response" is to be frightened, she said, and while "maybe the older generation... are a bit more used to" such sounds, they could trigger "the collective trauma".

Some on social media have urged people to stop letting off fireworks -- a ubiquitous practice for celebrations -- while humorous skits making light of difficulties like flight cancellations have also circulated.

With coping mechanisms varying greatly, some people are "going partying", while others "are reaching out to the community more", which helps them feel they are not alone, Hamze said.

Dancer Andrea Fahed, 28, whose flat was damaged in the port blast, said she panicked when she heard this week's sonic booms.

She said she felt "lucky" to be a dancer, because with her community "we laugh together, we move together... you let go of a lot of things".

But she said the "uncertainty" was a constant struggle, and now leaves her windows open, fearing another blast could shatter everything.

"Anything can happen," Fahed said.

"If it's happening with that intensity in Gaza, why wouldn't it come here?"



An American Tradition: Defeated Candidates Attending the President-Elect’s Inauguration

Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)
Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)
TT

An American Tradition: Defeated Candidates Attending the President-Elect’s Inauguration

Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)
Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)

In January 1981, Jimmy Carter nodded politely toward Ronald Reagan as the new Republican president thanked the Democrat for his administration's help after Reagan resoundingly defeated Carter the previous November.

Twenty years earlier, after a much closer race, Republican Richard Nixon clasped John F. Kennedy's hand and offered the new Democratic president a word of encouragement.

The US has a long tradition of defeated presidential candidates sharing the inauguration stage with the people who defeated them, projecting to the world the orderly transfer of power. It's a practice that Vice President Kamala Harris will resume on Jan. 20 after an eight-year hiatus.

Only once in the television era — with its magnifying effect on a losing candidate's expression — has a defeated candidate skipped the exercise. That candidate, former President Donald Trump, left for Florida after a failed effort to overturn his loss based on false or unfounded theories of voter fraud.

With Harris watching, Trump is scheduled to stand on the Capitol's west steps and be sworn in for a second term.

Below are examples of episodes that have featured a losing candidate in a rite that Reagan called "nothing short of a miracle."

2001: Al Gore and George W. Bush Democrat Al Gore conceded to Republican George W. Bush after 36 days of legal battling over Florida's ballots ended with a divided Supreme Court ruling to end the recount.

But Gore, the sitting vice president, would join Bush on the west steps of the Capitol a month later as the Texas governor was sworn in. After Bush took the oath, he and Gore shook hands, spoke briefly and smiled before Gore returned to his seat clapping along to the presidential anthem, "Hail to the Chief."

A disappointed Gore accepted the outcome and his role in demonstrating continuity of governance, former Gore campaign spokeswoman Kiki McLean said.

"He may have wished, ‘I wish that was me standing there,’" McLean said. "But I don't think Gore for one minute ever doubted he should be there in his capacity as vice president."

Hillary Clinton smiles wide as she and former President Jimmy Carter, from left, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, former President Bill Clinton, former President George W. Bush, and former first lady Laura Bush wait for the start of the inauguration ceremony to swear President-elect Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 20, 2017. (AP)

2017: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Democrat Hillary Clinton was candid about her disappointment in losing to Trump in 2016, when — like Gore against Bush — she received more votes but failed to win an Electoral College majority. "Obviously, I was crushed," she told Howard Stern on his radio show in 2019.

Calling Inauguration Day "one of the hardest days of my life," Clinton said she planned to attend Trump's swearing-in out of a sense of duty, having been first lady during her husband's presidency from 1993 to 2001. "You put on the best face possible," Clinton said on Stern's show.

2021: Mike Pence (with Trump absent) and Joe Biden Trump four years ago claimed without evidence that his loss to President Joe Biden was marred by widespread fraud. Two weeks earlier, Trump supporters had stormed the Capitol in a violent siege aimed at halting the electoral vote certification.

Instead, then-Vice President Mike Pence was the face of the outgoing administration.

"Sure, it was awkward," Pence's former chief of staff Marc Short said.

Still, Pence and his wife met privately with Biden and his wife to congratulate them in the Capitol before the ceremony, and escorted newly sworn-in Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband out of the Capitol afterward, as tradition had prescribed, Short said.

"There was an appreciation expressed for him by members of both chambers in both parties," he said.

1993: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Bush stood on the Capitol's west steps three times for his swearing-in — as vice president twice and in 1989 to be inaugurated as president. He would attend again in 1993 in defeat.

He joined Bill Clinton, the Democrat who beat him, on the traditional walk out onto the east steps. Bush would return triumphantly to the inaugural ceremony eight years later as the father of Clinton's successor, George W. Bush.

1961: Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy Nixon had just lost the 1960 election by fewer than 120,000 votes in what was the closest presidential contest in 44 years. But the departing vice president approached Kennedy with a wide grin, a handshake and an audible "good luck" just seconds after the winning Democrat's swearing-in.

Nixon would have to wait eight years to be sworn in as president, while his losing Democratic opponent — outgoing Vice President Hubert Humphrey — looked on. He was inaugurated a second time after winning reelection in 1972, only to resign after the Watergate scandal.

President-elect Ronald Reagan applauds as outgoing President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at Reagan's inaugural ceremony, in Washington, Jan. 20, 1981. (AP Photo, File)

1933: Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt Like Bush, Hoover would attend just one inauguration as a new president before losing to a Democrat four years later. But Democrat Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 swearing-in would not be Hoover's last. Hoover would live for another 31 years, see four more presidents sworn in, and sit in places of honor at the two inaugurations of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.

1897: Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison Cleveland, the sitting Democratic president, lost reelection in 1888 while winning more popular votes than former Indiana Sen. Benjamin Harrison. But Cleveland still managed to hold Harrison’s umbrella while the Republican was sworn in during a rainy 1889 inauguration.

Elected to a second, non-consecutive term in 1892, Cleveland, however, would stand solemnly behind William McKinley four years later at the Republican's 1897 inauguration, leaving the presidency that day after losing the 1896 nomination of his own party.

Cleveland was the only president to win two non-consecutive terms until Trump's victory in November.