War Piles Yet More Trauma on Lebanon's Exhausted People

'People just can't anymore,' said Rami Bou Khalil, head of psychiatry at Beirut's Hotel Dieu hospital - AFP
'People just can't anymore,' said Rami Bou Khalil, head of psychiatry at Beirut's Hotel Dieu hospital - AFP
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War Piles Yet More Trauma on Lebanon's Exhausted People

'People just can't anymore,' said Rami Bou Khalil, head of psychiatry at Beirut's Hotel Dieu hospital - AFP
'People just can't anymore,' said Rami Bou Khalil, head of psychiatry at Beirut's Hotel Dieu hospital - AFP

Ask a Lebanese person how they are, and you're likely to be met with a heavy pause or a pained smile. Years of crisis have drained them, and now Israeli air strikes are pushing many to breaking point.

Cartoonist Bernard Hage, who draws under the name Art of Boo, summed it up a few weeks ago with a layer cake.

These layers are "Financial Collapse", "Pandemic", the 2020 "Beirut Port Explosion", "Political Deadlock" and "Mass Depression".

"War" is now the cherry on top.

Carine Nakhle, a supervisor at suicide helpline Embrace, says the trauma is never-ending.

"The Lebanese population is not OK," she said, AFP reported.

The hotline's some 120 operators take shifts around the clock all week to field calls from people in distress.

Calls have increased to some 50 a day since Israel increased its airstrikes against Lebanon on September 23.

The callers are "people who are in shock, people who are panicking", Nakhle said.

"Many of them have been calling us from areas where they are being bombed or from shelters."

Israel's bombardment of Lebanon, mostly in the south and in Beirut's southern suburbs, has killed more than 1,100 people and displaced upwards of a million in less than two weeks.

Tens of thousands have found refuge in central Beirut, whose streets now throng with homeless people and where the traffic is even more swollen than usual.

- 'Huge injustice' -

Every night, airstrikes on the southern suburbs force people to flee their homes, as huge blasts rattle windows and spew clouds of debris skywards.

Ringing out across Beirut, the explosions awaken terrible memories: of the massive 2020 Beirut port blast that decimated large parts of the city; of the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006; and of the 1975-1990 civil war.

This latest affliction comes on the back of years of the worst financial crisis in Lebanon's history that has plunged much of its middle class into poverty.

Rita Barotta, 45, lives near the relatively quiet Christian-majority town of Jounieh north of Beirut.

She says she cannot hear the airstrikes, but also that she no longer has the words "to describe what is happening" to Lebanon.

"I no longer know what being me 15 days ago looked like," said the university lecturer in communications, who has thrown herself into helping the displaced.

"Eating, sleeping, looking after my plants -- none of that's left. I'm another me. The only thing that exists now for me is how I can help."

Networking on her phone, Barotta spends her days trying to find shelter or medicine for those in need.

"If I stop for even five minutes, I feel totally empty," she said.

Barotta almost lost her mother in the Beirut port explosion, and says that keeping busy is the only way for her not to feel "overwhelmed and petrified".

"What is happening today is not just a new trauma, it's a sense of huge injustice. Why are we being put through all this?"

- 'Just can't anymore' -

A 2022 study before the war by Lebanese non-governmental organization IDRAAC found that at least a third of Lebanese battled with mental health problems.

Rami Bou Khalil, head of psychiatry at Beirut's Hotel Dieu hospital, said all Lebanese were struggling in one way or another.

"Lebanese have a great capacity for resilience," he said, citing support from family, community and religion.

"But there is this accumulation of stress that is making the glass overflow."

"For years, we have been drawing on our physical, psychological and financial resources. People just can't anymore," he said.

He said he worries because some people who should be hospitalized cannot afford it, and others are relapsing "because they can no longer take a hit".

Many more people were relying on sleeping pills.

"People want to sleep," he said, and swallowing pills is easier when you have neither the time nor the money to be treated.

Nakhle, from Embrace, said many people sought help from non-governmental organizations as they could not afford the $100 consultation fee for a therapist at a private clinic.

At the charity's health centre, the waiting list for an appointment is four to five months long.



One Year of War in Gaza: Deadliest Conflict for Reporters

 A child walks through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive on Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP)
A child walks through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive on Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP)
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One Year of War in Gaza: Deadliest Conflict for Reporters

 A child walks through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive on Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP)
A child walks through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive on Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP)

Palestinian journalist Islam al-Zaanoun was so determined to cover the war in Gaza that she went back to work two months after giving birth. But, like all journalists in Gaza, she wasn't just covering the story - she was living it.

The 34-year-old, who works for Palestine TV, gave birth to a girl in Gaza city a few weeks after the beginning of the Israeli offensive last October.

She had to have a Caesarean section as Israeli airstrikes pounded the strip. Her doctors performed the operation in the dark with only the lights on their cellphones to guide them.

The next day she went home but the day after that she had to flee the fighting, driving further south with her three children. Nine days after giving birth, she was forced to abandon her car and continue on foot.

"I had to walk eight km (five miles) to get to the south with my children," she said. "There were bodies and corpses everywhere, horrifying sight. I felt my heart was going to stop from the fear."

Just 60 days later, she got back in front of the camera to report on the war, joining the ranks of Palestinian journalists who have provided the world's only window on the conflict in the absence of international media, who have not been granted free access by Israeli authorities.

"Correspondents have reporting in their blood, they don't learn it, so they cannot be far from the coverage too long," al-Zaanoun told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

As of Oct. 4, at least 127 journalists and media workers had been killed since the conflict began, according to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

This has made the past year the deadliest period on record for journalists since the press watchdog started keeping records in 1992.

Press freedom advocacy group Reporters Without Borders has recorded more than 130 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza in the past year, including at least 32 media workers who it says were directly targeted by Israel.

To date, CPJ has determined that at least five journalists were directly targeted by Israeli forces in killings which CPJ classifies as murders.

They include Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah, 37, who was killed by an Israeli tank crew in southern Lebanon last October, a Reuters investigation has found.

CPJ is still researching the details for confirmation in at least 10 other cases that indicate possible targeting.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, the Israel Defense Forces' international spokesman, said at the time of Abdallah's killing: "We don't target journalists." He did not provide further comment.

More than 41,600 people have been killed in Gaza and almost 100,000 have been wounded since Oct. 7, according to Gaza's health ministry.

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas stormed into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

'WHERE IS THE INTERNATIONAL LAW?'

For journalists like al-Zaanoun, the challenges are not limited to staying safe while reporting. Like the rest of the 2.3 million people in the strip, media workers have been displaced multiple times, gone hungry, lacked water and shelter and mourned dead neighbors and friends.

Food is scarce, diapers are expensive, and medicine is lacking, al-Zaanoun said. As well as her professional desire to keep reporting, she needs to put food on the table because her husband has not been able to work since the war started.

"If I don't work, my kids will go hungry," she said.

Like all Gazans, she fears for her safety and does not dare defy Israeli evacuation orders.

"We had no protection really. Had we decided to stay in the northern areas that would have definitely cost us a very high price and that is what happened to our friends," she said.

The Israel-Hamas war falls under a complex international system of justice that has emerged since World War Two, much of it aimed at protecting civilians. Even if states say they are acting in self-defense, international rules regarding armed conflict apply to all participants in a war.

Article 79 of the Geneva Conventions treats journalists working in conflict settings as protected civilians if they don't engage in the fighting.

In March, senior leaders at multiple global media outlets signed a letter urging Israeli authorities to protect journalists in Gaza, saying reporters have been working in unprecedented conditions and faced "grave personal risk".

What CPJ has called "the most dangerous" war for journalists has reverberated across the world, striking fear into reporters who are concerned about the setting of deadly precedents.

Abdalle Ahmed Mumin, a veteran freelance reporter and the secretary general of the Somali Journalists Syndicate, said he had experienced violence before but was shocked by what was happening in Gaza.

"I have been targeted personally myself. I have been detained, I have been unjustly kidnapped several times," he said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"I know all these things, but I haven't witnessed the kind of brutality that the journalists in Gaza have been going through."

Since 1992, 18 of Mumin's friends and colleagues have been killed in Somalia, where first warlords and later al-Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants have caused years of conflict.

"I'm scared of being a journalist ... because of the failure of the international protection mechanisms, the failure of the international community," he said. "Where is the international law? Where is the international humanitarian law?"