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.



Iran Confrontation Offers Israel's Netanyahu Path to Erase Oct 7 Stigma, at Least at Home

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grimaces after addressing the 79th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York, US, September 27, 2024.  REUTERS/Mike Segar
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grimaces after addressing the 79th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York, US, September 27, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Segar
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Iran Confrontation Offers Israel's Netanyahu Path to Erase Oct 7 Stigma, at Least at Home

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grimaces after addressing the 79th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York, US, September 27, 2024.  REUTERS/Mike Segar
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grimaces after addressing the 79th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York, US, September 27, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Segar

For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, confrontation with Iran and its proxies offers the chance of political redemption at home, even at the risk of a regional war, a year after the Oct 7 attack demolished his reputation as a security hawk.
Many Israelis, demoralized by the catastrophic security failures around the deadly attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas, have regained confidence in their military and intelligence apparatus after a series of stunning blows against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon in recent weeks.
A hate figure for the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who have joined protests worldwide against Israel's war in Gaza over the past year and a frequent irritant even to his closest ally, the United States, Netanyahu has benefited in his own country.
The death of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and a top ally of Hamas, in a Sept. 27 Israeli strike in Beirut was greeted with elation in a country still grappling with trauma from Oct. 7 and a year of war in Gaza that has badly dented its reputation abroad, according to Reuters.
Even when a barrage of Iranian missiles sent Israelis piling into bomb shelters last week, Israel's success in intercepting most of the projectiles in coordination with Western allies helped to shore up the country's sense of resilience.
The death of at least nine Israeli soldiers in Lebanon since Israel announced the start of its ground operation on Oct 1 has provided a sobering reminder of the potential dangers ahead.
But Netanyahu, 74, who called Nasrallah's death a "turning point", has led a chorus of statements by Israeli officials in recent days that sought to prepare the population for more war.
"Iran made a big mistake tonight - and it will pay for it," he said at the outset of a political-security meeting after the missile attacks.
According to a survey from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, around 80% of Israelis feel the Lebanon campaign has met or exceeded expectations, although the same survey found disappointment with the campaign in Gaza, with 70% supporting a ceasefire to bring Israeli hostages home.
POLITICAL SURVIVOR
A former member of an elite special forces unit that carried out some of Israel's most daring hostage rescues in the 1970s, Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics for decades, becoming the country's longest-serving prime minister when he won an unprecedented sixth term in 2022.
His alliance with hard-right national religious parties was key to his victory and he faced some of the biggest protests in Israel's history last year over a package of measures designed to curb the powers of the Supreme Court that drew accusations he was undermining the foundations of the country's democracy. His popularity was further damaged by a trial on corruption charges that he denies.
Since the start of the war, the protests over judicial changes have given way to regular large demonstrations demanding his government do more to bring back the hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7, with some protesters suggesting Netanyahu has deliberately kept the war going for his own political ends.
Throughout, Netanyahu has said that only sustained military pressure on Hamas will get the hostages back and he has vowed to continue the war until Hamas is destroyed as a military and governing force in Gaza.
So far, the prime minister has refused to accept personal responsibility for Oct. 7, one of the worst security failures in Israel's history. He has said only that everyone will have to answer difficult questions when the war with Hamas is over, and has dismissed calls to resign and hold early elections.
Outside Israel, he has been the target of protestors outraged by the Israeli military campaign that has laid waste to Gaza and killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health authorities. Foreign governments, including close ally the United States, have been critical of the Gaza campaign and alarmed by the spread of conflict to Lebanon. The International Criminal Court is considering a prosecution request for an arrest warrant against him over alleged war crimes in Gaza, bracketing him with Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist organization in many Western countries.
At home, while he is one of the most polarizing leaders in Israeli history, such controversies have not hurt his image among his base of right-wing supporters.
Netanyahu himself described the move by the ICC prosecutor as "absurd" and said it was directed against the whole of Israel and antisemitic.
MORTAL ENEMY
Before Israel began its escalated campaign against Hezbollah last month, Netanyahu had already seen his domestic political fortunes recover somewhat during a year of a war against Hamas, a group most Israelis, even on the left, see as a mortal enemy.
Recent opinion polls show his Likud party is once again the strongest party in Israel, even if he might still struggle to form a ruling coalition if an election were held now.
He may not need to however, having brought in former ally-turned-rival Gideon Saar last week into his often fractious government, increasing his majority to a comfortable 68 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.
That may give him some insurance against unruly coalition partners like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two hardliners from the settler movement who have been consistently unwilling to toe the government line. Having survived being blamed for the worst disaster in Israeli history, he now may even serve out a full term with elections not due until 2026.