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.



US Spends a Record $17.9 Billion on Military Aid to Israel Since Last Oct. 7

An Israeli fighter jet releases flares as it flies over the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Dec. 9, 2023. (AP)
An Israeli fighter jet releases flares as it flies over the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Dec. 9, 2023. (AP)
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US Spends a Record $17.9 Billion on Military Aid to Israel Since Last Oct. 7

An Israeli fighter jet releases flares as it flies over the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Dec. 9, 2023. (AP)
An Israeli fighter jet releases flares as it flies over the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Dec. 9, 2023. (AP)

The United States has spent a record of at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since the war in Gaza began and led to escalating conflict around the Middle East, according to a report for Brown University's Costs of War project, released on the anniversary of Hamas’ attacks on Israel.

An additional $4.86 billion has gone into stepped-up US military operations in the region since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, researchers said in findings first provided to The Associated Press. That includes the costs of a Navy-led campaign to quell strikes on commercial shipping by Yemen's Houthis, who are carrying them out in solidarity with the fellow Iranian-backed group Hamas.

The report — completed before Israel opened a second front, this one against Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, in late September — is one of the first tallies of estimated US costs as the Biden administration backs Israel in its conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon and seeks to contain hostilities by Iran-allied armed groups in the region.

The financial toll is on top of the cost in human lives: Hamas fighters killed more than 1,200 people in Israel a year ago and took others hostage. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory's Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.

At least 1,400 people in Lebanon, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, have been killed since Israel greatly expanded its strikes in that country in late September.

The financial costs were calculated by Linda J. Bilmes, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has assessed the full costs of US wars since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and fellow researchers William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler.

Here's a look at where some of the US taxpayer money went:

Record military aid to Israel

Israel — a protege of the United States since its 1948 founding — is the biggest recipient of US military aid in history, getting $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959, the report says.

Even so, the $17.9 billion spent since Oct. 7, 2023, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is by far the most military aid sent to Israel in one year. The US committed to providing billions in military assistance to Israel and Egypt each year when they signed their 1979 US-brokered peace treaty, and an agreement since the Obama administration set the annual amount for Israel at $3.8 billion through 2028.

The US aid since the Gaza war started includes military financing, arms sales, at least $4.4 billion in drawdowns from US stockpiles and hand-me-downs of used equipment.

Much of the US weapons delivered in the year were munitions, from artillery shells to 2,000-pound bunker-busters and precision-guided bombs.

Expenditures range from $4 billion to replenish Israel's Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems to cash for rifles and jet fuel, the study says.

Unlike the United States' publicly documented military aid to Ukraine, it was impossible to get the full details of what the US has shipped Israel since last Oct. 7, so the $17.9 billion for the year is a partial figure, the researchers said.

They cited Biden administration “efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering.”

Funding for the key US ally during a war that has exacted a heavy toll on civilians has divided Americans during the presidential campaign. But support for Israel has long carried weight in US politics, and Biden said Friday that “no administration has helped Israel more than I have."

US military operations in the Middle East

The Biden administration has bolstered its military strength in the region since the war in Gaza started, aiming to deter and respond to any attacks on Israeli and American forces.

Those additional operations cost at least $4.86 billion, the report said, not including beefed-up US military aid to Egypt and other partners in the region.

The US had 34,000 forces in the Middle East the day that Hamas broke through Israeli barricades around Gaza to attack. That number rose to about 50,000 in August when two aircraft carriers were in the region, aiming to discourage retaliation after a strike attributed to Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. The total is now around 43,000.

The number of US vessels and aircraft deployed — aircraft carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group, fighter squadrons, and air defense batteries — in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has varied during the year.

The Pentagon has said another aircraft carrier strike group is headed to Europe very soon and that could increase the troop total again if two carriers are again in the region at the same time.

The fight against the Houthis

The U. military has deployed since the start of the war to try to counter escalated strikes by the Houthi militias that control Yemen's capital and northern areas, and have been firing on merchant ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Gaza. The researchers called the $4.86 billion cost to the US an “unexpectedly complicated and asymmetrically expensive challenge.”

Houthis have kept launching attacks on ships traversing the critical trade route, drawing US strikes on launch sites and other targets. The campaign has become the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II.

“The US has deployed multiple aircraft carriers, destroyers, cruisers and expensive multimillion-dollar missiles against cheap Iranian-made Houthi drones that cost $2,000,” the authors said.

Just Friday, the US military struck more than a dozen Houthi targets in Yemen, going after weapons systems, bases and other equipment, officials said.

The researchers' calculations included at least $55 million in additional combat pay from the intensified operations in the region.