In the southern Lebanese village of Zefta, friends Hussein Ghazale and Abbas Wehbi were preparing to celebrate the beginning of the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah on the night of 16th April when an Israeli airstrike hit nearby, killing a man, woman and child. “We removed the bodies, then came to the road to welcome everybody,” said Wehbi. He played me a video of them setting off celebratory fireworks soon afterwards, as some of Lebanon’s roughly 1.2m displaced people began making their way home. This is the way that life and death mix in Lebanon these days: celebration and tragedy; pain and efforts to keep moving forward.
I have lived in Beirut since January 2024. I moved here because I liked the city—it is vibrant, with diverse inhabitants, an easy social life, a beautiful landscape and regular arts events. In the past, I lived in both East and West Africa as a correspondent, and was no stranger to covering conflict. But this time I was on book leave, working on a manuscript about love, with no plan to become a war correspondent.
There was already fighting in Lebanon when I moved here. Its latest iteration started when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israeli-controlled territory on 8th October 2023, in “solidarity” with Hamas—but it was mostly confined to the border areas. When Israeli attacks drastically escalated in September 2024, I finally got accredited and started reporting.
I began visiting airstrike sites. Rubble always looks grey at first: buildings turned into a tangle of metal and chunks of concrete, everything coated with dust. But peer closer and you notice the details: copybooks filled with schoolwork; academic papers; toiletries; DVD and VHS cases. Here was a mystery novel from the 1960s; there, some slimming tea; a pram; a bottle of bubbles; stuffed toys; furry slippers; silver high-heeled shoes; a little boy’s clothing covered in trains; a Frankenstein figurine; Uno cards. Small items that add up to whole lives.
More than 6,800 people have been killed by Israeli attacks since October 2023, and more than 2,500 since March, according to authorities here. Israel says its war is against Iran-backed Hezbollah alone, but the civilian toll in Lebanon—as in Gaza—is impossible to ignore. An airstrike makes the private almost indecently public.
In 2024, I started documenting the things that I saw, posting close-up pictures online in a series titled “Things I have seen in the rubble of Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon in the past week”. People far away began reaching out to me, saying these photographs made them understand the war in a new way: they could imagine these items in their own homes, played with by their own children. I questioned, then, if this is what it should take to make people empathise with other humans.
When a ceasefire was announced in November 2024, I took a break from that work, not imagining that all-out war would return to Lebanon so quickly and I would be back doing the same again this year.
I have some rules when photographing airstrike sites. I don’t move or touch any objects. I blur the faces of people in photographs I find before I share them. I visit the sites as soon as I can after attacks, but try to be as respectful as possible. If I have any doubt that a specific item was originally at a site, I don’t share the photograph.
A woman contacted me after one post. She said her husband was a teacher and she saw notes he had given to his -students in my photographs. That -specific attack—unlike many -others—had come after an Israeli -evacuation warning, and I was able to tell her that the student would not have been physically harmed, at least.
What about mental damage? Many Lebanese believe -civilians are being collectively punished: the drones that are often above our heads have been described as tools of psychological warfare, for example, their buzzing reminding millions of people that life is not normal.
Right before the latest all-out fighting began, I interviewed Mohamed Choucair, a DJ and one of the founders of music venue the Ballroom Blitz. He records atmosphere, and by February had recorded more than 200 hours of drone noises. “It’s always useful to archive,” he said, even “in a time when no one was really focused… The hardest part is labelling them beyond the date: what happened, what was interesting? What is there to look at after?”
He created an “instrument” that lets people play the drone like a piano. This was “a way to reach out to the west,” he said, helping people abroad understand the reality in Lebanon, while raising money for those in need. Some of his sound bank was later used in the Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Choucair said people have different reactions to the drone, depending on who and where they are, and what they’ve done. “For me, it’s an annoyance and a reminder that we’re totally powerless. We don’t own our skies, therefore we don’t own our thoughts, our future.” Yet his documentation, similar to my own, seemed at least an effort to record this tragedy, to show others everywhere that civilians here exist, that their lives also matter.
