I returned yesterday from a visit to south Lebanon, to the city of Nabatieh — I was just one and a half kilometres as the crow flies from the hill where the forces, artillery and rocket launchers of the Israeli occupation army are stationed.
The images of the south that we see on news bulletins are painful, but what an observer witnesses first-hand — even a neutral one — is catastrophic, deeply harsh and wounding. It carries within it every feeling of human grief, removed from any political, religious or sectarian bias.
Nabatieh is the largest governorate in south Lebanon by area, and exerts the greatest cultural and religious influence in Jabal Amel. It covers 1,097 square kilometres, meaning that the Nabatieh governorate and its districts represent 10.7% of Lebanon's total area.
85% of the governorate's residents depend on agriculture; it is a fertile farming region with no coastline, lying 22 km from Sidon and 65 km from Beirut.
The prominent families of this governorate belong to the major landowners and wealthy classes of Sidon and Beirut, or to the diaspora — particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
The scene in this city is bleak and painful. The streets are empty, the shops shuttered. No cafés, no cinema, no buying, no selling. Only a handful of cars belonging to some residents who are leaving the city, wanting to check on whatever remains — what remains of a lifetime's work: houses, villages, businesses.
My dear friend Mustafa Fahs, a son of this region, accompanied me. I noticed the marks of anguish on his face as he repeated expressions of sorrow each time he saw the rubble of a building or a neighbourhood: