Although long used to all manner of wars, Lebanon is watching in stunned disbelief as catastrophe strikes with an unprecedented violence. Everyone here remembers that in 2000, under pressure from Hezbollah, Israel withdrew from the south of the country, which it had occupied for eighteen years. The Shiite organization earned its nickname “Resistance” there, becoming the only Lebanese militia to keep its weapons — allowing it to become the Iran-backed “state within a state” that we know today.

The terrifying return of the Israeli army to Lebanese territory thus takes on the air of revenge, but with a key difference: it’s no longer only about occupying but also about emptying the south of its population (8 percent of the country’s land area) and ordering residents in the southern suburbs (some 800,000 in a country of five million) to evacuate as well — before the bombings.

In both regions, the panicked populations immediately fled their houses without looking back. Pursued by Israel’s watchful eye (and bombs), which nothing escapes, men, women, and children took refuge further north in schools emptied of their pupils, in rentals whose prices suddenly became prohibitive, or else outside, during this winter month, on the pavements of Beirut and elsewhere.