Lebanon’s January Hangover
On January 2, at about 5:30 p.m., as I was reading at my desk in my Beirut apartment and contemplating a busy start to the year, I was jolted out of my focus by a loud blast. The first question that came to my mind was: Has it started?
An explosion had ripped through an apartment block in the southern suburbs, just a 10-minute drive from where I live, killing Saleh Arouri, a senior leader of Hamas, along with at least six others. These suburbs are a Hezbollah bastion; Hamas leaders must have felt, wrongly, that they were safe there.
City streets emptied quickly. People rushed home, checked on their loved ones, and waited. Will Hezbollah’s response be immediate? Will it be big? Will there be war?
The following day was a big travel day for the tens of thousands of expatriates who’d returned to Lebanon for the holidays and were heading back to their lives abroad. Now the planned departures took on an added urgency.
[Read: Hezbollah watches and waits]
“We’re leaving just in time,” said one of my friends going back to the
