Four Years On, War Still Alive in Lebanese Minds

Abdallah, 48, has a recurring dream. In it, he is standing on the rooftop of his home in southern Lebanon, surveying the devastation caused by Israeli warplanes, when he suddenly realises that Israeli soldiers are behind him.

He starts running for his life, jumping from one rooftop to the next, until he can jump no further. With nowhere to go, Abdullah decides to jump – and wakes up on the floor of his bedroom.

Abdallah, a bus driver, has had this nightmare repeatedly ever since the one-month war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in August 2006.

Although four years have passed since the conflict, many Lebanese living in the south say that they still feel affected because of the heavy damage and human losses they witnessed during the war. Some continue to suffer from deep sadness, insomnia, depression, loss of appetite and other psychological conditions caused directly or indirectly by the war, experts say.

Ghada Btaysh, a psychologist based in south Lebanon, said that entire families have been stricken by the war.

“In a family, all members are stricken by the war but children are the most affected category,” said Btaysh. “Unlike the majority of other Lebanese children, many kids in the south display feelings of unhappiness. They seem to fear the future and are obsessed with the possibility of war erupting again.”

School teachers also note that many of their students show symptoms of psychological trauma since the 2006 war.

“My students are frightened when they hear thunder. They compare the sound to that of Israeli rockets,” said Rima Mansour, a primary school teacher in Maarakeh, a town in south Lebanon.

She added that the drawings of students reflect a lot of violence. They often draw amputated body parts, blood, bodies without heads, and use black or red as the colour of the sky, she said.

During its 2006 onslaught against Hezbollah, Israeli jets heavily bombarded sites in southern Lebanon. Thousands of houses, bridges and other elements of the local infrastructure were destroyed and more than a thousand Lebanese were killed.

If the conflict is still present in the minds of children in a conscious or unconscious form, adults’ lives are also affected in many ways, particularly due to fears that the region constantly seems to be on the brink of a new war.

According to Btaish, many men have a pessimistic view of the future. “Men fear to invest in new business projects because they apprehend destruction and loss in case of another war,” she said.

Many women feel sad and neglected by their husbands who display feeling of carelessness and detachment, she said.

After losing his wife in a bombing raid during the war, Samir Farah, 58, a school teacher who lives in a village near the border with Israel, suffered for months from anger, loneliness, and insomnia.

“It is hard for anyone to accept the death of those he loves,” he said. However, the support of his family and religion helped him overcome the crisis, he added.

Om Sami, 60, who also lost her son during the war, feels his presence in “day and night”. “I feel as if he is not dead… As if he is beside me,” she added.

For others, the war awakened the ghosts of a more remote past. University student Aya, 20, was deeply disturbed by the sight of corpses during the 2006 fighting. Since being exposed to dead bodies, she has been obsessing about the face of her father who died when she was only few months old.

She said that the sights of the corpses and that of her father were mixed in her head. She added that today she could not bear to watch any violence on television, and that even the sounds of fireworks and firecrackers upset her.