The Feeling That Made Staying in Our Village Possible

“Why would a family of six choose to stay in the South?” When I think about how to answer this question, the first thing that comes to mind is love — the kind of love that allows you to endure anything.

I look back on those days, reflect on what we’ve been through, and wonder how we managed to endure the war.

The harshest night, in terms of the intensity of the sounds, was the night of “Operation Eaten Straw,” Wednesday, March 11, 2026. The sounds were deafening and terrifyingly close. But hearing the resistance’s rockets, and knowing they were falling on the enemy and not on us, reassured us and helped us keep going.

The next day, the enemy threatened all of southern Lebanon. I was asleep when a friend called me and told me that my village was in the area under threat of bombardment. My parents decided to immediately leave to my aunt’s house, planning to look for another place to live in, even though we, the children, insisted on staying. 

We weren’t able to find another place nearby. The following day, we collectively took the opposite decision: to return to the South. Since then, the idea of leaving is no longer on the table.

My father called me to come watch the resistance’s rockets one night. We stepped onto the balcony. I didn’t want to take photos not to risk exposing what must stay hidden, so I wrote instead: “To see your sky adorned with your rockets, and not their rockets.” In that moment, we weren’t thinking of ourselves, but of them — the resistance fighters. We prayed for them, believing that prayer itself was a form of participation.

Two days after the landing in the Bekaa, the enemy threatened Ansariyye, the village adjacent to ours. We were sitting at the table for iftar when we heard strange sounds. My mother looked up and jokingly said: “Let me get up and heat the oil; what if there’s a landing here?”

What’s striking isn’t the joke itself, but how quickly the mindset shifts: going from thinking about how to flee to thinking about how to resist. The initial instinct is to confront, not to survive. In the middle of the night, the enemy launched airstrikes on the village. They were so loud that my little brother woke up with his hands over his ears.

Zein, my little brother, will turn 8 in June. When the war started, he was 5. He attended his first funeral in our city of Sour. He was on the football field when he heard ambulances racing through the streets after the pager massacre took place. Another time, the enemy bombed near his school, shattering the glass. 

I think about him a lot — how he grew up during a war. When I took him to the beach, he told me it was the best day since the start of the escalation, and that he wished he could go to the beach every day. Then he asked me: “Do you think the Israelis will think we’re provoking them, and bomb us?”

The beach we went to was only a two-minute walk from home. Still, my parents worried about us going, fearing a repeat of the strike that killed two young men on Sour’s shore on November 23, 2024.

Every time I think of Zein, I think about how the war robbed him of the chance to see life the way an 8-year-old should.

My sister and I made a habit of journaling our memories. One dawn during Ramadan, the sound of the resistance’s rockets blended with the rain outside. My sister described the moment as “poetic," and it made me smile. 

Dawn was peaceful, its scent distinct, and everything was still. And then, the sound came. We wondered: “Did they finish their prayers, then launch the rockets? What joins du‘a and action in a single moment?”

I visited the village of Saksakiyyeh three days after the massacre of Friday, March 27, 2026, in which six people were martyred and 17 others injured. The village seemed almost normal; life went on and people were out and about, especially with the number of people displaced there.

My relative who lives there tells me that the strike was incredibly powerful. Yet she chose to stay with her husband and 3-year-old daughter, refusing to leave the village out of a firm belief that whatever God has written would come to pass.

When I look back on those days, my memories are shaped less by what the enemy did than by what we saw and heard from the resistance. I don’t want to hold onto fear alone, or remember only the pain. What remains is the feeling that made staying possible.

Maybe that’s why the question is not, “Why did we stay?” but rather, “How could we have left?”

Three days into the ceasefire [on April 17, 2026], on our way to Sour, I was listening to “Ya Ali,” a song from childhood car rides. The lyrics came back to me: “barefoot in the cities.” The image of people crossing the bombed Qasimiye bridge on foot came to mind. How love drives us to travel great distances to reach the ones we love, thinking neither of danger nor death, but only of our home, land, and loved ones.

On our first visit to Sour, my father and I visited our loved ones, both living and dead. We went to the cemetery, to the graves of my grandmother and grandfather, and my aunt Mariam, who was martyred by Israeli gunfire in 1985 on the Qasimiye bridge. Her body was kept from us for a month.

Then we visited my family members who were martyred in the early days of the 66-Day War inside their home in the old quarter. I had visited them before the war in the same house that was targeted afterward, to check on their son, who was wounded in the pager attack. After that, we visited the graves of the resistance’s martyrs.

My father told me about the martyr who was targeted in a flouka boat at the port of Sour, and how he went to that place on purpose so as not to endanger anyone else. I wondered, “How do they bear this burden? To know that death follows them, and to still place the safety of others before their own?”

We went to the temporary graves of the martyrs. I saw my father crying, though he rarely ever does. The last time I saw him like this was when Sayyed Ali Khamenei was martyred.

He said to me: “It just breaks your heart.” Then he wept. So I wept with him.

This sorrow belongs to all of us, and this blood belongs to us, too.