A night under fire

It didn’t take long after the speeches of Nasrallah and Hariri for the fighting to start. And this time for real. All night long, we heard a lot of gunshots, with intermittent heavy explosions from RPGs and what have you. Apparently, the Hezbollah fighters were attacking the palace of Hariri in Qoreitem and that of Jumblatt in Clemenceau, leaving us right in the middle.

Sure, for those people living right next to these palaces, the situation must have been even worse, but still, it was bad enough already for us. Even more so because the building next door has been occupied by Future Movement fighters from the north of Lebanon since the last few months. Quite a few trucks were rushed into the garage of the building, supposedly filled with arms.

You can imagine our worries that they would start fighting from that building, making our building an easy victim of so-called “collateral damage”. For a long time, the building was quiet, but around 11PM, we heard gunshots being fired from it. This must mean that they had Hezbollah fighters in sight who were going through our street. The last thing we needed was our street to turn into a battle zone!

Obviously, we could only interpret from the sounds we heard since we had closed all our shutters and didn’t dare to take a peek outside. Let other people be heroes, we take comfort in the knowledge that the world also need people to be saved.

All the while we were watching the news on TV, showing us what we could hear outside already. At around midnight we went to bed, tired of a long, stressful day filled with panic shopping, echo’s of gunshots and loud explosions. Israel must be pleased with Hezbollah’s 60th Anniversary present.