Sunday, July 16, 2006
I woke up three hours ago to learn that, while I slept, the Israelis had bombed Jounieh, some three hundred meters down the mountain, and had been ‘’engaged ‘by the Lebanese army in a lively half hour or so shower of useless antiaircraft fire and flares.
I’m supposed to be an insomniac yet I sleep through a war!
This attack, coming on the fourth day of Israel’s sustained bombardment and blockade of Lebanon, was aimed at the Lebanese naval base on the Jounieh bay.
Our very own Pearl Harbour.
THE QUITE COUNTRY
What does a country at war look and feel like?
Well, this country, when it’s not being bombarded, is eerily quite.
Standing on the balcony, looking out across Jounieh, it is very quite and very dark with barely a car on the road.
A sense of anticipation permeates the air as thick as the fog that hangs over our heads like rain clouds and as thick as the man made fog, the fog of war.
You can't even hear a dog barking.
Even dogs are silent when the dogs of war are unleashed.
During wartime, ones afraid not just of the war itself, which is quite random, but of the lawlessness that often occurs during wartime.
Not that it’s happening now but it did happen during the civil war so you still feel a sense of unease that bombs aren’t the only thing that you have to worry about but that anything can happen in this abandoned country.
3:00 am
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