Netanyahu has turned Nabatieh into a new Gaza. The cost is not Lebanon’s alone — it is being paid in Washington’s diplomacy with Iran and in the anxiety running through global energy markets.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz arrived in Beirut in 1979 and stayed three years. The city was already at war with itself and with others, and Faiz, who had spent a lifetime writing about power and its victims, recognised the landscape immediately.
It was in Café Younis on Hamra Street that he wrote Ek Naghma Karbala-e-Beirut Key Liey — a song for the Karbala that Beirut had become. The reference carried the full weight of its history. In 680 CE, on the plains of Karbala, Husain ibn Ali was killed by a vastly superior force. He lost the battle and became immortal. His martyrdom passed into the moral vocabulary of resistance across the Muslim world, his killers into the vocabulary of tyranny. When Faiz reached for that image to describe Beirut, he was saying something precise: that the city was not merely suffering, but suffering in a way that history would remember.
He hoped it would resist. It did, repeatedly, and each time Faiz was proved right.
On Hamra Street, steps from the café, sat the office of Lotus — the trilingual magazine Faiz edited in English, French, and Arabic. It was financed by the Soviet Union and housed by the Union of Palestinian Writers, a arrangement made possible by the friendship between Faiz and Yasser Arafat. From that office, in a city learning to absorb its own destruction, he produced work that would outlast the siege, the rubble, and most of the political causes it served.
Here is a rewrite:
Faiz Ahmad Faiz arrived in Beirut in 1979 not as a visitor but as an exile. He had refused to make peace with General Ziaul Haq’s military regime in Pakistan, and Beirut — turbulent, besieged, and full of people who had also refused — suited him. Yasser Arafat, who housed Faiz and funded Lotus, the trilingual magazine Faiz edited on Hamra Street, had his own reasons to despise Zia: the general had played a role in the 1969 Jordanian operation that forced the PLO out of Amman and into Lebanon. The friendship between the two men was built on shared enmity as much as shared conviction.
At Café Younis, a few steps from the Lotus office and near the American University of Beirut, Faiz would gather with Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad, and Mahmoud Darwish. Four exiles, four languages, one table. They recited poems to each other in a city that was itself becoming a poem about endurance.
Then, in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. As Israeli forces approached Beirut, the PLO told Faiz he would have to leave — the Lotus office would relocate to Tunis with them. It was in that moment of departure, watching a city he loved absorb yet another assault, that Faiz wrote his song for Karbala-e-Beirut:
Beirut, ornament of our world Beirut, exquisite as Paradise’s gardens Those shattered mirrors were Smiling eyes of children Now are star-lit
Faces decorated with blood Dazzling beyond beauty Their elegant splendour Lights up the city lanes And radiant is Lebanon
He chose Karbala deliberately. In 680 CE, on the plains of that Iraqi city, Husain ibn Ali was killed by a force that vastly outnumbered him. He lost and became eternal. His martyrdom entered the moral language of resistance across the Muslim world; his killers entered the language of tyranny. When Faiz placed Beirut inside that frame, he was not reaching for metaphor. He was making a judgment: that this city’s suffering was of the kind history does not forget, and that its resistance was of the kind history does not dismiss.
Faiz died in 1984. Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon in 2000. He did not live to see it, but he had already seen enough to know the city would hold.
I visited Café Younis for the first time on a hot afternoon in June 2026. I had covered wars in Beirut many times over the past two decades but had never managed to sit in the chair where Faiz once sat. The café was founded in 1935 and has survived everything the city has thrown at it. It has branches now. On its walls hang old photographs, and I looked through them slowly, half-expecting to find Faiz somewhere in the background, cigarette in hand, watching the street.
Over Turkish coffee, I thought about his poem and about what he had understood that others missed: that Beirut does not simply suffer. It resists. And that resistance keeps creating new Karbalas — outnumbered, outgunned, and unwilling to disappear.
I have witnessed three of them. The first in 2006, during the Lebanon-Israel war. The second in 2024. The third I am witnessing now, in June 2026, from inside the city itself.
A senior colleague at Geo News had suggested I go to Switzerland, where Iran and the United States were preparing to hold talks. I told him Lebanon would matter more. Israel, I was certain, would escalate its bombing to sabotage the negotiations, and the story would be here, not in a conference room in Geneva. He agreed, and within days I was in Beirut with my cameraman.
When I stepped out of Beirut airport on June 18, the first sound I heard was an Israeli drone overhead. The next morning, I set out with my cameraman Himran Alexander for Nabatieh, a city in southern Lebanon that had been under Israeli fire for three months. Foreign journalists are required to register with the Lebanese Army before entering conflict zones. We stopped at an army post near Nabatieh at eight in the morning. The officer who issued permits had not yet arrived. Twenty minutes later he came in, shaken. Minutes earlier, he told us, Israeli strikes had hit civilian cars and motorcycles on the road to Nabatieh. Bodies were scattered across the road. The road was closed.
He gave us the permit and told us to return to Beirut and wait.
For three days, Israel pressed hard to take Nabatieh and did not succeed. On June 23, with Lebanon-Israel negotiations set to begin in the United States, the bombing eased. The road reopened and I went in.
Nothing in three months of reporting had prepared me for what I found. Nabatieh was not Lebanon. It was Gaza. The rubble of destroyed buildings stretched in every direction. The stench of human remains hung over the streets. A local Al Jazeera journalist, Rana Jouni, who had never left the city during the bombardment — sheltering in a civil defence office and reporting casualties from a field hospital — took me through the wreckage. She showed me a mosque built two hundred years ago, now gutted. She pointed toward the mountains of Ali al-Taher, behind which Israeli tanks and artillery were positioned. As she explained their military significance, Israeli artillery opened fire toward us. We moved.
At a hospital in the city, I met Dr Sarra, who had registered more than 500 deaths in her facility alone over the preceding weeks. Rana Jouni told me there were still bodies under the rubble that had not been reached. It was the month of Muharram. The city looked like a new Karbala.
Israel resumed attacks on Nabatieh on June 24 and 25. On June 26, Israel and the Lebanese government signed a peace agreement in Washington. The same day, Israeli forces killed more Lebanese in Nabatieh. Israel committed to withdrawing from southern Lebanon. On the ground, its forces were moving toward Beirut.
Netanyahu wants Nabatieh. Capturing its peaks means commanding all of southern Lebanon — and, more importantly for him, it means arriving at October’s elections as a conqueror rather than a defendant. His corruption trial continues. His coalition depends on ministers for whom any restraint is betrayal. The calculus is transparent: hold Nabatieh, claim victory, win the vote.
The cost of that calculus is being paid far beyond Lebanon’s borders. Iran has conditioned progress in its negotiations with the United States on an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and the reason is not difficult to understand. When Israel and the United States struck Iran jointly on February 28, it was Hezbollah that opened a front in southern Lebanon and relieved the pressure on Tehran. Iran, having survived the attempt to engineer its regime’s collapse, will not now abandon the ally that helped it survive. If Washington wants Tehran at the table in good faith, it must answer a prior question: how loyal is it willing to be to Netanyahu?
American public opinion, once reliably with Israel, has shifted. Iranian public opinion stands firmly with Hezbollah. The negotiations between the two countries are no longer simply a bilateral matter — they have become a variable in global energy stability, with the Strait of Hormuz and regional oil flows dependent on their outcome. A second Gaza in Lebanon does not just wound Lebanon. It wounds the process on which a significant part of the world economy now depends.
There is a path. Israeli forces withdraw from southern Lebanon. Iran, in return, restrains Hezbollah from firing on Israel. Hezbollah’s fighters are eventually absorbed into the Lebanese Army. None of this is simple, but all of it is possible — if Netanyahu’s electoral calendar is not allowed to set the terms for everyone else.
Faiz called Beirut an ornament of the world. He wrote that even faces decorated with blood could be dazzling beyond beauty. He meant it as witness, not aestheticisation — a recognition that dignity persists even inside devastation, and that resistance, however costly, is not nothing.
The international community has watched this city be destroyed before. It is watching again. It is time, once more, to do something other than watch.
