Residents of this Beirut neighbourhood felt safe. Then Israel attacked it. | Israel attacks Lebanon

Beirut, Lebanon – In the early hours of March 11, Mohammad al-Ahmad was asleep at home with his wife and kids when he heard an explosion. It was about 5:20am.

“I woke up in a panic,” he told Al Jazeera, sitting in his tracksuit in a supermarket across the street from the blast site in Beirut’s Aicha Bakkar neighbourhood, his close-cropped brown hair specked with grey.

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“I wanted to go see if my kids were all right and then a second explosion happened.”

The strike took out two whole floors in a residential building, leaving the street below covered in glass, concrete and dust. The Lebanese Ministry of Health said four people were injured in the attack. Israeli media said the apartment was used by the Jama’a Islamiye (the Islamic Group), though the group denied that any of its members or offices were targeted.

Al-Ahmad said his building was directly next to the one that was hit and his apartment was on the same level. “Glass is all over the floor, it’s all broken. The house has a lot of damage,” he said.

A third ordnance was found unexploded. “Thank God it didn’t explode,” he said. “If it exploded the damage would have been much worse.”

‘Israelis strike wherever they see fit’

Israel intensified its war on Lebanon again on Monday, March 2, after Hezbollah attacked Israel for the first time in more than a year.

Hezbollah said it was responding to the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei just two days earlier. A ceasefire had ostensibly been in effect since November 27, 2024, despite the United Nations and Lebanese government counting more than 15,000 Israeli ceasefire violations since then.

After Hezbollah’s reply, Israel intensified its attacks on the south and its troops have pushed further into Lebanese territory, engaging Hezbollah in battle in a couple of southern villages. Israel also issued evacuation orders for the entirety of south Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs (known as Dahiyeh), and a few villages in the eastern Bekaa Valley, leading to a massive displacement crisis of at least 800,000 people, according to the Lebanese government.

Israel has since resumed attacking Dahiyeh multiple times a day, though before Wednesday’s strike, it had only attacked central Beirut once. The attack has shaken residents of the city, who were under the impression their areas were deemed safe.

In 2024, Israel struck multiple times in central Beirut and hit targets in every region of Lebanon, including those where Hezbollah or its supporters are not well represented or supported.

Nicholas Blanford, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Al Jazeera that the Israelis were following a similar pattern to 2024.

“They are finding their targets and hitting them wherever they may be,” Blanford said.

“The Israelis will strike targets where they see fit,” Blanford said. “I don’t think they are particularly bothered necessarily where the location is, if it’s in a Sunni area, a Christian area, or whatever.”

We are afraid now

Residents in Aicha Bakkar said their sense of relative safety was completely shattered by Wednesday’s attack.

Ahmad Ballout, a 66-year-old retired English teacher, lives on the first floor of the building facing the building that was attacked. He said he left his home near Sidon, south Lebanon, in 2023 as Hezbollah and Israel started fighting and rented a furnished apartment in Beirut.

Just before the strike, Ballout was on the couch in his living room while his family slept inside. The force of the blast threw him onto the living room floor. It shattered much of the glass in his apartment and damaged his balcony.

“It took me a while to realise what was happening,” he said. “Now, I’m in pain. It was a big strike but God help all the others.”

The strike damaged many of the surrounding buildings. Two floors in the building where the attack took place were missing exterior walls. Inside, dust and debris covered a carpet that hung over the building’s exterior facade and a mattress that had ended up against an interior wall.

Cars below had their windshields broken by falling debris. Shocked neighbours looked on from their balconies, some having sustained damage to the steel or glass.

Ballout says the attack not only damaged his apartment but shattered the illusion of safety he had.

“We weren’t afraid before, but we are now,” he said.

That fear has led to frustration in the neighbourhood. A woman walking down the street by the site of the attack yelled out to whoever could hear: “We didn’t ask for this!”

On the corner of that street, Bilal Ahmad walked out of his brother’s building with his young daughter. “I don’t get it,” he told Al Jazeera. The target of the attack has yet to be named by Israel, Hezbollah or the Lebanese government. But Ahmad said that groups that know that they are Israeli targets should not put other residents in danger by staying there.

“The people here, where are they supposed to go [to be safe]? Go sit on the sand at the sea but don’t come between families and kids,” he said.

Checking identities

The attack has also set in motion a larger set of demands driven by fear. A few locals have called for the Lebanese government to protect them by controlling who enters their neighbourhoods.

“In the last war this didn’t happen,” al-Ahmad said. “People in every area, not just this area, should know who is coming and going and following up on this. A lot of people were hurt without any fault of their own.”

Al-Ahmad said he worries about the impact on his two boys – the elder boy is four years old, and the younger one is just a year old. One of them has a speech impediment and sees a speech therapist to work on his pronunciation. Al-Ahmad worries the trauma of the incident will further impact his son’s speech.

“We didn’t ask for this and we can’t take this,” he said, his eyes tearing up. “Whoever wants to do this, get out of this area. People are fed up. It’s a crowded area and we’re sheltering people who are even more fed up.”

Still, al-Ahmad is not calling for a ban on hosting displaced people. “We’re not upset that displaced people are here, we accept everyone, Lebanese and even Syrians, Christian and Muslim. We accept anyone but we won’t accept danger.”

Al-Ahmad said he cannot leave the neighbourhood: His home is there, as are his businesses, including he electricity company he works at with his brother-in-law.

“There’s way more fear than before,” he said, seated in the supermarket and staring off into the distance. “From now on we need to know who is who in every building.”