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Myriam Dalal

In Beirut, It’s Like a Bomb (Never) Went Off


(Photo via @LarissaAounSky on Twitter)

A car bomb rocked the Beirut southern suburb of Dahiyeh’s Bir el Abed neighborhood on Tuesday morning shortly after 11:00 a.m. The blast set several cars on fire and wounded 53 people, according to the minister of public health.

Incredibly, just a few hours after the incident, media coverage across Lebanon’s major networks returned to normal. Even Al-Manar TV, a station funded by Hezbollah, returned to its regularly scheduled programming just three hours after sending out initial reports about the blast.

In fact, by 5:00 p.m., news reports said everything had pretty much returned to normal in the neighborhood.

So let’s just go over all of this one more time: A car bomb goes off on a hot summer day in the parking lot of a mall, the day before Ramadan (when everyone is out doing last-minute food shopping and preparations) and no one, not a single person, was killed.

Speaker Nabih Berri called this “divine intervention” in a speech earlier today.

I call this a typical Lebanese reaction. “Alla satar,” y’all.

Wait a second… wait… can you hear that? Shhhh….. Do you know what that sound is?…

It’s silence.

It’s a strange, unwavering muteness. Awful silence, dead silence, deathlike silence.

The blast today represents a major security breach for an area that is tightly-guarded by Hezbollah. And except for the July 2006 War when Israel bombed out the area, today’s incident marks the greatest destruction to have been incurred on the Dahiyeh since the March 1985 assassination attempt at Mohammad Husein Fadlallah, which killed 80 people.

A lot went down today. It feels like the calm before a storm. Two men were reportedly taken into custody as suspects in connection with the bombing, but there are no new reports to confirm that information.

The only thing we can know for sure is that the will of the people in Dahiyeh cannot so easily be shaken. This Tweet says it all: