“It breaks my heart to see all the people sleeping on the Corniche,” Malik, a Sidon native who owns a trucking company, told The Media Line while standing in front of one of the bombed buildings in the city. Only one wall of the building remains standing. The shelling has left it twisted and unstable, with pieces of the staircase scattered from the upper floors. Malik, 59, has his trucks parked next to this Muslim Brotherhood building and said he left three minutes before the first shell hit. “They hit it twice,” he said. Luckily, this time he saved all his trucks. “Each one is worth $100,000, and during the Beirut port explosion [in 2020], I already lost two,” he said.
“This will be the last war; Hezbollah will keep fighting until the end, they won’t give up, but we can’t take it anymore. We’re tired,” says Malik, his hands blackened from removing debris that landed on his vehicles. Not everyone in Sidon sees the war ending soon.“This won’t be the last war, because Israel can’t achieve its goal,” the 21-year-old Palestinian-Lebanese student from Sidon tells The Media Line. According to Sara, Israel’s objective is not only to disarm Hezbollah but also to seize a large part of Lebanese territory. “It’s a very, very important geographical position; that’s why Lebanon has suffered so many wars,” she said.
The Litani River has long been central to the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, both as a geographic marker and a strategic military line. Known in classical sources as the Leontes and believed to derive from an older Semitic name, the river lies about 30 kilometers north of the border between the two countries and runs 140 kilometers from its source in the Bekaa Valley to its outlet in the Mediterranean Sea north of Tyre. (Ed note: Sidon, a very ancient city is located on the Mediterranean Sea and has a population of it is thought about 163,000 people.) (Read More)
