Many in Lebanon dread the prospect of war with Israel as tensions escalate in the region

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In September, Nabil Debs finished construction on a new boutique hotel just north of Tyre, a coastal city in southern Lebanon. The hotel is situated by the Mediterranean, surrounded by banana plantations and sand dunes.

“The beauty of Tyre is that it’s one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world,” Mr. Debs said. Its archeological treasures include a Roman hippodrome where 20,000 people once watched chariot races.

For a hotelier, it has “huge potential,” Mr. Debs said.

Building a hotel there was an act of optimism. Tyre is near the border with Israel, which has for decades been a bloody dividing line from Lebanon. But since 2006 the two sides have maintained a relative, if occasionally deadly, calm. “It’s never been quiet for such a long period of time,” Mr. Debs said. Earlier this year, Lebanon and Israel even signed a pact on offshore natural gas exploration that earned the backing of Hezbollah, the political party and militant group that controls most of Lebanon’s Shia Muslim-majority areas and has long been a sworn enemy of its neighbour to the south.

“So everything was looking good,” he added.

Then Hamas militants carried out their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, violently upending expectations for the future. Hezbollah, which shares with Hamas a fealty to Iran and a hatred of Israel, possesses an arsenal so fearsome that one of the most important questions in the Middle East at this uncertain moment is whether it will be drawn into a war with Israel, a prospect that threatens untold new suffering.

Hezbollah’s leaders, in solidarity with Hamas, have said they are ready to fight Israel at any time, a threat serious enough that the United States has dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean.

Since the Oct. 7 attack, tit-for-tat exchanges of fire between Israel and militants in Lebanon have killed civilians and combatants on both sides, fraying the uneasy co-existence that has prevailed in recent years.

For Lebanon, a country that has spent the past half-decade in the grip of successive crises, the threat of war could hardly have come at a worse time.

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Since 2019, a financial and economic crisis has brought about the collapse of the country’s banking system and currency. A colossal explosion in the Port of Beirut in 2020 killed more than 200 people and shattered parts of the city. Inflation hit 171 per cent in 2022. Gross domestic product has fallen by half. In Beirut, basic civic infrastructure such as traffic lights barely functions.

But the past year brought a few glimmers of optimism. The currency has stabilized. New investment money trickled in. Travellers began to return, freed from the grips of pandemic restrictions. In Beirut, restaurants opened by the hundreds.

If those seeds of hope are shattered by a new period of conflict, Mr. Nebs said, “everything would be set back.”

“So people are certainly not supportive of any war.”

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Lebanon knows well the cost of conflict with Israel. In 2006, a war of just 34 days wrecked 80 bridges, 94 roads and 30,000 homes, offices and shops. More than a quarter of the population was displaced.

Memories of that time have returned with vivid force with Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip over the past week, which has now killed more than 2,778 people and blasted countless homes into heaps of concrete.

“What is happening in Gaza would give you a very clear idea of what will happen if it started in Lebanon,” said Wadih Al-Asmar, the president of the Lebanese Center for Human Rights.

Among those set against the prospect of a new war with Israel are Lebanon’s leaders.

“The government is continuing its contacts internally and externally to keep the situation as calm as possible inside Lebanon and to distance Lebanon from the repercussions of the ongoing war in Gaza,” Najib Mikati, who has been the country’s caretaker Prime Minister since 2021, said on Monday.

Beirut does not direct Hezbollah’s actions – that power lies in Tehran – but people close to the militant group have indicated that they, too, have little appetite for a fight.

“Any war brings more casualties, more victims, more destruction,” said a person close to the Amal Movement, a political party allied with Hezbollah. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the person because of the sensitivity of discussing the current situation.

“We have the right as the resistance and as people of Lebanon to defend our territory and to react and reply to any attack,” the person said. But “the decision for war in Lebanon is in the hands of the Israelis.”

Support for Hezbollah is far from universal in Lebanon. Indeed, with the exception of the Shia Muslim community that has always been the group’s chief source of support, it’s “quite a common feeling that Hezbollah is actually now one of the biggest challenges for progress and justice in Lebanon,” said Nizar Hassan, a Lebanese political analyst and advocate for political reform. Hezbollah has earned enmity over many years for acting with the impunity of a schoolyard bully, he said.

But it is Israel that has kindled the most burning rage, particularly under the hard-right leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government and its iron-fisted response to the Hamas attacks.

“People in general understand that if Netanyahu continues in power and Israel is not divided politically, we are witnessing something like the end of Palestinian territorial integrity in any form,” Mr. Hassan said. “It’s a drastic situation that people understand is a special moment in history.”

He has been surprised by the thirst for blood.

“It’s no exaggeration that I probably know at least 100 people who would be happy to leave their jobs, PhDs, university, whatever to go and fight,” he said. “I’ve never seen something like this.”

But the calculus of conflict is different than in years past. Not only have recent crises stripped people in Lebanon of personal means, but the international environment has grown less supportive. With the normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries, many of those countries “are not engaged with Lebanon – and a lot of non-Arab countries are preoccupied with other things,” said Makram Ouaiss, the executive director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies.

None of that means Lebanon will remain on the sidelines of Israel’s fight with Hamas. Iran holds immense sway, and its rhetoric is menacing. Even if both Israel and Lebanon prefer restraint, miscalculations can lead to escalation, said Mark Daou, an independent member of Lebanon’s parliament.

But war, he said, “will not resolve the Palestinian issue – nor will it make Lebanon any better.”