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Beirut: It waes 2:14 in the afternoon when the first bomb fell, and the sudden sound of crashing metal was like a heavy truck had overturned outside our office. The Israeli strike had hit somewhere nearby.

Within seconds, plumes of smoke were rising across Beirut’s skyline, from the coastal corniche, down to the city’s busiest intersection, up from one of its wealthiest neighbourhoods and one of its poorest. Boom. Boom. Boom. We stopped counting. One staffer ran into the office from downstairs, her face white and lips trembling.

During the 10 years that Beirut has been my home, the Lebanese capital has lived through rounds of Israeli bombing, Israel’s detonation of pagers belonging to Hezbollah members and a devastating port explosion in 2020.

But Wednesday was the first time it felt like the city had been left breathless.

In a span of 10 minutes, Israel says it hit 100 targets in Lebanon. Most were in Beirut. Over 300 people were killed, including more than 100 women, children and elderly. Late night TV shows said it rivalled one of the worst days during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut – in August of that year, when roughly 300 people were killed over some 10 hours of bombardment.

Acrid smoke, frantic calls and looks of horror

Before Wednesday’s bombardment, many Lebanese had hoped that a ceasefire announced hours earlier in the Iran war would bring a pause in the more than a month of fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

It is still not clear what the targets were. Israel said it hit Hezbollah command and control centres, but the only Hezbollah official it reported killing was an aide to the group’s secretary general.

As bombs fell, panicked commuters got stuck in traffic while trying to rush home to move their families, unsure where Israel may hit next. Others made frantic calls on an overwhelmed communication network, looking for loved ones or yelling at relatives to pack up and leave.

Confused drivers stared at the acrid black and white smoke billowing over the city, trying to determine which road to take.

In the stricken areas, the mayhem was on another level. People’s faces were covered in black soot. At one of Beirut’s busiest intersections, on Corniche al-Mazraa, an Associated Press photographer saw charred cars piled on top of each other. A body was crushed inside one.

In Mar Elias, one of Beirut’s main commercial streets, a blast raised dust and debris that hid the view of the entire block. Across the street, Sahar Charara was huddled in her apartment.

Ever since the 2020 port explosion, in which her two children suffered minor injuries, Charara has tried to protect herself from seeing the victims of violence – a sign of how years of accumulated heartbreaks have marked Lebanese.

But when the dust cleared, she looked outside and saw the despair of an entire city on the face of an elderly woman frozen in place and screaming for minutes.

“There was so much horror and fear in her screaming,” Charara said.

When Charara left her apartment an hour later, she exchanged a few words with her neighbour whose shop was destroyed. The expression on her face was a “blank look of horror”, Charara said.

She learned later from her building’s doorman that another neighbour had fallen from the balcony and died from the impact.

Buildings crumble to ground

A strike hit near the home of Nahida Khalil, close to the corniche. Then she saw smoke also coming from the direction of her brother’s building further up the street.

The next 15 minutes felt like an eternity as she tried to call her brother, with no answer. Finally, his wife responded, screaming that their building was hit.

They had searched through the black smoke filling their apartment to find their three children. When they finally made it to the street, they saw half of their building had been levelled, and the other half was slowly tumbling down as rescuers searched for the missing.

“I lived through all the wars since 1975. I never felt this fear,” Khalil, who lived in the same building for decades, said.

“These strikes are meant to terrorise … and to spoil the ceasefire and cause division” between Lebanese people.

101st strike

At hospitals, staff were still trying to identify dozens of bodies.

The last strike came shortly after midnight, hitting the southern suburbs of Beirut, which have been regularly hit during the war.

Mohammed Mehdi’s barbershop, in operation for 30 years, was destroyed.

During the current war, he and his family fled their home in the neighbourhood, Chiyah, and now sleep in a dentist clinic, near Khalil’s family building. But he made it a point to keep his barber shop open, going to it every day to meet friends, have coffee and give the occasional haircut. He shut down Wednesday as bombs starting falling across the city.

“They carried out 100 strikes. Ours was the 101st,” he said Thursday.

“I am still in shock, and I don’t know where things are going. I lost my job and this loss may last for a while.”