Nader El Khalil had worked in the same nut and confectionery shop on Corniche al-Mazraa for thirty-five years. He knew which bins needed refilling before lunchtime. He knew the regulars by their orders. He had just got engaged. Then, on the afternoon of Wednesday the 8th of April 2026, an Israeli airstrike razed the building around him, and Nader was gone.
More than twenty-four hours after the attack, rescue crews were still searching through the rubble at the site for the remains of victims. That’s the thing about this kind of violence – it doesn’t end when the planes leave. It carries on, in the searching, the identifying, the not-knowing.
An Attack Designed to Terrorise
The assault that killed Nader was called, with characteristic grandiosity, “Operation Eternal Darkness.” Fifty fighter jets of the Israeli Air Force dropped around 160 munitions, striking five different neighbourhoods in the capital’s central and coastal areas without warning. Several strikes occurred in busy commercial and residential locations during rush hour, causing widespread panic. It was, by Israel’s own account, its largest coordinated attack across Lebanon since it started its assault in early March.
The numbers accumulate the way numbers always do in wars – until they don’t feel like numbers anymore. On Wednesday, Lebanon’s Civil Defence said 254 people were killed and 1,165 others were wounded in the attacks. By Friday, Lebanon’s health ministry revised the number to over 300 killed. A list of the dead released by the ministry included 30 children and 70 women.
The selection of targets was designed to terrorise. An Israeli airstrike hit a cemetery in the Bekaa Valley during a funeral, killing at least ten mourners and wounding four others. Three girls were killed in an Israeli attack on the coastal town of Adloun, south of Sidon. Doctors Without Borders reported its healthcare staff were injured by Israeli forces at Hiram Hospital in Tyre. Multiple Israeli strikes damaged the last main bridge linking southern Lebanon with the rest of the country, threatening to sever tens of thousands from access to humanitarian aid and medical care.
Across the capital, Beirut’s hospitals buckled. Dr. Eveline Hitti, chair of the emergency department at the American University of Beirut Hospital, described it as one of the largest mass casualty events the facility had experienced in fifteen years.
The attack came, note, within hours of the United States and Iran agreeing to a two-week truce after five weeks of war. Pakistan, which helped broker the deal, said Lebanon was included in the ceasefire. Israel and the United States disagreed. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu vowed his military would press on.
What the Camera Misses
Here is what the cameras mostly didn’t capture, because cameras go where the fire is, not where the kettle is put on.
While Israel’s jets were still in the skies, ordinary Lebanese people were mobilising. Not governments, not NGOs, just ordinary citizens. A restaurant owner in Sidon who opened his kitchen to strangers. Residents of the Ras el-Nabaa neighbourhood of Beirut who simply positioned themselves at street corners to direct the terrified, the displaced, the lost.
Social media users started sharing information to help those fleeing, circulating alternative routes to ease congestion on the highways. With queues of traffic at a standstill, residents of towns and villages on the coast started distributing water and some brought meals for those stuck in their cars. Numbers for local mechanics were handed out in case anyone’s car broke down on the road.
There is a quality to these gestures that resists the language of policy and strategy. Nobody called a meeting. Nobody wrote a terms of reference. In the Chouf district of Mount Lebanon, activists set up a database of local homes willing to take in the displaced. “What we are doing is serving our people – our aim is community solidarity,” said one of the activists.
In the village of Zaroun, in Mount Lebanon, a group calling itself “To the People” did what the name promises. They opened the social club in the town and received about 60 families. They also provided sleeping materials and food to the displaced.
Nation Station, Ahla Fawda, and the Kitchen as Command Centre
Some of these initiatives have names. Nation Station is a community kitchen that was born in the rubble of the 2020 Beirut Port explosion – a catastrophe that killed over 200 people and destroyed much of the city’s waterfront. When the bombs came again, Nation Station simply ramped up crisis operations. By mid-March, it was serving around 1,000 meals a day and distributing them to three collective shelters. By April it had prepared over 28,000 meals in total. The kitchen buzzes daily with volunteers who often just show up, word having reached them through WhatsApp groups or Instagram posts or a friend’s friend. Nation Station is not affiliated with any political party, any government ministry, any international body. It is, in the precise and radical sense, a community kitchen.
Near it, the Ahla Fawda organisation (whose name translates roughly as beautiful chaos) is another case study in informal adaptation. Usually focused on urban planning and environmental projects like buying up plastic waste, Ahla Fawda instantly redirected its efforts towards crisis response after Wednesday’s Israeli attacks. Its Eco Hub became a refuge where displaced people could come for a meal, access clean clothing, or to simply sit in a space away from the rubble and carnage. A library-café called Barzakh partnered to provide meals cooked on-site by volunteers. There are no matching uniforms here. No intake processing. Just an open door.
Beit el Baraka, a social enterprise embedded in some of Beirut’s most economically distressed neighbourhoods, has served over 100,000 cooked meals since March, and has been delivering blankets, food and oil to villages south of the Litani River – the area hardest hit and most cut off.
FoodBlessed, another volunteer-driven initiative, is delivering tents, mattresses, food parcels and targeted kits to displaced families. The specificity of these kits, Baby Essentials, Family Essentials, is a kind of astuteness that large bureaucratic systems rarely manage.
Arcenciel, one of Lebanon’s older humanitarian organisations, is providing support specifically to people with disabilities – a group that formal emergency systems routinely overlook. They have been delivering assistive medical devices, psycho-social support sessions, and medical waste collection.
Offrejoie, one of the country’s most established civil society bodies, mobilised volunteers within hours of the April 8 strikes, organising relief campaigns and beginning the crucial work of making damaged homes safe.
The Refugee-Led Model: Basmeh & Zeitooneh and the Logic of Prior Experience
Among the responders is an organisation whose very origins encode the logic of informal mutual aid. Basmeh & Zeitooneh was founded in 2012 by a group of Syrian refugees who began by visiting the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut to assess what was needed and to fill the gaps left by other aid agencies. Five volunteers. No headquarters. No prior institutional identity. Today it operates six community centres in Lebanon.
When the 2026 war began, Basmeh & Zeitooneh activated its emergency response within hours. The operations manager later described the first forty-eight hours plainly: “We couldn’t wait for approvals – we just used our own WhatsApp groups to mobilise help and get food to displaced families.”
Crucially, Basmeh & Zeitooneh operates on a principle of what it calls “indivisible humanity” – responding to need rather than legal status or nationality. In a displacement crisis that has again exposed Lebanon’s discriminatory hierarchies of belonging, this matters enormously. Officially, government shelters are open to all. In practice, non-Lebanese people – Syrian refugees, Palestinian families displaced yet again, migrant workers living under the kafala system – have reportedly been turned away. The informal networks, the community kitchens, the WhatsApp groups – these are the spaces where people who fall through the official cracks can still find something.
The Anti-Racism Movement has been supporting migrant workers, and Reclaim Our Rights, a coalition of women migrant workers, has mobilised its membership, described as community leaders, mothers and activists, to run community kitchens, distribute food boxes, and assist displaced migrant women with rent for informal shelters. These are people helping groups that are largely invisible to official emergency systems.
The Oldest Knowledge: Mutual Aid Before It Had a Name
What is happening in Lebanon is new in its specific technologies – the WhatsApp group, the Instagram fundraiser, the Google spreadsheet tracking available shelter – but ancient in its underlying structure. Before there were NGOs, before there were states, before there were humanitarian coordination clusters, there was the neighbour who opened the door. The elder who knew which family needed what. The network of obligation and care that made survival possible in a world that was frequently trying to kill you.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke often of the beloved community not as a utopian fantasy, but as a practical programme. A community in which the suffering of one is the business of all. A community defined not by geography or blood or sect, but by the decision – freely made, daily renewed – to show up for each other. He argued it was the only durable form of politics, the only foundation on which anything worth having could be built.
The Lebanese people did not need to read King to understand this. They have been living this for decades, building networks of mutual aid across every fracture their society contains – sectarian, class, regional – because the state has so often been absent, corrupt, or under bombardment. Each crisis has deepened the informal infrastructure, added names to the WhatsApp groups, extended the web of obligation.
The formal political institutions of the world – the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, the governments of Europe and North America – have not stopped the bombs falling on Lebanon. They have issued statements. They have called emergency sessions. They have feigned concern. And the planes have continued. This is not a new observation, but its implications are worth sitting with: if the formal structures of international order cannot or will not protect civilian populations from this kind of violence, what can?
Perhaps part of the answer is the beloved community – rejecting discrimination, preserving dignity and agency, building on trust and love, prioritising care and inclusion. This is not a description of a temporary emergency measure. It is a description of the only political form that has proven consistently capable of caring for people in the face of forces that wish them harm. It is what the Lakota were doing before the cavalry arrived, and what they continued doing after. It is what Black communities in the American South were doing before the Civil Rights Act, and what sustained them through the long years when legal equality remained a promise. It is what the Lebanese have been doing for decades.
Local community, real community, the beloved kind, the kind that doesn’t wait for permission, may be the most radical thing left. Not because it ends wars. It doesn’t. Nader El Khalil is still gone, and the planes have not been grounded. But because it is the thing that war is trying to destroy – the conviction that the person next to you matters. That their life is yours to protect. That their grief is yours to carry. In a world in which states routinely fail their obligations to their own citizens, let alone to those their weapons kill, the beloved community is not an alternative to politics. It is the most durable politics there is.
While the nut shop is rubble and families grieve, strangers continue to rally.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
