I’ve lost 62 percent of my life to war
With Lebanon under a new invasion by Israel, its people are calculating the toll from years of conflict.
I entered my father’s date of birth as it appeared in his passport, November 15, 1947, and clicked Start. The website conflict calculator WarsinLebanon.com—launched after the latest combat into which Hezbollah dragged the country, an act of retaliation for the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—enables Lebanese citizens to discover exactly how many days of their lives have been spent in the shadow of conflict. In an instant, it provides a precise calculation and enumerates the main events of the time.
My father, who is nearing 80, lives with my mother in a small apartment my siblings and I rented for them in the Aley region of Mount Lebanon near Beirut. They have been there since the previous war, which began on October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel from Lebanon’s southern border in support of Hamas, a day after the massacre committed by Hamas fighters in Israel.
Entire lifetimes spent in wartime, calculated by the website in cold statistics, including 47.1 percent of my father’s: That amounts to exactly 36 years, 10 months, and 12 days—his life’s accumulated balance of conflict. War continues to carve furrows into his wrinkled skin with each missile and shell.
He was born one year before the Nakba (the Catastrophe), as Arabs describe it—when the State of Israel was declared and some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to become refugees. He has lived his entire life under the clouds of war, starting with skirmishes on the Lebanese-Israeli border in 1948 that led to the 1949 armistice. Conflict continued with the “mini” civil war of 1958, a symptom of the Cold War and regional struggle between Arab Nasserism—the secular, anti-imperialist ideology that emerged in the 1950s under the Egyptian president—and the Western powers (some of which had participated in what Arabs call the “Tripartite Aggression” against Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956).
Lebanon’s president at the time, Camille Chamoun, refused to sever ties with the West, declaring his support for the US-backed “Baghdad Pact” between Iraq, Turkey, Britain, Pakistan and Iran, aimed at containing Soviet expansion. It prompted civil conflict between Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The US military intervened, landing Marines on Lebanese shores. Although my father was a child of only 11 then, his memory stores many scenes and events from that upheaval.
Then, at the age of 20, he lived through the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which Arabs dubbed the Naksa (the Setback). My father was not a man of Arab nationalist leanings but amid the general frustration, he too felt the profound despondency of Arab defeat and Israeli victory. Two years later, he witnessed the legitimization of Palestinian armed action from south Lebanon via the Cairo Agreement between Yasser Arafat and the Lebanese army.
The south, where my father was born and raised, became a sanctuary for Palestinian fedayeen fighters to train and launch attacks against Israel. In his youth, he never felt the urge to engage in politics, join a party or bear arms under a militia. He always stood against weapons, even hunting rifles. He shunned my maternal uncle for months after he once left a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in his room in our house; my younger brother reached for it to play, setting off a burst of gunfire, the bullets lodging in the ceiling. That incident almost turned into a catastrophe. I remember my father’s expression of fear and his fury at my uncle. He passed his loathing of weaponry down to my siblings and me.
In 1973, war again erupted between the Arabs and Israel, and my father lived through its impact on Lebanon. No sooner had that regional war subsided than the “War of Others on Our Land” began, as many Lebanese call it. In fact, it was a civil war, which broke out in April 1975 and lasted until 1990. Fifteen years of checkpoints, kidnappings, bombings, sniper fire and “killing by identity card” as the sectarian violence came to be known. My father experienced it all, including the 1978 Israeli invasion of south Lebanon, known as “Operation Litani,” and a broader invasion in 1982 that reached the capital Beirut to forcibly expel the fighters of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.
My father married my mother in that war, during a truce between two shellings. In their wedding photos, taken at a simple ceremony at my grandfather’s house, they look overwhelmed, exhausted and afraid. My mother smiles in those pictures, but I know well that behind her expression lay a genuine terror of war.
Often when the Litani River is mentioned in the news, she reminds me that she crossed that water holding me as an infant, fleeing north to escape Israeli soldiers. She could not swim and was afraid of the water. Her fear drove her across. She held no prophet’s staff nor did she walk upon water; it was horror and survival instinct that propelled her. The Israelis fired over the heads of the displaced people crossing the river, my mother remembers. In her terror, she dropped the bag containing my clothes and cloth diapers; she only wanted me to make it across. I was baptized in the waters of war.
I was my parents’ eldest, brought into the world during the conflict—just a few weeks after the February 6, 1984 uprising, when the Amal Movement militia, backed by the Syrian army, nullified the peace agreement with Israel the Lebanese parliament had approved on May 17, 1983. Then we lived through both “Wars of Elimination and Liberation” launched by Michel Aoun (who would later become president from 2016 to 2022) when he was an army commander—the first against the Christian Lebanese Forces militia, the second against the Syrian army between 1989 and 1990.
My mother was always more fragile than my father in their relationship with war. She would pray during every raid and bombardment in the ’90s, while we were growing up in the city of Nabatieh in south Lebanon. I remember her gathering my siblings and me, huddling with us in the narrow hallway of our house, away from the glass windows, murmuring her prayers from the Quran. My father was not religious; he would pace between the balcony and narrow corridor, stripped of supplications, bolstered only by sips of whiskey to confront the absurdity surrounding him.
In the summer of 1993, my father drove us in his old white Mercedes for hours along the coastal road from the south to Beirut, fleeing “Operation Accountability,” the offensive Israel launched to eliminate Hezbollah fighters. The car was heavy with suitcases, mattresses and my mother’s prayers. The scene repeated itself in April 1996 when we fled “The Grapes of Wrath,” known in Lebanon as the “April Aggression,” a 17-day campaign of the Israeli Defense Forces against Hezbollah.
In 2000, my father—like many other Lebanese—thought peace had finally arrived. Israel withdrew from the south and Hezbollah declared victory and “Liberation.” But Hezbollah’s “Divine Project” had only just begun. Its regional role controlling the state, its consequential choices and the fates of the Lebanese began to take shape following a speech delivered by party leader Hassan Nasrallah in the city of Bint Jbeil after Israel’s withdrawal. Nasrallah thanked two people and dedicated the “victory” and the liberated south to them: Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, and Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian tyrant.
It wasn’t long before my father was displaced again. In 2006, after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, waking the giant of war that had been slumbering for six years, my father was trapped with the family for days in the south before they managed to escape, piled into a small car stuffed with mattresses and blankets.
Between all these wars, my father lived through the bombings of terrorists from ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front that targeted Lebanon, roving political assassinations and civil wars both large and small. He was humiliated at the checkpoints of Lebanese militias and occupying soldiers—Israeli, Syrian and Palestinian. He has heard the impact of more bullets in his life than the number of white hairs on his head, which is thick with them. He survived possible death dozens of times, lurking in roadside bombs, shells and passing bullets. He has inhaled the smoke of some of those shells and missiles like the last drags of a cigarette; he smoked voraciously in shelters and on balconies overlooking destruction, stubbing out his butts as if they were the years crushed under the heel of a jackboot.
In October 2024, my father was on a fleeting visit to our village to check on our house when a major escalation occurred between Israel and Hezbollah. A good Samaritan gave him a ride to Beirut, joining a stream of people fleeing northward. They were stuck for over 12 hours in the traffic of displacement, an echo of the wars in which his entire life has been trapped since his birth in 1947—wars that continue to gnaw away at his life, day after day.
Amid the rubble of all the conflict, topped by the catastrophic Beirut port explosion in August 2020 and economic collapse, the Lebanese people were nevertheless pinning their hopes on a new era. It took shape at the beginning of 2025, following a ceasefire and talk of a “grand bargain” under which Hezbollah would finally agree to hand over its weapons to the state.
With a new president and a technocratic government in place after decades of corrupt and ineffectual rule, my father—along with many Lebanese—felt it could finally be possible to break from the cycle of war and destruction. There was hope Lebanon would escape the regional “axis” conflicts for which innocent people have paid with decades of suffering.
However, all hopes vanished when Israel resumed its airstrikes on the Iranian-backed militia and it became clear that Hezbollah’s talk of surrendering its arms had been no more than a lie. The group launched its rockets in retaliation for Khamenei, causing everything to collapse once again. Just like that, the “war counter” returned, stripping away still more days from my father’s life.
And now it was my turn to run my own birthdate through the website. I entered February 29, 1984, and hit Start. The result popped up: I have lost 62 percent of my life to war. Of my 42 years and 28 days on this Earth, 26 years and 29 days have been spent under the shadow of conflict.
I left Lebanon for good in January 2023, accepting a job offer in Washington, DC. I do not know if the last three years living abroad truly count toward that tally, although the weight of war at home follows me. I’ve returned to Beirut only once, in October 2023, after war had reignited. I went for 10 days to check on my parents, renew my passport and fly back. When I arrived and knocked on the door, my mother burst into tears as though she were seeing a child covered in blood and ash. She became a lake of tears, and I drowned in her. I struggled to stay afloat, trying to lift her up with me.
In the small apartment, my mother was forced to huddle with my father, my uncle, my aunts, my brother and my other brother’s wife and infant daughter. The war had tossed them all out of their homes in search of something—less than stability but better than death: survival.
I noticed my father lying on the living room floor, burying himself under two thick blankets while the rest of us ran a fan to try to break the unseasonable heat. His chills seem like the accumulation of decades of fires, wars and brutal massacres. Now, even in the warmth of a day like that hot one in October, when the news of yet another massacre blows from the television, he shivers with a cold no words of hope can heal.
Rami Al Amin is a journalist and multimedia producer for the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations Studies from St. Joseph’s University in Beirut. His published books in Arabic include I Am a Great Poet, a poetry collection, The Facebook Folk and The Two Weeping Women: Biography of a Statue.