Beirut, Lebanon – The first time Eliah Kaylough, 26, heard the thunderous explosion, he was so terrified that he instinctively ran for cover. On Tuesday this week, he had just started his shift as a waiter at a restaurant on busy Gemmayze Street in east Beirut when he was suddenly startled by the sound of a large explosion.
For Kaylough, this immediately triggered memories of the massive port explosion in 2020 and he became fearful that the city was experiencing a new explosion or was under attack.
But as he ran out of the restaurant, a man from a nearby store stopped him and explained that Beirut was not being bombed. The sound, Kaylough discovered, was a sonic boom, a thunderous noise caused by an object moving faster than the speed of sound.
Israeli jets have increasingly been unleashing these sonic booms over Lebanon since October 7 last year, following the attack on southern Israel by Hamas. But the booms that sounded across Beirut on Tuesday were the loudest ever heard in the city, several residents told Al Jazeera.
Kaylough said it was the first time he had heard one since Israel tends to launch sonic booms in other parts of the country and city.
“The sound was scary and I really thought we were under attack,” Kaylouh told Al Jazeera on Thursday night at the restaurant, where he was back at work. “I remember putting on my hat and grabbing my bag and being ready to close the store.”
Since October, the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and Israel have been involved in a low-intensity conflict. On Friday, Israel intensified its attacks, killing Hamas official Samer al-Hajj in a drone strike on the coastal city of Sidon, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Lebanon’s southern border.
Throughout the Gaza war, however, Israel has been releasing sonic booms while flying at low altitudes over Lebanon in an apparent effort to intimidate and terrorize the population, analysts and residents told Al Jazeera.
“We are concerned about the alleged use of sonic booms by Israeli aircraft over Lebanon, which has caused great fear among the civilian population,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanese researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Parties to armed conflict must not use intimidation methods against the civilian population.”
In fact, the sonic booms heard earlier this week occurred just two days after the anniversary of the Beirut port explosion on August 4, 2020, which devastated large areas of Beirut, killed more than 200 people and injured thousands. The explosion was caused by a fire in a warehouse where a stockpile of highly combustible ammonium nitrate was being stored.
Tuesday’s sonic boom was triggered moments before Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was to begin a speech. Last month, tensions between the enemies increased after Israel assassinated senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran’s capital, Tehran.
Systematic use of ‘sound terror’
The use of sonic booms is part of a broader trend of psychological warfare that Israel is waging against the Lebanese population, according to Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a sound expert and founder of Earshot, a nonprofit that conducts audio analysis to track human rights abuses and state violations. violence.
Abu Hamdan said that since the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, which lasted 34 days and left 1,100 Lebanese citizens and 165 Israelis dead, Israel has routinely violated Lebanese airspace with its fighter jets to scare civilians.
“Since the 2006 truce, there have been more than 22,000 Israeli aerial violations in Lebanon. In 2020 alone, there were more than 2,000 [air violations] with no response from Hezbollah, Abu Hamdan told Al Jazeera.
Abu Hamdan believes that, since last October, Israel has also used sonic booms as an “acoustic reminder that [Israel] can turn Lebanon into Gaza at any time.”
He said Israel’s increasing use of sonic booms reflects the escalation of the conflict with Hezbollah in recent months.
“There is an escalation and we are seeing this escalation in the sound. The next phase of escalation is, of course, material destruction,” said Abu Hamdan.
Rana Farhat, 28, a resident of Beirut, said Israel’s intimidation tactics are having the desired effect. She heard the sonic booms on Aug. 6 while having dinner with her family at a restaurant in a city north of Beirut.
They were surprised when they heard the sound of an explosion, but her parents tried to reassure her and her siblings that Beirut was not being attacked. Everyone quickly checked their phones to find out what was going on.
“We were all checking the news to see if it was an explosion or not,” said Farhat, 28, as he smoked shisha in a Beirut cafe on Thursday night. “There were young children in the restaurant and they were clearly scared. They don’t understand what these sounds mean.”
Recurrent trauma
The murmur of fighter planes and other explosion-like noises could re-traumatize populations that have survived previous explosions and wars, Abu Hamdan said.
In the long term, recurring jet and explosion sounds can even increase the risk of stroke and deplete calcium deposits in the heart, according to medical studies he cited.
“Once you have been exposed to [jet or blast] sounds that have produced the kind of fear they have in this country, so whenever you hear them – even quietly – it will produce the same stress response [in an individual]”, explained Abu Hamdan.
Kaylough said the sonic booms he heard on Tuesday this week transported him back to the explosion at Beirut port. That day, he was working in a shopping mall when a sudden explosion shattered the glass around him and ripped the doors off the store where he worked.
“The sound was so loud. I remember people were screaming but I couldn’t hear them,” he told Al Jazeera.
After the initial shock, Kaylough felt a sudden pain and realized that a large piece of metal was stuck in his leg. He was rushed to the hospital and eventually treated by doctors.
Although Kaylough suffered no long-term physical injuries, he says the sonic booms are triggering the trauma he experienced that day.
“THE [sound from] the sonic boom took me back to the moment of the explosion, but I’m just trying not to think about it,” he said.
Farhat said the sonic booms also remind her of the 2006 war.
At the time, her neighborhood was not being directly hit, but she remembers watching television coverage of the war with her parents. At age 10, she realized that the scenes of collapsed buildings and rubble she saw were being filmed a short drive from her home.
She also remembers hearing the sound of Israeli fighter jets flying over Beirut to bomb the southern suburbs. Although Farhat doesn’t know whether another war is imminent over Beirut at this time, she insisted that Israel’s frightening tactics will not force her to leave her beloved city.
“They are just trying to scare us, but I consider it a sign of weakness,” she told Al Jazeera. “No matter what happens, I don’t want to leave the house and I won’t. I was born here, raised here and I will stay here.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
