"Nothing To Lose" How Lebanon's Women-Led Civil Society is Building On The Edge of Despair

On the afternoon of August 4, Aya Zantout sat in Al Makan, the cultural center in the Mar Elias neighborhood of Beirut, where she often volunteered. Suddenly, from her seat just a few feet from the office’s glass door, she heard a strange boom, followed by a thunderous sound that shook the building and sent the door heaving from its hinges. Glass shattered in every direction. “I can’t describe it in words,” she recalled to me in early August, “the way the door flew, the sounds, it was so scary.”

Dazed, Zantout stood on shaky legs and rushed to find Al Makan’s founder, Hiba Khodr, and Khodr’s daughter Jude Chehab down the hall. Surrounded by broken glass, they huddled together, the ground beneath them quaking. “We thought Israel must be bombing us,” she said. They strained for the sound of another bomb, furtively checking their phones. The signal was scrambled. A few moments later, they opened the front door, dashing across a street covered with debris and stunned neighbors, to the top-floor apartment shared by Khodr and Chehab. They found a home in disarray: furniture blown out of place and chunks of the ceiling littering the floor. From the window, they stared in the direction of the sea, where an enormous, poison-pink cloud billowed on the shore. Below, Beirut lay in pieces. [Read the full article at The Intercept]