My daughter lives in Beirut.
She is there as I write this. My ex-husband Karim lives there too.
The notifications come through in a particular rhythm now. Not news alerts. Just her messages. A photo of the sky. A voice note. Sometimes nothing for a few hours, and something in my body responds before my mind has caught up with it.
I grew up between worlds. I know Lebanon the way you know a place that is also family, through the quality of light on a particular street, through the man I married and the children we made who carry both of us in their faces.
My daughter looks European. She has a name that tells a different story. People's faces change when they hear it.
She is there now because it is her home too.
Yesterday
Yesterday, Israel launched what it called its largest coordinated strikes since this war began.
254 people killed in a single day. Fifty fighter jets. A hundred and sixty munitions. Over a hundred targets in ten minutes.
Hours earlier, a ceasefire between the US and Iran had been announced. Lebanon's president welcomed it. Netanyahu said it did not apply to Lebanon.
More than 1.2 million people have been displaced since March 2.
A man named Fadi Zaydan, 35, had been preparing to go home to Nabatieh with his parents when the news came through. "We can't take this anymore," he said. "Sleeping in a tent, not showering, the uncertainty. But we'll be targeted if we go home."
I read that and felt it in my chest before I could name what it was.
The fourteen million
I want to speak to something that does not appear in the casualty counts.
The Lebanese diaspora numbers up to fourteen million people worldwide, more than the population of Lebanon itself.
Right now, fourteen million people are tracking WhatsApp signals, watching the sky in photographs, lying awake with a quality of dread that arrives before the mind has assembled a reason for it.
A study published in ScienceDirect found that forty-one percent of Lebanese expatriates scored above clinical thresholds for anxiety and depression nine months after the Beirut port explosion, despite not being physically present for it.
The event happened in the homeland. Experienced through screens and phone calls and family faces on video. That was sufficient to produce clinical-level distress in nearly half the diaspora.
The body does not require proximity to activate. It requires connection.
The activation does not stay in the present moment either. It reaches back through the nervous system, finding every previous layer of fear stored there: personal history, family history, the generations before that.
Epigenetic research has shown that the children and grandchildren of people who lived through sustained threat carry the physiological signatures of that threat in their own bodies. Higher cortisol baselines. Altered stress responses. A nervous system calibrated for danger that is no longer present in the same form.
The grandmother who fled. The grandfather who watched. The mother who learned as a child that certain sounds mean hide.
Their children were born into relative safety and still find themselves scanning a room before they can settle. Still wake at 3am with something they cannot name.
The body is loyal to what it learned kept people alive.
No recovery window
There is a name for what Lebanon has been living with long before this escalation.
Psychiatrists call it Continuous Traumatic Stress, not post-traumatic, because there is no post. No recovery window. The body never fully exhales.
One Lebanese psychiatrist described the resilience narrative, the idea that Lebanese people are strong, that they rebuild, that they endure, as a harmful expectation.
A body does not become stronger by never being allowed to rest. It becomes more defended. More braced. More hypervigilant.
Anyone who has sat at a table in Lebanon, in Syria, across the Middle East, knows the particular quality of that hospitality. The tfaddal. The table that keeps expanding. The insistence that you are family.
That warmth and that chronic activation exist in the same body, at the same table. Both are entirely real.
The next layer
There are people doing extraordinary work holding this community right now.
Micheline Maalouf, a Syrian-Lebanese trauma therapist, is one of them. She is naming the rage, the moral injury, the refusal to pathologise what is a completely human response to mass harm. Follow her. Share her. Send her posts to the people you love who are inside this.
What I want to add is not a correction. It is the next layer.
Because once someone has named the rage and the grief and let it be real, they still have to be somewhere with it. In their body. In the room with the people they love who are also carrying it.
This is what I know how to do.
If someone you love is going through this: stay with them
Do not offer one prompt and move on. Be generous. Here is a set of questions you can bring to a conversation, a phone call, a voice note.
You do not need to ask all of them. You need to ask one and then actually stay for the answer.
Set the container first. Say: I have time. I am not going to fix anything. I just want to know what it is like for you right now.
Then, slowly, not all at once, any of these:
- Tell me what is happening in your body right now.
- Tell me where you feel this most: your chest, your throat, your stomach.
- Tell me what the hardest moment has been in the last 24 hours.
- Tell me something you have not been able to say to anyone yet.
- Tell me what you need right now that nobody is giving you.
- Tell me what you are most afraid of.
- Tell me what you are holding for other people that you have not had space to put down.
- Tell me what has surprised you about yourself in how you are handling this.
- Tell me what it would mean to you if this stopped tomorrow.
- Tell me what you want people outside Lebanon to understand that they are not understanding.
After each answer, only three responses. No fixing. No jumping to the next question.
Thank you, I heard you.
Clarify that, say more.
Summarise that, give me the one thing at the centre.
Then stay in the silence for a moment before you move on.
This is not therapy. This is presence. It is the most powerful thing one human being can offer another when the world is on fire and there is nothing to fix.
This morning
My daughter sent me a voice note this morning.
She sounded like herself. Like someone who has learned to hold ordinary life and extraordinary circumstance at the same time, the way people do when they have no other option.
I listened to it three times.
Then I stayed with what was in my body. The tightening. The specific quality of relief. The fear still underneath it, because the notifications keep coming and the situation does not resolve.
I did not try to fix it.
I let it be there. I witnessed it in myself first. Because that is always where it starts.
The fear is already here.
You do not have to carry it alone.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette