TYRE, Lebanon — Twelve miles north of Lebanon's border with Israel, the ancient coastal city of Tyre has become an unlikely battleground in Israel's war with the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
Tyre, one of Lebanon's biggest cities, is a coastal hub and in peacetime a thriving tourist destination.
But in late May, before the current ceasefire began, Israel started targeting the entire city, apart from a small, largely Christian enclave on the seaside, saying it was hitting Hezbollah fighters. Thousands of people streamed into that neighborhood — the last relatively safe place in the city.
Days later, Israel warned residents of the historic Christian neighborhood it could attack there too.
The warning, which came without proof that Hezbollah was operating in the Christian quarter, left residents of the ancient city without any safe haven.
An ancient city facing new destruction
On a recent Sunday, a low-flying Israeli drone buzzed over Tyre's Antiquities neighborhood, where Israeli airstrikes had hit the previous week. The area is named after ancient Roman sites, as well as those associated with Alexander the Great, who built a causeway to conquer the island city.
Later in the day, an Israeli airstrike on a century-old house near the gate of the ancient port — a UNESCO-listed World Heritage site — damaged ancient columns and toppled stone capitals.
On one of the neighborhood blocks, previous strikes over the past two weeks had flattened every building. In a landscape drained of color, building rubble and dead, blackened trees were coated with grey concrete dust.
Metallic letters from an upscale beauty salon were hanging by wires over windows with the glass blown out.
"You can see they destroyed everything," said Ali al-Ra'i, a local policeman. "This building fell, and that building."
Ra'i grew increasingly nervous as the high-pitched whine of an Israeli drone grew louder. "They are above us now. It's dangerous," he said, before urging everyone to leave.
Unable to leave, residents rely on each other
In another neighborhood, a view of the brilliant deep blue of the Mediterranean, a block away, framed the ruins of what had been a famous creamery – Karrit Ice Cream.
"It was an old-established family," said Ra'i. "The ice cream was famous – and tasty."
Rida Karrit, one of the owners, evacuated with his Ukrainian wife after the four-story building was struck at the end of May. He and his brothers and their families lived above the ice cream plant. The family, who trace their ancestry to Crete, was so well known that the neighborhood was named after them.
"I used to think maybe they were right about Hezbollah being in places – and then they hit our house," Karrit told NPR in Sidon as he was leaving. His wife was heading back to Ukraine, where she felt safer, even though a war is being fought there too.
Despite Israel's warnings that residents were at risk of being killed if they stayed, on these few blocks alone, dozens of families remained. Many of them were elderly or disabled. All of them were poor.
Maysa Tafla and her husband Issa Tafla have a small coffee shop beneath their apartment building overlooking the sea. She said they stayed despite the danger because her husband, a tailor, is partially paralyzed.
More than 1.2 million people in Lebanon have been displaced by the war between Israel and Hezbollah, which began on March 2, according to the United Nations. The crisis-ridden Lebanese government had turned public schools into shelters, but most were filled beyond capacity.
"If he needed the bathroom in a shelter, he would have to wait in line for three or four hours," she said.
Tafla, 55, said after Israel's warnings that it could attack their neighborhood, they stayed in a hotel for a few days until they ran out of money and returned home.
"If there were an attack, he would not be able to run," she said of her husband, 67. "We sit at home with our hands on our hearts," she said, referring to herself and her two daughters. "We will not leave him."
In another apartment building nestled between seaside restaurants, a family that had remained waved to the Taflas from their balcony.
"We know everyone in these apartments," she said. "If you stay in Tyre, you will see life is all about singing, music, the beach, drinking, everything."
With that, Tafla said they would have known if there were Hezbollah fighters in their midst.
Despite the danger, the poor, elderly and disabled remain
Alwan Sharafaddine, the deputy mayor of Tyre, said at least 9,000 people — about 15 percent of the population — have remained in the city since Israel issued warnings to evacuate.
The mayor, Hassan Dbouk, said while people are receiving help from U.N. organizations, there was little assistance from the Lebanese government.
Lebanon's long-running economic crisis means most people have no savings.
Here, communities are the safety net.
Hassan Sabbagh was walking home with his 10-year-old son. He held a plastic bag with a large container of rice with shredded chicken and slivered almonds made by his neighbor.
"If we were in Sidon or Beirut and we were in the streets, some people would say 'you're not from here, leave, you know?" said Sabbagh, who has a shop selling and repairing air conditioners.
Sabbagh and his family used their apartment during the day — washing up and eating meals there. But at night, he said, he and his wife rolled out mattresses on the beach, placing the children between them and sleeping on the sand in case their apartment building was hit.
Other families had pitched small tents on the beach, while some had erected makeshift tents using blankets hung from tree branches on the lawns of beachfront hotels.
One woman sat on a sidewalk playing with an orange cat in a cardboard box. She and her family were displaced from villages further south. Her home there has now been destroyed.
"We are trying to manage," said Anaal Slaibi, 50. She said she and her niece tried and failed to find somewhere in the safer Christian quarter to stay.
Now they were renting a storefront for $250 a month so her ill, elderly mother had access to a bathroom. "We looked, we looked everywhere," she said. "We couldn't find anything, and we didn't have money to rent there."
"Whatever happens will happen," said her niece Amina Haidous, 37.
An ancient legacy, historic co-existence
Tyre is the site of an ancient Phoenician port city which ruled over colonies in Cadiz and Carthage. It was famous for a purple dye worn only by royalty and that was extracted from murex sea snails.
Alexander the Great conquered it in 332 BCE after building a causeway to what had been considered an impregnable island fortress.
At the modern port in the Christian quarter of Tyre, small wooden tourist and fishing boats were moored to the docks.
One of the fishermen, Mohammad, said he was sleeping on a boat because 14 displaced members of his wife's family were staying at his own home. Mohammad did not want to give his full name because of "the dangerous times" they were going through.
He said Tyre, though remained immune to the sectarian tension that has occurred in other places between Muslims and Christians. In some towns and neighborhoods, Christian residents have prevented displaced Shia Muslims from staying, in fear that they could become a target of Israel — Hezbollah is itself made up of Shia, and backed by the Shia theocratic regime in Iran.
It does not matter "whether you are Ali or Elias," he said, using the example of two common Muslim and Christian names. He pointed out that even the boats named after their owners, bobbing in the harbor, are intermingled.
Just 50 miles from the Lebanese capital, residents here take pride in the city's unique identity.
Jafaar al-Samra had just sold an octopus, minutes after spearing it while snorkeling. Asked how life is in the city, Sumra, 63, played a song on his phone — a love song to the sea — and sang along to it.
Further along the beach, Mimi Istanbouli, a displaced teacher, had slipped off her gold-colored loafers and had her toes in the sand.
She and her mother, who are Muslim, were displaced from another part of Tyre.
Istanbouli, 32, said she didn't leave the city because her elderly mother is ill and can't wait in line for hours for a bathroom, as they would have to, even if they found room in a shelter. They were sleeping in a theatre in the Christian quarter.
"From many years ago, they are our neighbors," she said as church bells ring for Sunday mass. "Here Christians are good neighbors, perfect neighbors."
The silk polka-dot scarf covering her hair fluttered in the breeze. She couldn't charge her phone and didn't have internet, so she couldn't teach.
She said it was difficult but they have to stay to defend the land.
"If we have to stay like this, we stay, but we don't let Israel take our country — never. It's ours," she said.
In a place where Jesus walked, Christians cling to their faith
Not far from the port, the 18th-century Greek Catholic Saint Thomas Cathedral was the only church still holding services in the war-ravaged city.
Tyre was an important center of early Christianity. According to the gospels, Jesus traveled here from biblical Galilee, while the apostle Paul established a thriving church here.
Two thousand years later, the Melkite Archbishop of Tyre, Georges Eskandar, was saying mass in the stone cathedral with about one hundred people filling the pews.
The Vatican ambassador, Paolo Borgia, had come from Beirut for the service. Some of the women had their hair covered in lace mantillas, an old Catholic custom. Two altar girls were dressed in t-shirts and shorts.
"There is no city more than Soor that exemplifies co-existence," the bishop told NPR, referring to Tyre by its Arabic name.
To the congregation, he noted in his sermon that the people of Tyre were historically raised to live together.
"We should ensure we don't fear each other, that we fear for each other," he said, referring to different religious groups. He told them not to let fear divide them.
Borgio, the ambassador, told them he brought greetings from Pope Leo. A crowd of families pressed around him after the mass, smiling and holding up their small children for him to bless.
Dbouk, the mayor of Tyre, said that, unlike some other towns where Christians fearing Israeli attacks have kept away displaced Shiite Muslims, Tyre's solidarity has served it well.
"Tyre is the real face of the Lebanese family, the big Lebanese family," he said.
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