Before I could even reply or acknowledge what had happened, there was a second explosion, even bigger than the first. As buildings crumbled and glass rained down upon us, I was paralyzed by fear.
When the dust began to settle, all I could see was devastation -- bloodied people, a café turned to ash, rubble where an entire street once stood. The sirens that followed were deafening.
Lebanon has been plagued by political corruption and crony capitalism for decades. And the pandemic and economic collapse only added to the already dire state of Lebanon. With growing poverty rates, inadequate basic medical care and broken infrastructure, we thought that we had already hit rock bottom and that nothing worse was possible anymore.
But then the explosion happened on Aug. 4, and we descended further into hell -- a hell that only our anger may save us from.
Though I was fortunate to escape the explosions without many cuts or bruises, one of my friends at the café was not so lucky. Broken glass fell on her, opening a wound in her leg that was bleeding heavily and required urgent stitching.
When we realized what had happened, we ran to several nearby hospitals, hoping the doctors at one them could treat her wounds. But when we arrived at each one, we were told they were either at capacity or had been too badly damaged to take in new patients.
We stopped the first taxi we could find, asking the driver to take us across the city -- hoping that we might find a hospital that could treat our friend further away from the explosion. But as we drove around in the taxi, it became clear the explosion had not damaged our neighborhood only -- it had rocked much of the city, leaving few hospitals able to help.
With the traffic growing worse by the minute, we could not reach a hospital and ended up going to a relative of my injured friend who lived closer by and was a medical doctor. By the time we arrived, his home had already been converted into a field hospital. Injured neighbors were streaming in, covered in blood, and begging for help.
They, too, could not get hospital care and needed urgent help. Without anesthesia and with few medical supplies available at home, he was forced to stitch wounds from his living room couch.
While the investigation into the cause of the explosions is still ongoing, one thing is clear: Our government and the whole ruling political class in Lebanon are directly responsible. By allowing 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate to be stored in the Beirut port for six years, it committed its biggest and most unforgivable crime to date. Now, Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab has announced the resignation of his government, less than a week after the explosion.
It wasn't the first transgression of the Lebanese ruling class against its people. Since October 2019, the financial crisis started to deepen with the banks imposing an illegal and unofficial capital control on most depositors while the oligarchs had been smuggling money -- our money -- abroad.
The economic collapse was coupled with a deterioration of
