One by one, the churchgoers trudged into the bare-brick cathedral in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre for the last Sunday Mass before Christmas, their clothes sodden by rain and their minds haunted by war.
There were no parties this year for the children, no music recitals and no Christmas tree in the city square. Much of the city is gone. Flattened apartment buildings. Mangled cars. Blown-out and abandoned mom-and-pop stores. After months of Israeli airstrikes, the holiday season began not with celebration, but with funerals as church members tended to their dead.
The pastor, Yaacoub Saab, did his best to lift spirits as he stepped up to the altar. “It’s a great blessing to gather and pray together,” he said. But later, out of earshot of his parishioners, he conceded that “we are finding it difficult to celebrate.”
Amid a cease-fire between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Tyre’s ancient Christian community has resigned itself to a muted Christmas this year. While most of Tyre’s 125,000 residents fled during the war, the city’s Christian quarter, nestled alongside the harbor with its winding alleyways, was one of the few neighborhoods where some people remained. For months, they survived largely on handouts of bread, cut off from the outside world as water, electricity and medicine dwindled.
Despite the reprieve from the violence in recent weeks, the community remains haunted by trauma and loss. When friends and loved ones cross paths in the street, festive greetings are the last thing on anyone’s tongue. “Thank God for your safety,” they would say.
On Sunday, after Mass was over, Charbel Alameh, 11, ran outside and jostled among friends to ring the church bells, the boys leaping into the air and pulling down with all their might on the hefty ropes. Charbel had gone months without seeing their faces. His mother, Souraya Alameh, who was pregnant, had decided to stay put when other families in the neighborhood fled. She feared having to give birth away from home in a hospital crammed with war wounded.
Like many Lebanese, the Alameh family had been caught off guard by Israel’s sudden bombing campaign in late September. The ramped-up offensive followed nearly a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which began firing rockets at Israel in October 2023 in solidarity with Hamas militants in Gaza.
Faced with one of the most intense air raids in contemporary warfare, hundreds of thousands of people tried to flee, and the highways in southern Lebanon quickly clogged with miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“There was nowhere for us to go,” recounted Ms. Alameh as she sat in the family’s damp, single-room home, watching intently over little Christina as she slept in her cot — a child of war born into an uncertain peace.
After months spent sheltering as Israeli fighter jets roared overhead, members of the family were desperate to claw back some sense of holiday cheer. They had already prepared and wrapped their gifts months ago, ready to cart them away in case they needed to flee. Charbel and his younger brother, Elias, had decorated a small Christmas tree in the corner and were now tucking into baklava as members of the local clergy came in to see the newborn baby.
Both boys are receiving trauma counseling at school, Ms. Alameh said. “We tried to explain as much as a child’s understanding allows,” she said, “but at the end of the war, we, the adults, needed someone to explain what had happened, too.”
Next door, the Kahwaji family’s home was devoid of decoration. Where a Christmas tree once stood there was now just a collection of empty water bottles. With running water scarce during the bombardment, family members had made a perilous journey to the neighborhood’s outskirts to fill up the containers and lug them home. They said they had survived mostly on boiled potatoes, cooked atop a simple burner affixed to a gas canister.
“We surrendered ourselves to God,” said Rita Kahwaji, gesturing to the Christian iconography that adorned the home’s peeling walls.
This was not their first war.
Ms. Kahwaji’s daughter, Nazha, or “Nana,” as her family calls her, is deaf in one ear after she was maimed as a 7-month-old baby when, they said, an Israeli strike hit a relative’s home more than three decades ago. Ms. Kahwaji herself was injured in the blast, the shrapnel still lodged centimeters from her heart.
“We’ve lived our whole life in war,” she said.
Nana Kahwaji sat on the family’s couch, her neck adorned with a small gold cross, and at times strained to hear her family speak. She had hastened to design the nativity scene at the church as soon as the cease-fire was announced, but it had done little to cheer up her normally bubbly 7-year-old daughter.
“There are barely any celebrations this year,” Nana said. “Mentally, we are unable.”
In the weeks since the truce was reached, life has begun to stutter back to normal in Tyre, where tens of thousands of residents have returned to the coastal city. Teenage girls snap selfies on the seafront. Fishermen repair their nets. Groups of friends sit in cafes gossiping over cups of bitter, cardamom-infused Arabic coffee.
The destruction, however, is not easy to ignore.
On the city’s main shopping street, businesses that once bustled in the holiday season have been pulverized, and some of those that remain have been blackened by fire. Jewelry stores, restaurants, chic swimwear outlets — many have been reduced to rubble, the torsos of shop mannequins strewed amid the rubble. In the remnants of one residential building, a sole curtain fluttered in the wintry breeze; the floors below it were collapsed like a pancake.
“We’re still alive,” one man called down as he combed through what was left of his apartment.
At Nour and Mahdi Akanan’s toy store, the husband and wife had only recently reopened after an airstrike across the street gutted their building, destroying what they said was nearly $35,000 in stock. Now, just a flimsy piece of paper advertised their store name. They had placed outside one of the few objects to survive the blast, a saxophone-playing Santa Claus, in the hopes of enticing customers.
“The demand for toys is very little this year,” said Ms. Akanan.
The store had sold only seven items since reopening and may be forced to close, Ms. Akanan said, gesturing to a family across the way pulling belongings from the flattened building.
“Priorities,” she said. “They don’t want to celebrate anything.”
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