In battered Lebanon, a lone gas station is a lifeline in the East
The gas station is nestled on the side of the road, a lone hive of liveliness in an otherwise deserted stretch of eastern Lebanon.
By 9 a.m., a steady stream of cars is already pulling up to its pump and the station’s owner, Ali Jawad, waves them in one by one. They are neighbors, doctors, rescue workers, among the few people remaining in an area that has been hit with near daily Israeli airstrikes. As he fills up their tanks, they share the latest news – the buildings destroyed, the friends injured, the neighbors killed.
In between pumping fuel, Jawad fields calls from people who have fled, asking if the road has been hit and if their homes have survived another night of strikes. The few drivers passing by honk, and he waves as if to say: Yes, I’m still here, too.
“I’m never leaving,” Jawad, 56, said one recent morning. “It’s my duty to stay, to help people here.”
Jawad’s gas station is the last one still open on the outskirts of Baalbek, a city of ancient Roman ruins in eastern Lebanon that has nearly emptied over the past two weeks as most residents fled the barrage of Israeli airstrikes.
For those who have stayed, the station has become a badly needed lifeline. Today it is a town square of sorts, a hub for essential commodities as the war has intensified: fuel, friendship and information.
In a country where the government struggles to provide basic services, and where fuel shortages persist even in better times, the gasoline he provides is a critical stopgap. Demand for fuel has only soared as the war has intensified.
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah started firing on northern Israel in solidarity with its ally Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, setting off back-and-forth exchanges of fire that displaced communities on both sides of the border. In recent weeks, Israel has stepped up its bombardment and invaded with ground troops as it expands its fight against Hezbollah. More than 1.2 million people have now fled their homes in Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.
A few hundred have remained around Baalbek, where Jawad’s pumps help fuel the excavators of rescue workers digging through rubble and the ambulances carrying injured people to hospitals. They power the generators that keep the hospital lights on, allow the last known open bakery to remain open, and run the refrigerators for the grocery store next door.
Jawad also serves as a nexus for updates on the situation in Baalbek. Virtually all drivers share news of the billowing smoke from the strikes they passed along the way. His phone rings constantly with calls from neighbors asking for the latest developments.
“Did you see the strike yesterday?” Jawad asked one driver, as he pulled up to the pump. “The one at the entrance to Baalbek.”
“No, I missed it. I was with relatives in Tripoli,” the driver replied, referring to a city on the northern Lebanese coast.
“Oh, thank God,” Jawad said.
A few minutes later, Jawad picked up a call: “Did you hear they hit Bednayel this morning? Yeah, 15 kilometers from here.” Balancing the phone between his shoulder and his ear, he waved another car to the pump.
The driver, Khalid Zayim, 42, stepped out and let out a loud sigh. Smudges of soot and dust covered his gray jumpsuit, the uniform for the Civil Defense, the country’s emergency medical workers who rush to the site of the strikes.
“It’s a disaster,” Zayim told him. “There’s a shortage of everything.”
In the past week, five of his 15 team members have fallen sick from the plumes of black smoke and other toxins they inhaled at the scene of the strikes, he said. Their few excavators have been so greatly in demand that they often have had to do without at some sites. That meant digging through rubble by hand for hours on end to find people buried beneath, though few were alive by the time the workers reached them.
Once his car’s tank was full, Zayim sat back into the driver’s seat and reached beneath the passenger’s seat. Then he pulled out a twisted piece of metal from the site of the strike. “Look, a souvenir,” he said, before setting off down the road back to his base.
Even before Israel ratcheted up its bombardment last month, many people across the country relied on informal networks of social support. The government, they had learned over decades of crises, was too hobbled by corruption and political paralysis to provide most basic services.
The country’s Shiite community came to depend on the social safety net provided by Hezbollah, which ran its own welfare network of hospitals, schools and youth programs. While Hezbollah never invested as much in eastern Lebanon as the south, the few services it provided helped keep the impoverished region afloat. But now, with the group seemingly consumed by the war effort, even that support has largely vanished, Baalbek residents say.
“The party isn’t helping,” Jawad said, referring to Hezbollah, which is also a political party. “We used to see them driving back and forth, but now we don’t even see them. They’re in hiding because of the drones and the airstrikes.”
The absence of formal aid has pushed Jawad to stay – a point in which he takes great pride. The gas station a block down the road had closed a week earlier, after its owner fled. Glancing in that direction, Jawad scoffed. “Coward,” he muttered under his breath.
The decision to stay has come at a cost. Late last month, he said an Israeli airstrike decimated a building behind his pumps, shattering the windows of his office and sending pieces of flaming hot metal flying across the station. One grazed his 24-year old son’s hand. His son screamed in pain, Jawad said.
The next day, their son and two daughters drove to the family’s second home in Batroun, a city along Lebanon’s northern coast. Gada Tasnoob Talib, 50, begged her husband to leave with them. “She told me, ‘You’re crazy. Leave. All the other people are leaving – we have the money to leave,’” he recalled. “She doesn’t understand it from my point of view. It’s not about the money, it’s about taking a stance: Either you help people or you don’t.”
The fight was among the most intense of their marriage. The two had been an item since she was 14 and Jawad chased her down the street to tell her that he liked her. Their budding romance was a scandal. She was Christian, Jawad was Shiite Muslim, and her parents did not approve until, months later, Jawad finally wore them down. The pair have hardly spent a day apart in the 36 years since.
Despite her own fears, Talib ultimately decided to stay behind with her husband. The ache of being away from each other now, of not knowing if he was safe, would be too much, she said. But the couple and their few remaining neighbors in Baalbek wonder how long the delicate web of support can last.
“What if they start attacking the roads? Then how do we get fuel from Beirut?” asked Mohammad Qassem, 30, the last known remaining butcher in Baalbek who arrived at the station in a red Volkswagen van.
As he spoke, a ram in the back of the vehicle, its chestnut coat dusty and matted, crooned. It had been smuggled across the border from a farm in Syria that morning.
Days earlier, an Israeli airstrike had hit near one crossing between Lebanon and Syria that Israeli officials claimed Hezbollah was using to smuggle weapons. Qassem worried it was only a matter of time until those strikes expanded to the rest of the Lebanese-Syrian border – and cut off their supply of meat for the butchery.
For now, they try to put aside their anxiety. Qassem said he will find some other way to feed the town if the border closes. Jawad says only death could drag him away.
“Baalbek will never die,” Jawad proclaimed. “But who will pay the price? The civilians who die.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
