Omar Jheir was sitting in his Beirut living room when the world came crashing down around him.
“You don't have control over your body. You don't know where you are,” the Australian tells SBS News from Gemmayzeh, just a few hundred metres from the Port of Beirut.
“I stayed conscious, but I couldn't see anything. I thought it was going to happen again; another strike. No one knew what was happening. Everyone thought that they had been attacked in their own home.”
Omar and the world soon learned some 2,750 tonnes of improperly stored ammonium nitrate had exploded in one of the port’s warehouses.
The explosion, which happened about 6pm local time on 4 August 2020, ripped through large swathes of the city, killing 218 people, wounding another 6,500, and leaving some 300,000 homeless.
Australian Omar Jheir rebuilt his cafe in downtown Beirut after it was destroyed in the explosion. Source: Supplied
It was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history and was felt as far as Cyprus, 240 kilometres away.
“I got hit on the left side of my body. My ribs were fractured, I had a broken arm. I did two operations in my arm and two operations in my feet,” Omar says.
“We lost our business, my wife's business, the house that we lived in, another house that we own up the road, our cars. Within five seconds, we lost everything, and no one's been held accountable yet, and we don't know what happened.”
Rebuilding in a crisis
In the heart of Gemmayzeh, home to some of Beirut’s most popular bars and restaurants, Omar’s cafe, Sip, was reduced to rubble in an instant.
He has since rebuilt and reopened, but staying open in Lebanon’s worsening economic crisis is another issue.
The Lebanese currency has lost more than 92 per cent of its value since 2019. Food and fuel are in short supply, and power outages can last up to 22 hours per day.
Omar's cafe after the explosion. Source: Supplied
“All of a sudden, the electricity cuts out. They cut us off for five, six hours the other day. After five hours, we had to empty all our fridges, throw away all our produce. There goes a week of loss,” Omar says.
“All of a sudden the currency jumps up or drops down, and your prices are exactly the same. You either have to change your prices immediately, in the same day, or you’re running at a loss.”
Omar and his wife Hala are also expecting their first child any day now.
With severe shortages of essential goods right around the country, they have had to import nappies and milk from overseas.
Omar and his wife Hala after the explosion. Source: Supplied
“For three months now, my wife and I have been saying, ‘where are the diapers? We need to get milk’, and we can’t find anything in the market. It doesn’t exist. It’s not on the shelves,” Omar says.
“When the baby is born, he needs to take a specific vaccine. It's not available. I tried to get it through family in Dubai and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. I can’t get it.”
Like many others, Omar and his wife now feel they have no choice but to leave the country.
“We're going through all this just to see that we have delivered the baby, and then we’ll get out,” he says.
Omar today. Source: Supplied
“It's very hard to continue living here. It's almost impossible. We're waiting for a miracle.”
A moment of life and death
On the day of the explosion, Geelong-born doctor Stephanie Yacoub was on shift as the chief resident of obstetrics and gynecology at Beirut’s St George Hospital, about 900 metres from the port.
She had just wheeled a patient in to deliver her baby. The patient’s husband, with his phone at the ready, was preparing to film the birth of their first child.
What happened next was all caught on camera.
“Suddenly we felt the earth and the ground shake. I was wondering if it was actually an earthquake, but I didn’t even get to finish my question before I suddenly heard that noise and I was flung back into the wall,” Stephanie says.
“A window frame had fallen on top of me. When I pushed that off me and looked up, there was just complete destruction. There was a cloud of dust and glass everywhere. I can never forget the noises that I was hearing - all the alarms possible going off, people screaming.”
Somehow, Stephanie managed to get up and deliver the baby, who was named George.
With the hospital in ruins, she then took a second patient to another hospital and safely delivered her baby as well.
Dr Stephanie Yacoub was born in Australia and moved to Lebanon with her family in 2008. Source: Supplied
“I have so much respect for everyone who was in the hospital that day because no one even thought about running away. Everyone just said ‘we have to do our job,’” she recalls.
“When you do surgery, you know you can't panic. Once you panic, you lose control, so I’m very glad I was able to stay calm.”
A failing health system
Stephanie continued working at St George Hospital after the explosion and graduated from her medical residency just last month. But she says doctors around the country fear they will soon no longer be able to do their jobs properly.
“There are a lot of medications that are no longer available in Lebanon. We're not talking about medications that are non-essential. We're talking about antibiotics, we're talking about powdered milk for babies, and then a couple of days ago it was announced that pacemakers are no longer available in Lebanon,” she says.
“Being a surgeon, there’s always news that anaesthetics are going to be unavailable in Lebanon, and they're actually buying anaesthetics on the black market, so this is really, really serious.”
Dr Stephanie Yacoub says the health system is under enormous strain. Source: Supplied
She says the country’s doctors and nurses are now facing a moral dilemma, with some fearing they are breaking the Hippocratic Oath, taken by physicians, to do no harm when they are unable to offer treatment due to the severe shortages.
Next month, Stephanie will rejoin her family in Australia.
“Mental health-wise, it’s been a struggle dealing with the explosion and everything that we're living through. This week, leading up to the anniversary of the explosion has been really difficult, and unfortunately, I do need a little break from this country,” she says.
“It's really sad to think so many doctors and very well-educated people are also being forced to make the same decision and flee Lebanon.”
A humanitarian crisis
In the days after the explosion, Lebanon’s government resigned and it has yet to be replaced.
A new prime minister-designate, Najib Mikati, was tasked with breaking the impasse last week, but he has already served in the role twice before and been mired with corruption allegations.
Without a new government committed to ending decades-long engrained corruption, the billions in foreign aid promised to Lebanon in the wake of the explosion cannot be unlocked.
“Lebanon, unfortunately, is ruled by one of the most corrupt political elite in the world,” Lebanese journalist Mehsen Mekhtfe says.
Prime minister-designate Najib Mikati. Source: EPA
“If we still have the same people ruling, if we still have the same people in power, of course, the situation will be the same and nothing's going to change.”
With little leadership politically, the task of dealing with Lebanon’s economic crisis has fallen largely to aid groups.
The Lebanese Red Cross is one of the groups leading humanitarian efforts and is still supporting many of the families impacted directly by last year’s explosion. Its undersecretary-general, Nabih Jabr, paints a bleak picture of their new realities.
“They can't sleep at night because there is no electricity. They cannot turn on the fans, so the kids don't fall asleep. It's hot and damp. They cannot preserve their food. The fridges don't work on a few hours of electricity every day,” he says.
“And then there’s the daily quest for medicine and fuel. There are lines and lines at the fuel station, you never know if you can get fuel, so you can wait two hours to get 10 litres of fuel. Or you can go to 10 pharmacies just to get medicine to reduce your kid’s fever.
“The minimum wage in Lebanon used to be about $500 per month. Now, the average salary is less than $70. So, Lebanon has very quickly, in the space of one year, become one of the poorest countries in the world.”
With half the country now living below the poverty line, humanitarian workers are worried about the generation of Lebanese children growing up in a crisis.
Lebanese Red Cross volunteers preparing care packages following the Beirut port explosion. Source: Supplied
“Seventy-seven per cent of families in the country do not have the means to access food and children are going to bed hungry,” UNICEF Lebanon’s Yukie Mokuo says.
“We think 600,000 children were psychologically impacted by the blast. But now there is child labour, children out of school, not having access to medication, this is all impacting the psychology of children in their everyday lives. We need immediate action, and the cost of inaction will be very, very high.”
Australians digging deep
Also shouldering the load has been the Lebanese diaspora around the world.
There are more than 200,000 Australians of Lebanese descent, many of whom still have family in Lebanon.
“What is really sustaining the country at the moment are expatriates travelling here, bringing their families, and to a certain extent, Lebanese nationals who live here who are receiving money from abroad,” Australian expatriate Adam Malouf says from Lebanon.
“The problem with that is, come the end of August, early September, when all the expatriates go back, what's going to happen?”
In Cairns, Lebanese Australian Bilal Charmand has been trying to answer that question. He has been sharing his fundraising attempts via social media.
“For $25, we're getting a food box that's got all the essentials that can allow a Lebanese family to last for one month,” he says.
Source: Facebook
“We’re connecting with priests and religious figures in Lebanon because they’re already one-on-one with the families who need help.
“The priests we work with keep one-hour intervals between each family who come and collect the food, so they don’t run into each other, because it’s not easy for the Lebanese people to be in this situation. They’ve never needed to be in this situation.”
With the economic crisis showing no sign of improving, those left in Lebanon are struggling to see a way out.
“Only a miracle, divine intervention, would get Lebanon out of the crisis that we’re facing,” Dr Stephanie Yacoub says.
“It’s sad to say that about the place I’ve called home for more than 10 years.”
Information about UNICEF Australia's Lebanon appeal can be found , and the Lebanese Red Cross .
