Beirut, Lebanon – When 26-year-old Eliah Kaylough first heard the massive explosion, he was so frightened that he instinctively ran for cover. On Tuesday this week, he had just started his shift as a waiter at a restaurant on busy Gemmayze Street in east Beirut when he was suddenly startled by the sound of a massive explosion.
For Kaylough, this immediately triggered memories of the massive port explosion in 2020, and he was terrified that the city would either experience another explosion or be attacked.
But as he ran out of the restaurant, a man from a nearby shop stopped him and told him that Beirut was not being bombed. The sound, Kaylough discovered, was a sonic boom, a thunderous noise caused by an object moving faster than the speed of sound.
Israeli fighter jets have been making these sonic booms over Lebanon with increasing frequency since October 7 last year, following Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. But the booms heard over Beirut on Tuesday were the loudest ever heard in the city, several residents told Al Jazeera.
Kaylough said it was the first time he had heard such a bang since Israel has become prone to setting off sonic booms in other parts of the country and the city.
“The noise was terrifying and I really thought we were being attacked,” Kaylouh told Al Jazeera on Thursday night at the restaurant where he was working another shift. “I remember putting on my hat, grabbing my bag and getting ready to close the shop.”
The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in a small-scale conflict since October. On Friday, Israel stepped up its attacks and killed Hamas official Samer al-Hajj in a drone strike on the coastal city of Sidon, about 50 kilometers from Lebanon’s southern border.
However, throughout the Gaza war, Israel has fired sonic booms by flying jets at low altitude over Lebanon, apparently in an attempt to intimidate and terrify the population, analysts and residents told Al Jazeera.
“We are concerned about reports of the use of sonic booms by Israeli aircraft over Lebanon, which have caused great fear among civilians,” said Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Parties to armed conflict should not use intimidation tactics against civilians.”
In fact, the sonic booms heard earlier this week occurred just two days after the anniversary of the Beirut port explosion on August 4, 2020, which devastated much of Beirut, killing more than 200 people and injuring thousands. The explosion was caused by a fire in a warehouse storing a supply of highly flammable ammonium nitrate.
Tuesday’s sonic boom came just moments before Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah began a speech. Last month, tensions between the two enemies escalated after Israel assassinated Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Lebanon and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital Tehran.
Systematic use of “loud terror”
The use of sonic booms is part of a broader trend of psychological warfare that Israel is waging against the Lebanese people, says Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a sound expert and founder of Earshot, a nonprofit that conducts audio analysis to track human rights abuses and state violence.
Abu Hamdan said that since the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, which lasted 34 days and killed 1,100 Lebanese and 165 Israelis, Israel has regularly violated Lebanese airspace with its fighter jets to intimidate civilians.
“Since the 2006 ceasefire, there have been more than 22,000 Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon. In 2020 alone, there were more than 2,000 (airstrikes) with no response from Hezbollah,” Abu Hamdan told Al Jazeera.
Abu Hamdan believes that since last October, Israel has also been using sonic booms as “an acoustic reminder that (Israel) can turn Lebanon into Gaza at any time.”
He said Israel’s increasing use of sonic booms reflected the escalation of the conflict with Hezbollah in recent months.
“There is an escalation and we can also perceive this escalation acoustically. The next phase of the escalation is, of course, material destruction,” said Abu Hamdan.
Rana Farhat, 28, of Beirut, said Israel’s scaremongering was having the desired effect. She heard the Aug. 6 sonic booms while eating dinner with her family at a restaurant in a town north of Beirut.
They were frightened when they heard the sound of an explosion, but their parents tried to reassure them and their siblings that Beirut was not under attack. Everyone quickly looked at their phones to find out what was going on.
“We all checked the news to see if it was an explosion or not,” said Farhat, 28, while smoking shisha in a Beirut cafe on Thursday night. “There were small children in the restaurant and they were obviously scared. They don’t understand what such noises mean.”
Recurrent trauma
The roar of fighter jets and other explosive noises could cause renewed trauma to populations that have survived previous explosions and wars, Abu Hamdan said.
In the long term, recurring jet and pressure waves could even increase the risk of stroke and break down calcium deposits in the heart, according to medical studies he cites.
“Once you have been exposed to the noise of jets or blasts that creates the kind of fear that exists in this country, every time you hear it – even if it is quiet – it triggers the same stress response (in a person),” Abu Hamdan explained.
Kaylough said the sonic booms he heard on Tuesday this week brought back memories of the explosion at Beirut’s port. He was working in a shopping mall that day when a sudden explosion shattered the glass around him and blew the doors of the store where he worked off their hinges.
“The noise was so loud. I remember people screaming, but I couldn’t hear them,” he told Al Jazeera.
After the initial shock, Kaylough suddenly felt pain and realized that a large piece of metal was stuck in his lower leg. He was taken to the hospital and eventually treated by doctors.
Although Kaylough suffered no long-term physical injuries, he says the sonic booms triggered the trauma he experienced that day.
“The sonic boom took me back to the time of the explosion, but I try not to think about it,” he said.
Farhat said the sonic booms also reminded her of the 2006 war.
Her neighborhood wasn’t directly affected at the time, but she remembers watching the war coverage on television with her parents. As a 10-year-old, she realized that the scenes of collapsed buildings and rubble she was seeing were being filmed just a short drive from her home.
She also remembers hearing the sound of Israeli fighter jets flying over Beirut to bomb the southern suburbs. Although Farhat does not know if a new war is looming over Beirut, she stresses that Israel’s scaremongering will not persuade her to leave her beloved city.
“They just want to scare us, but I see this as a sign of weakness,” she told Al Jazeera. “Whatever happens, I don’t want to leave my home and I won’t. I was born here, grew up here and I will stay here.”
