Close call for Bay Area teen who escapes conflict in Lebanon

By Hannah Dreier,

Early last month, 17-year-old Ayat Kaddoura left her San Bruno home to visit her father and his relatives in Saida, Lebanon. Three days into her vacation Israel began air strikes on Hezbollah, and Kaddoura became one of the 1,500 Americans who found themselves trapped a war-zone. One week after her perilous journey home to the U.S., Kaddoura recalls the early days of the conflict. “My dad kept telling me it’s just going to be a few days and then it’s going to be over — it’s not going to be a war.” Initially calm, Kaddoura began to fear for her life when the Beirut airport was hit on the day she was scheduled to fly out of it. Soon, she says, “everything was being hit- the bridges were hit, the roads were hit, people were dying.”As her father petitioned the U.S. embassy for evacuation, the family stayed indoors with jackets, passports, and running shoes on or near them at all times. Spotty internet and phone service made it difficult for Kaddoura to contact her mother. “It was the hardest thing — I wanted to see her so bad.” She finally got through by phone three days into the war; her mother had not even heard about the conflict. Kaddoura’s most terrifying moment came when she picked up an airdropped Israeli flyer warning those living near Hezbollah members to evacuate. “There’s no way to know,” she explained, “it’s like how do you know if your next-door neighbor’s a terrorist or not?… How are you supposed to leave? It was kind of like they were just trying to tell us ‘we’re going to hit you.’”Finally, with the conflict escalating and the U.S. embassy failing to help, the family decided to flee to Syria in the van of a near-stranger. Bombed-out roads made the trip to Beirut, a mere 25 miles to the north, take an hour and a half. Kaddoura tells how the family held hands and prayed as they sped along the roads at 100 miles an hour. “Under every tunnel you would think, okay we’re going to get hit- there’s no way we’re going to survive this one.”Kaddoura had been in Beirut on the eve of the war, and was amazed at the devastation she saw on her return less than two weeks later. “There was a building and the top of it was on fire- do you remember the World Trade Center when the top was falling off? It was just like that — I felt like I was seeing it.” The family reached Syria at 3 in the morning and then traveled down to Jordan. Once out of immediate danger, Kaddoura became so sick she had to be fed intravenously for two days. “I thought that the sickness was going to kill me, I thought everything was going to kill me… you just felt like your life was over already,” she says. As she recovered, the family moved to the comparative tranquility of Palestine. “Even though the Israelis are sort of in your face all the time, it was normal, that’s when we got back to our life.”Though Kaddoura still harbors some anger over her government’s slowness to facilitate her family’s evacuation and call for a cease-fire, she is overjoyed to be back home. “I had so much faith in my country,” she says, “it’s kind of disappointing. But at the same time you come back, and it’s just like ‘I love this country,’ America is the safest place to be.”Of the Israeli and Hezbollah armies, she says, ”It felt like the Israelis had no heart...someone has to defend the Lebanese people.” The daughter of two Palestinian refugees, Kaddoura sees the current conflict in Lebanon in the context of Israel’s long history with Palestine. Though she does not support violence, she says, “You can’t just sit there and let someone slap you in the face a million times — you have to slap them back.” Kaddoura hopes that the Israelis will withdraw, and that the Lebanese will be able to find psychological peace. “I just want the people to be emotionally and mentally okay, because that’s the hardest part,” she says, “I don’t even know how the rest of my family is living right now.”Kaddoura is spending what remains of her summer break with her family and “when I go back to school,” she says, “I’m going to bring awareness to the issue.”Her mother suggests that as a result of this experience her daughter might go into politics, and Kaddoura seems to agree. “When you hear ‘war’ here you don’t know what war is,” she explains; “You’d never support war once you’ve seen war.” ♦