A source on politics, war, the Middle East, Arabic poetry, and art.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
This is the old house of my grandfather, Muhammad As`ad AbuKhalil, in the old port section of the city of Tyre. The entire section of the house to the left was bombed out by Israeli occupation forces in their savage 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It remains one of the oldest houses in the city of Tyre. As a child, I did not appreciate the house. The long stairway scared me (it did not have that support of concrete underneath, and it shook with every step). The top of the roof was built like a fortress but now you can see the new red paint and stone over it. While I was taking those pictures, a fisherman near his boat saw me, and recognized me and he knew my entire family. He suggested that I go up a long ladder in a large structure that was in the middle of the sea. I volunteered him for that mission, and he took several pictures, but after I came back I realized that I forgot to teach him how to zoom in and out. The pictures were not good.