The glass panels shuddered as the two explosions reverberated through the shopping mall. A few people started running to the exit, but most stayed put. It was only Israeli planes breaking the sound barrier, they said to each other. Barely anyone reacted when there was a third.

“We thought this was it, the war had started,” Leila, who owns a beauty parlor next to the mall on the outskirts of Beirut, recalled as she filed the nails of a customer. But any dip in business would be short-lived, she said. “You’ll see, Lebanese people will be back out and everything will go back to normal.” 

Beirut is used to living with the threat of war, and this was a couple of weeks ago. That threat is now getting more acute after Israel launched a preemptive attack on southern Lebanon. But for many in the city, recent events have just been the latest version of normality.

Lebanon has been waiting for war since October, when Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah began firing at Israel because of the war in Gaza, itself a response to Hamas’s assault on the Jewish state. The two sides have been trading fire along the border, exchanges that could spiral into a bigger, broader conflict involving global as well as regional powers. 

That prospect became more real last Sunday when Israel dispatched 100 warplanes to take out Hezbollah missile launchers and, officials said, thwart a planned assault by the group to avenge an earlier attack.

Israel struck Beirut’s southern suburbs at the end of July and killed the military chief of Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organization by the US and UK. Hours later, Iran blamed Israel for killing Hamas’s political head Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. 

Since the assassinations, the world has been bracing for the repercussions. Flights were suspended in and out of Lebanon and countries including the US, UK, France and Gulf states told their citizens to leave.

But for Leila and others in Beirut, it was a case of adding it all to the list of worries. Their economy is still reeling from a financial meltdown in 2019 and then a massive explosion at Beirut’s port a year later. The currency is shaky, unemployment hit almost 50% and infrastructure is crumbling. 

On Aug. 17, state-run power firm Électricité du Liban said it had run out of fuel. An ensuing blackout hit Beirut airport, ports and prisons. 

Lebanese make fun of themselves and their definition of “normal” on social media. A meme circulating online summed up their way of living, showing the branded bottle of Absolut Vodka with the words “Absolut denial” instead.

You have to be in your 40s to have much memory of the civil war that made Beirut a byword for Middle East conflict, but the country remained a tinderbox. There was tension with Syria and regular exchanges with Israel, as well as the sporadic sectarian strife that has defined the country for decades.

George Beshara, a contractor who lives in the district of Matn, dropped out of school during the civil war and also remembers dodging parts of the city in 2006 when Israel hit the airport and port in response to a Hezbollah attack over the border. 

“Lebanon has always been like that,” said Beshara. “If Israel goes for war, it’d be for a couple of days and then it’ll be over.”

That sanguine attitude, though, contrasts with people who had more of a choice. Days after the Israeli strike, barely anything changed as the Lebanese diaspora, one of the largest in the world, flocked for the summer season.

Tourist arrivals were up over 100% in June compared with the same month last year. The lights emanating from Sky Bar, one of the most popular nightclubs in the Middle East, lit up the Beirut night. Many others had to turn people away. Cars lined up to get into clubs a few kilometers down the coast from Beirut. Scheduled concerts went ahead.

Then the threat of all-out war and travel warnings snuffed out any hope that tourist income would exceed the $5 billion to $7 billion recorded last year, according to the minister responsible for the economy.

“Welcome to the Lebanese expatriate, the backbone of the economy,” read posters glued to several buildings along a highway leading to downtown Beirut. Visitors would have passed them as they joined long queues at the airport, with stories of skyrocketing prices for tickets back to Europe and the US. 

Ali, a 50-year-old staunch supporter of Amal Movement, Hezbollah’s main ally, drives his taxi through Beirut’s southern suburbs, one of Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds.

When he passed through after the Israeli missiles hit, Ali saw barely any traffic for the first time in years. “People got scared and moved out,” he said. A picture of his brother in military fatigues is fixed on the blades of his car’s air conditioning. He died in an airstrike in southern Lebanon earlier this year.

Israeli assaults on that region near the border and elsewhere have so far killed at least 500 people, mostly Hezbollah fighters, based on local estimates. Roughly 30 soldiers and 18 civilians have been killed by Hezbollah attacks, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Entering Beirut, a billboard shows an image of a child with torn clothes looking at a destroyed building and reads “Enough, we’re exhausted,” with a hashtag “Lebanon does not want war.” 

Bashir, a 43-year-old father of two, belongs to a significant portion of society that believes the problem is Hezbollah, which holds great sway over political life in Lebanon and is better armed than the Lebanese military. 

Leader Hassan Nasrallah said that his group, whose ultimate goal is to destroy Israel, has contained the conflict on the border for the sake of the Lebanese against calls from Palestinians to escalate further.

“Who is he to make a decision to go to war on my behalf?” said Bashir, who, like Leila, declined to be identified by his full name. “I didn’t ask for this.”

Bashir still makes his way 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Beirut to south Lebanon every week to check on his house near the border. Many people in that area have grown used to the sounds of the strikes. They’re now normal, he said.