Dana El-Kurd

And that's like completely regardless of what happens to Hezbollah, because Hezbollah can disappear tomorrow and the problem will continue to be the same, if not just get worse.

The country has no economy to speak of.

The currency was already devalued during the economic crisis, was one of the highest devaluations in the world.

And there are no prospects going forward in terms of like making this a country that can even sustain itself.

It's already very like import dependent.

But if you exclude the South Lebanon and it being a breadbasket, East Lebanon as well, by the way, is also a breadbasket.

And that's another area of Lebanon that the Israelis have been constantly bombarding.

To paraphrase that Israeli minister, that like Lebanon is not a state, it's not a nation.

It's just a place that's on the map.

That will pose a problem, obviously, first and foremost for us, like for the Lebanese and people who live in Lebanon.

But it is also a problem geopolitically.

It's a problem internationally.

It will freak out the EU in terms of the refugee crisis, because the EU has actually counted on Lebanon to keep a lot of people in Lebanon.

They send like a billion euros.

I think it was two or three years ago or something like that.

I wrote about it at the time, actually, because Lebanon had the highest percentage, maybe still does now, I don't know, of refugees per capita, so to speak, compared to citizens in the world.

one million or so senior refugees with roughly five million Lebanese or something like that along those lines.

There's no census in Lebanon.

So I'm saying all of this to sort of emphasize why there is this sense of despair in the country and why if that's not even remotely addressed, whatever fires we're seeing now, whatever horrors we're seeing, I just don't see any way they will stop anytime soon.

Whatever happens even to Hezbollah next, there's no reason to imagine that some other group wouldn't be formed at some point because people live there.