We are two months into the war. Minds of my six-year-old twin daughters, Qamar and Leony, are abuzz with vocabulary no child should ponder: sonic boom (jidar il-sot), missile, MK drone, evacuation plane, war, and bombs roll off their tongues with frightening ease. In the early weeks of the war, they learned quickly to distinguish between a sonic boom and aerial bombardment, pausing briefly to take in the soundscape of horror while role-playing stories about “mean people” taking houses away from their rightful owners. Their bedtime discussions turn from Mo Willem’s Knuffle Bunny, a story about two friends who mistakenly swap their stuffed animals, to the perils of settler colonialism. Is this the first time Israel has invaded our South? asks Qamar. Before I can respond, Leony chimes in, “No, Qamar, Israel did it before when Mommy was young, but we kicked them out!” At six years old, they had already experienced the August 4, 2020, Beirut port blast, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. Despite their limited vocabulary at the time, they managed to verbalize “da boom.” Now, the blasts are highly intended man-made monstrosities of pure evil, and we are reckoning with world-shifting realities while trying to keep our children’s faith in humanity intact.

The twins’ artwork betrays this bleak reality they struggle to parse. Cycles of violence in Lebanon thread generations into a circle of war. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), my mother meticulously labeled and compiled our sometimes joyful, sometimes chaotic drawings, a practice I find myself unconsciously replicating. Scrawled on the backside of each yellowed paper was a timestamp of the Civil War.

On September 17, 2024, the Israeli pager attack on Lebanon detonated yet another horrific assault on humans and nonhumans in all corners of Lebanon. That evening, schools all over the country shuttered to absorb an influx of civilians bombed out of their beloved homes. A week into school closures, after most of her classmates and one of her homeroom teachers had left the country and Israeli warplanes were marring and menacing our skies, Leony wrote and illustrated a story about her imaginary friend “Lena,” who boards a plane, “but the plane falls into the sea.”

On September 27, 2024, at 6:23 p.m., as yet another resplendent Beirut sunset unfolded, Leony excitedly assembled her easel on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea to capture the rich medley of raw and burnt sienna melting into glassy blue. Just as she proudly hoisted her finished painting for my camera click, a rumbling roar ruptured the moment’s repose, sheathing our world with profound darkness. It was not until the next morning that we found out that Israel assassinated the General Secretary of Hizbullah, Hassan Nasrallah. That night, like the rest of Lebanon, unable to sleep as waves and waves of terrified inhabitants left Dahiyeh in utter panic, a displaced family placed their beloved cat in a makeshift carrier at the gates of the American University of Beirut, where we reside, hoping it would find a safer home. We quickly retrieved the doe-eyed cat, and Qamar and Leony named him “Jnoubi,” meaning Southerner. Enshrined in our living room is a portrait of Jnoubi, a forever reminder of all that was lost that night. Jnoobi joins a growing cat family, including “Falasteen” (Palestine), a feral kitten they rescued last October.

Our lives have lost all rhyme or rhythm; our senses are held hostage to the offensive sensorium of war: the pungent smell of phosphorous bombs, burning wreckage, the unbearable buzz of Israeli reconnaissance drones, and the palpable uncertainly of life as we no longer know it. We haven’t left our home environs for weeks and weeks. In a desperate bid for normalcy, we piled into the car and drove to the twins’ classmate’s birthday party one weekend, the first of its kind since the war started.

The birthday venue was on the outskirts of Dahiya, Beirut’s southern suburbs. As the festivities got underway, a loud blast consumed our very being, freezing us in place for what felt like an eternity. The disjointed colorful balloons and children in party gear staring up in bewilderment at the sky felt especially piercing that day. Our phones began to blare with “evacuation orders” for entire swathes of neighborhoods in Dahiya as we were absorbed by the frenzy of traffic escaping the targeted zones. Determined to visit my mother, who lives south of Beirut and whom I had not been able to hug for over a month due to the unsafe roads connecting us, we did not immediately head home. In search of an alternative route to my mother’s home, our navigation casually waved us toward its “faster route,” cutting right through the line of fire. We only realized this when we saw the billowing black smoke rising in the distance. We drove home defeated.

It’s November 23. A deafening boom startled us awake. Massive airstrikes have been pulverizing Dahiya, a mere 6 km away, throughout all hours of the day and night. What’s that banging on our window again, asks a sleepy twin? It’s thunder; I repeat a tired phrase that my mother used to tell us when we were young. But it’s not raining, comes the same response I gave my mother.

As I round up my 1000 words, another blast shakes the room: this time, it’s bunker-buster bombs on a crowded neighborhood in central Beirut, leveling four buildings full of slumbering civilians. Ambulances are blaring. Calls for blood donations proliferate. The stench of burning assails our senses. The drones are buzzing menacingly overhead. Schools are canceled for tomorrow.

In the final hours before the apocalyptic ceasefire, Israel belched hellfire onto all areas of Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut, coating the air with heavy explosives that made our eyes and lungs burn with rage. As I hugged my children tight that night, I announced hesitantly that the war would end by morning. As we awoke to a droneless dawn in Beirut, Leony ran to her desk to express her joy:

Despite the recursive history of wars in Lebanon, I wrote with cautious hope in my book’s introduction that my six-year-old daughters would grow up in a world free from the horrors of war. Our hope for a world without war might be shaken, but when I come across my daughter’s drawing proudly captioned in Arabic, “I don’t like war”, my heart breaks but also mends, knowing she has embraced the fundamental tenet of sumud (steadfastness): rejecting all that is evil in this world.