Click the play button to hear an interview with Katherine:
“At first it was in the distance – distant gunfire and the occasional very loud bang, and then throughout the day and the night it was very close and very loud and very worrying.
"Then, this morning we were sitting in the flat and hearing lots of bangs throughout the building and eventually they came up to our floor. They were banging loudly on the door saying we had to let them in. There were two men – I think they were Hezbollah—with guns, and they wanted to look around the rooms and see if there was anyone hiding there or if we were hiding guns or weapons. They told us to go downstairs and take our passports. We were walking past lots of men who were tied up – they tied their hands and were shouting at them. They took them downstairs and were lining them up and shouting.
"We were taken downstairs and just showed our passports. They were talking to us and saying ‘our fight is not with you, you are safe, do not be afraid, we will look after you’ – but I’m not sure what they were going to do with these other men. So eventually they told us we could go back upstairs. That was very scary, but after it happened it was a bit of a relief, because we kind of know more of the situation now and that that is not going to happen again. But, then, we don’t know if other groups are going to move into the area and cause more trouble. The situation here is very uncertain.”
Katherine has since been able to move away from the fighting to another part of Beirut. As she and her friends left the building, they saw that all the windows in the block were broken, theirs being the only ones not smashed. The building was riddled with bullet holes.
Please pray for BMS workers and partners in Lebanon and for a peaceful, just resolution to the problems there.
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