Word: hamra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Save Beirut from this inferno," pleaded Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami. Tank and artillery fire on downtown streets prevented fire trucks from reaching dozens of burning buildings in the Hamra district, which includes the Commodore and the American University of Beirut. West Beirut's once fashionable main thoroughfare, Rue Hamra, where the city's upper crust could buy anything from French perfume to Cuban cigars, was reduced to a smoke- filled war zone. Declared a retired Lebanese Army colonel: "It is a fight to the finish...
...week the Druze and the Communists, who had renewed an old alliance just last month, had the upper hand. They had pushed the Amal out of Hamra and the low-income Sunni Muslim district of Zarif and had begun shelling Shi'ite gunmen occupying the state television station in the Tallet Khayyat district, on the southern edge of West Beirut...
...ordered the army to shoot on sight. Steel shutters rang down on storefronts. Pedestrians scattered. Car horns blared incessantly. We were interviewing a former government minister when the fighting broke out, and emerged from his office to find shots ringing out amid the cafés and boutiques of Hamra Street, one of West Beirut's busiest thoroughfares. We stopped briefly to buy provisions, then hurried to our apartment building. Not a minute too soon. The half a dozen men of the Lebanese Army contingent billeted in our lobby to protect diplomatic residents were already nervously fingering their M16s...
Countless buildings in the Hamra area were badly damaged, including the Information Ministry and the headquarters of An Nahar, the newspaper of record for the entire Arab world. Last week, on its 50th anniversary, it was unable to pub lish for the first time. Inside the An Nahar building, the offices of several American news organizations, including United Press International, Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, were damaged or destroyed by phosphorus bombs. In late afternoon, Israeli artillery fire hit the Commodore Hotel, where many foreign correspondents were staying...
Early on Wednesday morning the ninth cease-fire is broken as Israeli armor attempts to move into West Beirut. To cover the advance, Israeli artillery and ships drop shells everywhere. Not a single area escapes untouched: for the first time Hamra, the heart of the commercial area, comes under sustained and heavy shelling...