MIDDLE EAST: There are no cars on the road to Haret Hreik. The shelling stopped only hours ago and plumes of black smoke still hang in an otherwise flawless blue sky, writes Mary Fitzgerald in Beirut.
In the past, before the bombings, the 15-minute drive from downtown Beirut could feel at times disorientating as the brash glamour of the city centre gave way to austere streets where women in black chadors walked under commemorative portraits of Hizbullah's dead. Haret Hreik has always been a place apart but now more so than ever.
While residents elsewhere in Beirut cower in fear that their neighbourhood could be hit next, most of Haret Hreik's inhabitants have long fled this once teeming district that now bears the brunt of Israel's bombardment.
Eight days of relentless bombing have turned what used to be Hizbullah's Beirut heartland into a ghost town.
Israel's attacks have targeted and destroyed the militant group's headquarters, the home of its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and its TV station, but also overpasses and roads in Haret Hreik and the wider area known as the dahiya, Beirut's southern suburbs. Scores of buildings, homes and businesses have been reduced to rubble and the number of dead continues to rise. The few untouched streets on Haret Hreik's outskirts are deserted and piled with rubbish. Around one corner a blue and white municipal sign reads "Welcome to Haret Hreik" in Arabic and French. Beyond it devastation.
Half-collapsed tower blocks lean wobbly against each other. The entire outer wall of one apartment building has been ripped off in a blast, exposing rooms that once formed modest homes.
The top of the street is blocked with a row of tyres. It soon becomes apparent why. Heavily armed Hizbullah gunmen, dressed in black, appear silently from doorways at my car's approach. One of them, shaven-headed and paunchy, moves forward and we speak in Arabic. "Shu biddik?" he asks - "What do you want?". He explains gruffly that there is no access to the street and that all inquiries should go through the Hizbullah main office, a rather ridiculous statement given that it was completely destroyed in an Israeli strike earlier this week.
A turn down a narrow alley brings us out in front of one of the many flyovers targeted in the bombardment. This one used to lead to the airport further south but now it lies snapped in two, its exposed girders gaping in the sun. Someone has hung a Hizbullah flag from one of the metal spikes that jut out of the concrete. A green design on yellow background, the flag features an upheld fist clutching an AK 47 in silhouette.
The shutters of some nearby shops have buckled in the blast and the windows in one five-storey building are all blown out. But further down the street there is some semblance of normality, even if it appears surreal in the circumstances. Zuhair Dakkak has kept his small tyre-fitting shop open throughout the bombings but admits with a grin that business has been slow.
"My family are all at my brother's house in another part of the city," he says, sitting in the shade outside with some friends. "I want to keep this little place open no matter what. Of course I'm worried and frightened, but this is my business. I need to keep it going." A poster of Ayatollah Khomeini hangs lopsided on a lamp-post opposite. His face and that of Nasrallah gaze down on Haret Hreik's ruined streets.
Underneath the Hizbullah leader's turbanned head, a line reads in Arabic: "All of us are resistance." One Israeli missile hit the very centre of a small roundabout nearby, carving a deep crater that has churned up piles of the red Levant soil that lies under Beirut's concrete. Another landed in a street close by, cleaving down the middle of an office building.
Two young men roar past on a motorbike, Hizbullah's yellow banner fluttering from the back. They drive over dozens of mud-streaked leaflets that fell from the sky earlier this week, a warning from the Israelis to get out before they struck yet again. A few minutes away there are more signs of life. An elderly man cycles down an alleyway. A group of men sit on chairs outside a shuttered shop. Every so often a teenage boy in T-shirt and jeans will emerge from a narrow lane.
The last time I walked the streets of Haret Hreik was during the Shia holy day of Ashura earlier this year. Marking the death and martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein, in Iraq 1,300 years ago, it is one of the most important dates in the Shia calendar and takes on extra significance in this Hizbullah stronghold, suffocated as it is with an ideology that draws inspiration from its "martyred" fighters.
I watched hundreds of thousands of Beirut's poverty-stricken Shia walk barefoot in the pouring rain, pounding their chests and chanting exhortations to the Imam Hussein. During the infrequent lulls, they would yell in unison, "Death to America, death to Israel." This is a conflict that is far from over.