Stephanie Preston took this photo from her cot at a refugee camp in Cyprus. Hundreds fled to the converted fairgrounds when Israel began bombing Lebanon on July 12, 2006. Photo by Stephanie Preston; ©2007 Endeavors; click to enlarge.
Bombs over Beirut
by Margarite Nathe
Stephanie Preston was asleep in her bed when the first bombs hit at 3:45 in the morning. “Those aren’t firecrackers,” the other tenants murmured nervously in the hallway. Hezbollah had been setting off fireworks in celebration of their captured prisoners, but these sounds were different. Rumors buzzed through the night in Beirut, Lebanon.
She had arrived in the city weeks earlier for a journalism internship at The Daily Star, Beirut’s English-language newspaper. The next day, Preston — a junior at Carolina — learned that Israel had begun to fire bombs, missiles, and artillery at Lebanon. Hezbollah, a Lebanese radical Shi’ite Muslim organization, had captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. From the roof of her apartment building, Preston watched as the sky caught fire, jets roared overhead, and Israel’s retribution exploded around her.
The photography gig was supposed to last three and a half weeks. Before the fighting began on July 12, 2006, she shot photos for stories about a car rally, a kite show, and cheese pasteurization. Afterward, while she waited to evacuate from the city, she snapped images of the empty streets as tourism trickled away and residents and businesses suffered from a bread shortage.
Almost three weeks after she was supposed to have left Beirut, Preston still hadn’t been called to evacuate. The bombs usually fell far away, but sometimes they were closer. Her building shook when bombs hit the nearby airport and its fuel tanks exploded.
“Then a friend of mine from the newspaper pulled some strings with the U.S. Consul,” Preston says. On July 22, she climbed aboard the first available ship, the Orient Queen, bound for a refugee camp in Cyprus. She sailed for five hours with seven hundred fifty other Americans, escorted by a Navy destroyer.
Preston stayed with hundreds of other refugees on fairgrounds under a huge dome. “People slept on cots,” she says. “The lights were always on. It wasn’t really comfortable, but everyone’s basic needs were met.” After two days in the refugee camp, Preston went to stay for a week with the family of her friend, a Cypriot UNC student, before returning safely to her own family.
Preston, now a junior and a global economics and Chinese major, spent the Fall 2006 semester studying in Xiamen, China.
