As a bomb descended on a multi-story apartment building in Beirut's Tayouneh area Friday, hundreds of onlookers gathered in the street at a traffic roundabout several hundred meters (yards) away.
Among them was an Associated Press photographer. Hassan Ammar had donned his flak jacket and helmet and rushed to the scene — taking up his position at a safe distance using a long lens — after the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning with a map marking the targeted building.
The Israeli army said the building contained facilities belonging to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
However, Ammar had different associations with the building. He had grown up less than a kilometer (less than 0.6 miles) from it, and he had been there on multiple occasions.
When he was a child during the 15-year Lebanese civil war that ended in 1990, “this building was on the front line between Muslim and Christian neighborhoods,” the so-called Green Line, he recalled.
But in later years, Ammar...
