Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gaza-conflict-reverberates-on-beirut-streets Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Beirut, once known as the Paris of the Middle East, has more recently seen decades of civil war and conflict -- and the growing power of Hezbollah as a political party. Jeffrey Brown reports from the Lebanese capital on reaction to the Gaza conflict there. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JEFFREY BROWN: In Beirut, even on a beautiful winter weekend, signs of violence from the recent past are everywhere. The bullet-scarred remains of what was once a Holiday Inn stand as a grim monument to the brutal 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 and involved Muslim and Christian factions, Palestinian refugees, and interventions by both Syria and Israel.Nearby, the bombed-out block once home to the Saint George Hotel, where a huge bomb blast killed prime minister Rafik Hariri and many others in 2005. Syrian agents are suspected in the assassination. A U.N. investigation is ongoing.In another area of the city, vacant holes in the ground where Israeli jets bombed in 2006 after border skirmishes with Hezbollah spread into a 34-day war that left some 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis dead.Now Beirut is watching and reacting to the fighting in nearby Gaza.Before the civil war and before all the fighting here, Beirut was long known as the Paris of the Middle East, a place of culture and openness. And you can still feel some of that even this morning on a walk through parts of the city and here on the famous Corniche, overlooking the Mediterranean.But Beirut is also the home to Hezbollah, the Party of God, which has grown from a small movement born in the early 1980s into an important political and social force, with a stronghold here in the southern suburbs of the city.RAMI KHOURI, Director, Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Relations: Beirut is an amazing place, because you have the most dynamic, creative, vibrant culture in the Arab world. At the same time, you have the destruction of war all around you. You have ethnic tensions, religious tensions. The two contrasts are really quite striking.