Beirut 1975: The Battle of the Hotels That Started a War

In April 1975, a minor scuffle between militiamen in Beirut's Ain al-Rummaneh neighborhood ignited a decade and a half of civil war. This episode zooms in on the first weeks of that war — the so-called 'Battle of the Hotels' — when Beirut's luxury coastline became a frontline. Lucas and Luna walk through the geography of that spring: the Holiday Inn, the Phoenicia Intercontinental, the St. George Hotel, where snipers and masked gunmen turned tourist landmarks into bunkers. Along the way they meet the key factions — the Phalangists under Pierre Gemayel, the National Movement under Kamal Jumblatt, and the emerging Palestinian factions like Fatah and the PFLP. They discuss the role of the Lebanese Army, which disintegrated rather than take sides, and the first attempts at ceasefires, which collapsed within hours. The episode also touches on the social geography of Beirut — the East-West divide, the Holiday Inn's symbolic height, and how the war began not with a grand strategy but with busloads of displaced families and the smell of burning cars. Specific detail: the Christian Black Saturday massacres of December 1975 and the Battle of the Hotels proper, which lasted from October 1975 to March 1976. A story of how a city of cafes and beach clubs became a shooting gallery.

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