Syria earthquake shakes nerves in a region already on edge

Overnight tremor comes amid growing fears of a wider regional war

Beirut, where residents felt a 4.8 magnitude tremor which struck Syria and Jordan. EPA

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Residents in Beirut and across Lebanon were startled at midnight by a 4.8 magnitude earthquake which struck Syria and Jordan and rattled their homes.

Many feared it was one of the almost-daily sonic booms from Israeli jets flying low above the Lebanese capital, or the widely anticipated Hezbollah response to the killing of senior commander Fouad Shukr in an Israeli air strike in Beirut last month.

“I didn't sleep all night, it was a nightmare. Now it is the time for earthquakes?” said Hamoudi, a 37-year-old shopkeeper originally from south Lebanon who is living in the suburbs of Beirut. In 2006, when Hezbollah and Israel last fought a full-on war, he fled to Syria to escape the fighting.

While south Lebanon has been entrenched in conflict since October – with nearly 100,000 people displaced from the border areas – the impact of the fighting has gradually crept towards the capital, which for two weeks has been on tenterhooks.

Hamoudi said he knew it was an earthquake but was still shaken by it. “Oh my god, the feeling – I am still scared until now,” he said.

In Turkey, Abu Hassan, a Syrian resident of Gaziantep in the south-east, said his family were reminded of the twin 7.8-intensity earthquakes last February, which killed more than 50,000 people in the two countries.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who fled the war in their home country live in the region. Thousands of them were killed in last year’s quakes.

“We felt the quake last night – we are all OK, but my wife and three children were terrified,” said Abu Hassan, who did not want to give his full name for security reasons. “It brought back a lot of memories for them.”

Ali, a Syrian baker in Turkey’s Hatay province, among the worst-hit areas in last year’s quakes, said last night’s tremor “brought back painful, awful memories”, even though it did not cause any visible material damage. “We cannot sleep like other people, my children cannot sleep from fear and panic,” he said.

“What happened to us cannot be forgotten,” said Toqa Zarzori, a Syrian woman who lost her home in last year’s quake, and was recently relocated to temporary accommodation in a container in Hatay, on the road towards the Syrian border. She said people inside their homes felt the tremor last night. “People are scared,” she added.

Haluk Eyidogan, a Turkish seismologist, said the quake occurred in the active Dead Sea Fault Zone, which runs through Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.

Pressure in the zone had possibly increased after last February's earthquakes, he said.

It is not the first earthquake in the area, he said. “There were hundreds of such earthquakes in the past.” The probability of more quakes in Lebanon and Syria is high, he added.

The tremor's epicentre was recorded as near the city of Hama, in west-central Syria.

For Syrians in Turkey, already struggling against rising anti-immigrant sentiment and years of violent conflict in their country, last night's earthquake was another painful blow.

“Every possible calamity that could happen has happened to me,” said Abu Hassan in Gaziantep. “I’ve become tired of living. My situation has reached a stage where I want to die.”

Lebanon, on the surface, was largely spared by the February 2023 earthquakes. There was limited structural damage, but it did highlight how some buildings had been hastily or improperly built.

Last year's earthquakes also revived memories for people still traumatised by the 2020 Beirut blast, which killed more than 200 people, injured thousands and wreaked devastation across the Lebanese capital.

Following Monday's earthquake, the Lebanese Real Estate Authority warned that many buildings were prone to collapse because of the lack of restoration. The quake rattled nerves in a country already on edge.

“We are all tired from this situation. But what can we do? Nothing,” said Hamoudi.