WASHINGTON, D.C.: When Bertha Nohra spotted Lebanon’s first lady wandering alone through a Virginia shopping mall over the weekend, carrying her own bags with no security detail in sight, the veteran journalist-turned-florist did a double take.
“I had to look twice to make sure it was her,” said Nohra, who covered Lebanon’s presidential palace for decades, then moved to Washington in 2003 and worked as a prime-time news anchor for years before opening a flower shop in Virginia. “Not a single assistant with her. No one.”
She approached. “I told her, ‘Madame, we are very happy that you are here, and that the president came,’” Nohra recalled.
It was a small, human moment ahead of a consequential one. On Tuesday, President Joseph Aoun was welcomed in the Oval Office for his first face-to-face meeting with President Donald Trump — the first visit to the White House by a Lebanese head of state in nearly two decades, since Michel Sleiman met Barack Obama in 2009.
Aoun arrived carrying a written plan to disarm Hezbollah and an appeal for Washington to press Israel into implementing the June 26 framework agreement, which envisions a phased Israeli troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon in exchange for the group’s disarmament.
Speaking to media, Trump vowed to help Lebanon “a lot,” adding that Lebanon had been “a very mistreated country” that had been “hit hard” for decades.
“It’s probably a dangerous place in a lot of ways,” Trump told reporters. “But they love the country... and we’re going to help it. We’re going to help it a lot.”
For Lebanese Americans who have spent the better part of two years watching their country burn from thousands of miles away, the visit carries weight far beyond diplomatic protocol.
Interviewed in the Washington area, several expats described what it was like to witness two wars unfold on their phones and television screens — the 2024 war that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the far deadlier war that reignited on March 2, 2026, after Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening strikes of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
“When I have a plan in the summer to go to my country, I want to know if I can go or not,” Nohra said. “I don’t want to be at the mercy of Iran: If something bad happens in Iran, then chaos and war will ensue in Lebanon. Enough is enough.”
A Lebanese army soldier stands guard at a checkpoint after entering the southern Lebanese village of Zawtar on July 21, 2026. (AFP/File)
Nohra, who covered Lebanon’s 1996 Grapes of Wrath operation and the 2006 war as a reporter, said she has watched the same cycle repeat itself for three decades. “What did we bring them back into the country for, and let them take a bigger swath of land than the one they occupied?” she said, referring to Israeli forces. “Not to mention the 4,000 who were killed — 4,000 in a tiny country of 3 million.”
Her figure is, if anything, conservative. Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health has recorded 4,321 people killed and 12,207 wounded by Israeli strikes since the war resumed on March 2 — a toll that, combined with the 2024 war, brings the overall number of Lebanese killed by Israel since the two wars began to over 6,500.
More than 1 million people have been displaced by the fighting since March, and UN agencies say 247 children have been killed and 992 injured since March 2 — an average of 12 children killed or maimed every day.
Entire villages have ceased to exist: a UNDP assessment found that 11,095 buildings were completely destroyed in the 2026 offensive alone, and satellite analysis by Le Monde found 45 percent of urban areas in southern Lebanon damaged or destroyed since March.
Towns like Naqoura, once painstakingly rebuilt after the 2024 war, have since been razed and made completely uninhabitable.
Nohra, whose husband Gerard is desperate to return to Lebanon while she hesitates to bring their children, said she is tired of defending a war she never chose. “It is not possible that we are the only country left that has to ‘resist,’” she said, using the term Hezbollah applies to its armed campaign against Israel. “Enough!”
Still, she said, she cannot lecture those who stayed behind. “Those would tell us, ‘Come live here and then tell us what you think.’ Ok, but here I am: living in America and half of my heart is Lebanon.”
She said she has decided to trust the government’s new approach because there is no alternative left to try. “We have tried war. We have tried ‘resistance.’ But the country was destroyed, once, then twice. And the people of the south, God help them. If the son of the south himself is telling you now, we are done with war, what then would I, who live in exile, say?”
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun being received by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, DC. onm July 19, 2026. (AFP/File)
President Aoun’s own family hails from southern Lebanon even though he was born in the Beirut suburb of Sin Al-Fil.
Aoun’s visit came as the Lebanese army moved into an area of the south under a deal with Israel aimed at proving Beirut can extend state authority and disarm Iran-backed Hezbollah.
But in a sign of the fragility of the agreement, the Lebanese army said Israeli troops fired near its soldiers deploying in a so-called “pilot zone” Israel is supposed to withdraw from.
During the meeting on Tuesday, Trump said the US “will be looking at” putting additional pressure on Israel to withdraw.
Nohra said her message to the president, delivered through the first lady, was: “We expats want you to carry a message to the president: Fix the country, because we have hope in him, we have no other hope,” she said. “Those who criticize the talks with Israel and the trilateral framework agreement, I tell them: Give it a chance. You have seen what war has brought you. Now see what these talks will give you. If it doesn’t work, bury it. But give it a chance at least.”
Sousou Ayoub, a Lebanese American who lives in Northern Virginia and whose husband is from the border town of Rmeich, said the hardest part of watching the war from afar was not knowing whether her family was telling her the truth. “You talk to your parents and you don’t know if they are telling the truth or if they are lying just so as not to make you worry,” she said.
She described the destruction of southern towns as unrecognizable. “There are towns that you can’t tell the streets in anymore, no sign of past life, no house recognizable, no memory — all the lives of those people, all the love that they put into their homes, the families they made. Nothing else is left. This is so scary. For me, it is like a horror film.”
She credited residents of border villages such as Ain Ebel who stayed and endured Israeli encirclement with keeping the south Lebanese. “Not one inch of Lebanon would we accept to let go,” she said.
A man waving a Hezbollah flag walks over open graves near a portrait of a Hezbollah fighter killed during clashes with the Israeli army drive during a mass funeral in the southern Lebanese village of Majdel Selm on July 18, 2026. (AFP/File)
Ayoub said she trusts Aoun personally, describing a close friendship with the first lady that predates the presidency. She acknowledged the political danger the president faces walking into direct talks with Israel opposed by Hezbollah and, she argued, resented by hardliners on the Israeli side as well.
“No party is agreeing with him, because both parties want the war to continue,” she said, referring to Hezbollah and Israel. “We are with the president. We don’t want war. We want peace — and we want that peace to come not at the expense of our country, of our army,” meaning built on the strength of the Lebanese Armed Forces rather than Hezbollah’s arsenal.
She credited Trump, calling him “for the first time” a US president genuinely invested in Lebanese peace rather than transactional interests in the country.
“We are praying for President Aoun, and we are asking God to help him realize our hope and his goal, and have peace in Lebanon for once,” she said.
She pointed to the diplomatic machinery now in motion — Lebanon’s Ambassador to Washington Nada Mouawad; the US Ambassador to Beirut Michel Issa; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who hosted Aoun on Sunday and praised what he called the Lebanese government’s “determined effort to reclaim Lebanon’s sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure, and move towards peace.”
Ayoub said: “Enough. Lebanon doesn’t want war anymore. We want Lebanon to be the Switzerland of the Middle East again.”
Ayoub Sarouphim, a Lebanese American architect who has lived in the US since 2001, framed his hopes for the visit in more structural terms: a durable peace framework built on the disarmament of illegal armed groups, an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Lebanese territory, formal border demarcation with both Israel and Syria, and a reconstruction and development plan for what has been lost.
“As a Lebanese American whose heart and soul beats passionately for both home countries, the hope is that President Aoun is able to show up for this historical moment and work with the US administration to put words into actions and bring permanent peace to Lebanon,” Sarouphim said.
He was unsparing about Hezbollah, calling it a “hypocritical” and “disloyal” partner in government that has waged war without coordinating with the state and does not serve the Lebanese people’s interests. Yet he cautioned against abandoning the Southern communities including those who have long depended economically on the group and on Iran, arguing that the state, which he said was “absent in the 70s” when Hezbollah first filled the vacuum, must now reintegrate the group’s base into a political system rather than repeat that mistake.
Lebanese Americans and supporters hold candles as they gather in support of Lebanon during a vigil in Dearborn, Michigan, US on April 10, 2026. (REUTERS/File)
Every person interviewed traced the current war back to a decision they say Lebanon had no part in making: Hezbollah fired on Israel on March 2 in retaliation for the killing of Khamenei, prompting Lebanon’s own Cabinet to hold an emergency meeting within hours and formally ban Hezbollah’s military activities — a ban it has struggled to enforce. Critics in Beirut, including officials in Aoun’s own government, have accused Hezbollah of putting Iran’s interests ahead of Lebanon’s and torpedoing a peace process that was already under strain.
Hezbollah has not softened its position since. The group has rejected both the negotiations with Israel and the framework agreement itself, refusing calls to disarm, and insists only continued pressure from Iran can end the war and bring an Israeli withdrawal. Its lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah has called the government’s direct talks with Israel “a blatant violation of the national pact, the constitution and Lebanese laws.”
Israel’s own signals have done little to reassure the diaspora that any deal will hold: Defense Minister Israel Katz insists Israel has “no territorial ambitions in Lebanon” and will not withdraw “a millimeter” until Hezbollah is disarmed, even as he has separately vowed Israeli forces will remain in “security zones” in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza “indefinitely.” That contradiction — disclaiming territorial ambition while declaring an open-ended presence, with the military already barring residents from dozens of southern villages — is exactly what the Lebanese expats interviewed fear: that Israel will not fully honor the framework, leaving Hezbollah an alibi to keep fighting and Lebanon again a battlefield for Tehran.
Underneath the diplomacy sits an economy in ruins. Even as remittances from millions of Lebanese abroad keep families afloat, expats describe watching their homeland cycle through collapse after collapse since the 2019 financial crash, compounded now by a war-battered south where poverty rates in some districts have topped 90 percent and tens of thousands of homes lie in rubble.
None of the three expats interviewed described themselves as naive about the odds. But each, in their own words, arrived at the same place: that Aoun, and the fragile channel he is opening between Beirut, Washington and Tel Aviv, may be the last option left after 50 years in which, as Sarouphim put it, “every Lebanese generation has now officially lived through war.”
Nohra said: “Look at Jordan, look at Egypt. They made peace with Israel. Look at Germany — the whole earth was against it, and now who doesn’t have relations with Germany? No war lasts forever. Wars don’t last.”
