For more than an hour, ambulances struggled to ferry the wounded and the dead from the neighborhood while Lebanese troops and Hezbollah gunmen cordoned off the area, preventing anyone from getting close to the site of the two blasts, less than 50 meters (yards) apart.
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A double suicide bombing hit the Burj al-Barajneh last week, killing 46 people and wounding at least 200 others.
The attackers had planned to launch five suicide bombings inside a hospital in the deprived Beirut suburb of Burj al-Barajneh on Thursday, Interior Minister Nuhad Mashnuq said, but they changed their target because of heavy security.
He added that the entire “bombing network and its supporters were arrested in the 48 hours following the explosion”. He said the Syrians were found in a Palestinian refugee camp and in a Beirut apartment where explosives belts were being assembled. Later the security officers announced arrest of two other Syrian and Lebanese suspects. While the reports are that “IS” has claimed responsibility, such acts have no place in the religion of Islam and in no way represent its followers.
ISIS said “soldiers of the Caliphate” first detonated explosives planted on a motorbike on the street.
Barnard writes that, “The disparity in reactions highlighted a sense in the region of being left alone to bear the brunt of Syria’s deadly four-year war, which has sent more than four million refugees fleeing, mostly to neighboring countries like Lebanon”.
What of Beirut? Often called the “Paris of the Middle East” – you can unpack the presumptions underlying that phrase on your own time (why isn’t Paris the Beirut of Europe?) – the Lebanese capital was rocked by attacks similar in magnitude to the Paris attacks just one day earlier.
“When the attacks in which his heroism manifested are not heard about or emphasized enough, the details of these attacks will also get pushed to the side”, he said.
In a post shared more than 10,000 times on Facebook, Lebanese blogger Joey Ayoub criticised the apparent disparity in reactions to the two sets of attacks, arguing that the deaths in Beirut did not seem to matter as much as the deaths in Paris.
One of the bombers attempted to attack a Shia religious venue packed with worshippers on the last day of the holy month of Muharram.
At least 971 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
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Those explosions were ostensibly in revenge for Hezbollah’s military support for regime forces in neighbouring Syria’s civil war.
