Celine Haidar sits in her wheelchair on the balcony of a rehabilitation center an hour outside of Beirut, Lebanon. For the past half hour, the 20-year-old Lebanon midfielder has been resilient, peaceful even, despite emerging from a coma just three months ago to discover a life unrecognizable to the one she once knew.
Advertisement
“The truth is,” Haidar tells The Athletic, “sometimes, I thought of suicide.”
Immediately, Haidar begins apologizing. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she says via video call, with the help of a translator. “But, of course, my mentality has changed since that day.”
That day was Nov. 16, 2024, the moment Haidar was struck in the head by shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon’s capital. She had been a rising star on the Lebanese national soccer team. The injury put her in a coma for nearly 60 days, made her a symbol of the war’s destruction, and changed her focus toward restoring any semblance of normalcy in recovery.
“How I went from death to life again, I’m not going to give up,” Haidar says. “But these last two months,” she pauses, “even my enemies, I don’t wish them this pain.”
The Athletic is speaking to Haidar less than 24 hours after an Israeli airstrike struck a residential neighbourhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut, an area that is a stronghold of the militant group and political party Hezbollah. The strike was not far from Al-Chiyyah, the suburb Haidar calls home, where she was attempting to follow an evacuation order when she was struck by the shrapnel.
Life in Lebanon’s capital has been delineated by sounds and sights of conflict for decades, but the insect-like hum of drones and screams of evacuation sirens have been ever-present since Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite movement, and Israel began exchanging cross-border attacks in the wake of the war in Gaza.
Despite the announcement of a ceasefire deal in November, days after Haidar’s injury, attacks have continued, with Sunday’s strike targeting a Hezbollah facility, according to a joint statement from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz. The United Nations’ Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said on social media that the strike “generated panic and fear of renewed violence among those desperate for a return to normalcy.”
Haidar, whose story travelled around the globe, is aching to restore a semblance of normalcy to her life.
“Can I show you the view?” Haidar asks as she is wheeled out onto the balcony. Staring back at her, an orange sun sets beneath grey clouds, blanketing the skyline in streaks of pink and yellow. It is beautiful, Haidar says, “but sitting here is not.”
A grin accompanies Haidar’s last line, even as she turns the camera towards her legs, confined to a wheelchair. “Look at this, this s–t,” Haidar says. “I swear, I got depressed.”
Advertisement
The camera returns to Haidar’s face. Again, she is smiling. But Haidar still hurts. “Everywhere,” she clarifies. “Lots of parts of my body, my heart.”
She remembers almost nothing from the day she was injured, only that she had returned home and that her parents had told her to run, to get far away from the strike.
“And I was going, and there were people on the street, and they’re telling me there’s an airstrike coming now and to stay here. And I stood there. And it happened,” she says.
Waking up from her coma was a blur. She asked questions about how she was injured, if it was the result of an accident, or something that happened during a match. The graphic video of her injury, which spread across social media, was eventually shown to her.
In it, Haidar watched herself lying among the still-settling rubble, her dark hair spooling in eddying puddles of red.
Escaping reminders of her tragedy is nearly impossible. Haidar’s voice is hoarse and strained, the result of an emergency tracheostomy, a surgical procedure that creates an opening in the neck to aid breathing. For the interview, she must lift her phone speaker to her mouth and raise a voice she has only recently learned to reuse.
Her right eyebrow is partially shaven where the shrapnel struck her head. Her hair, once long and flowing in a low ponytail, is now cut short above her ears. “It took time to know that my hair was like this because I didn’t have my phone at first,” Haidar says. “When I realized, I called my friend. He’s a haircutter. I told him to cut it more.”
She smiles again. “Stubborn” was a word used by her coaches and friends to describe her as they waited for her to awake, certain that she would. “She wants her life as she wants it,” her father, Abbas, told The Athletic earlier this year, as he described a young girl who refused to acquiesce to her country’s historic conservatism, who captained her senior club team to a national title, despite being its youngest player by nearly four years. “Celine does what she wants, from the strength of her personality.”
Haidar’s recovery journey is evidence of that. Upon waking up, Haidar was handed what doctors believed to be an ambitious prognosis: one year to use a wheelchair, to move her arms, to eventually learn to walk, first with the help of support bars, then a walker, and then, finally, with only the gentle assistance of a physio’s hand or forearm.
Advertisement
Yet, Haidar can already walk alone in physio sessions. “I achieved this result in two months,” she says. She is not yet permitted to do so outside of those sessions, though she insists she is more than capable. She clutches her hand close to her chest and clenches it into a distorted fist.
“My hand was like this every day,” she says, before lifting her arm high into the air and opening her hand so that her fingers spread into the twilight sky. “Look at it now.”
The journey has not been without dark moments. Being in a rehabilitation centre means being an hour’s drive from her family and friends. When she was in the hospital in Beirut, her parents, coaches and teammates could visit frequently, but the days are lonelier now, spent battling her own body’s limits. The rare times she is permitted to leave to visit friends, teammates and loved ones, and share her progress with them, become lifelines.
“I’m in depression because I’m here alone,” Haidar says. “Every day before I sleep, I cry, I cry, and I cry. And I pray to God to be back again.
“When I first woke, I thought that I would never go back to how I was. Now there’s no giving up. No pain, no gain, right? Only losers give up.”
Here, another smile, though this time something more visceral burns behind it. Support from her family and friends, the memories of their elation at her waking, remain priceless motivations. Her father, in particular, spurs her on. She says he was shot in the leg when he was, she says, a prisoner of war during the conflict between Lebanon and Israel in the 1980s.
“I always told my dad that I’m like him,” she says. “I’m strong, I look like him, I’m a warrior like him. He, too, was hurt by Israel; he almost died, but he lived.”
She tips her chin upwards. “I am now even more like him.”
That she has had to be this manifestation of herself has been emotional for her and her father.
Speaking to The Athletic earlier this year, Abbas bemoaned the “zero-sum” nature of war. “We paid a war tax, a blood tax for our daughters. What did we do wrong?” Abbas said. “We only live to raise our children, to make their dreams come true. Celine was beginning her life, building step by step with football. This injury cut off her journey. I hope this experience is passed on.”
Advertisement
Haidar, the youngest of three children, shares a similar hope. Her parents, she says, were within range of Israel’s strike on Sunday.
“They wanted to go from home and run away. I told them, no, we are stronger than that. I tell everyone, don’t lose hope ever. God is stronger than everything and will never keep this going,” she says.
Instead of speaking at length about how her life ground to a halt, she leans into the future tense and, eventually, to football.
Simply making a full return to the sport that has been her life is the bottom rung of Haidar’s ambitions. There is a country to represent, boundaries to break.
“My dream is to get back to how I was, to start to achieve my dreams again.” Haidar smiles once again.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To contact the Samaritans, go to samaritans.org or call 116 123 in the UK, and to reach CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), go to thecalmzone.net or ring 0800 58 58 58 in the UK.
(Top photo: Beirut Football Academy, Celine Haidar; Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic)
4