cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8029051
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/36949
BEIRUT — It is morning outside Mohammed Al-Amin Mosque in downtown Beirut, and beneath the gigantic crescent moon statue, a woman in a white hijab and dirtied floral dress is calling for her children.
She screams out the name of one of them, Mohammed, when he almost wanders into the busy street.
Fatima, 45, fled the southern suburb of Bourj al-Barajneh with her family on March 2 when Israel bombarded the community as part of the broadening regional war.
She is a mother of two young boys and an older daughter who are sitting cross-legged around her on cardboard boxes. Thick comforters, a jug of water, and a half-eaten bag of Lebanese bread lean on the statue behind them.
It’s not the first time they have been displaced. The family is originally from Syria but escaped the civil war for the relative peace of Bourj al-Barajneh. Fatima’s mother, Warde, 70, is there in her wheelchair; she sheltered in the exact same spot under the gigantic crescent moon statue in 2024 when Israel last struck their neighborhood.
This time, they abandoned their home when the explosions brought her sons to tears. “Children are not like adults; there is fear and there is terror,” she says. “So we left Bourj al-Barajneh. Yesterday we slept near this statue.”
“Our children have been hungry since yesterday. I mean there’s no food, no drink,” she explains. “And yesterday night the children were freezing.”
“Children are not like adults; there is fear and there is terror.”
Authorities in Beirut have done nothing to help them, Fatima says. They are among a wide swath of the Lebanese populace that has been uprooted and one of tens of families who have found shelter near the gigantic crescent moon statue. A few men brought them blankets when they saw that the family was cold. The problem is that they have nowhere to go now. “Now we’re afraid to go back. They’re saying there’s bombing. So, we’re forced to be sitting here on the ground. What can we do? There’s no solution. There’s nothing,” she says.
The next day, they are gone.
Israel’s wave of attacks on Lebanon are the deadliest conflict in the country since the 1975–1990 civil war. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 people, 118 of them children, and displaced 1 million others. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah but has consistently struck residential buildings in the south and east of the country, the southern suburbs of Beirut, and, recently, parts of central Beirut as well.
Nowhere seems safe, especially for those whose apartments are in evacuation zones that encompass nearly 600 square miles, according to the United Nations. As of mid-March, as many as 1 in 5 people in Lebanon have been displaced by Israeli military operations. The Intercept walked the streets of Beirut to learn their stories.
Displaced people find shade by public art in downtown Beirut. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
Across the street from the statue where Fatima’s family sheltered, two teenage boys lay on a thin mattress pushed up against a wall covered with purple and yellow graffiti. One is awake and scrolling his phone with one hand behind his head. Behind him, his brother sleeps.
Karim is 16, with dark brown hair and an inviting face. A few days ago, he was in Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, trying to pick up odd jobs to make money. He lived with his family in an apartment and shared a room with his brother.
On February 28, the night the U.S. and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Karim heard “problems would soon be coming to Lebanon.” He wasn’t convinced at first. When Israel started hitting the southern suburbs, Karim narrowly avoided an air attack as his parents and brother tried to escape by car on the street known as Airport Road, which connects downtown Beirut to the Rafic Hariri International Airport. “They were striking in front of us, cutting off the road.”
“If we find a house, we’ll go, and if we find a school, we’ll go. And if we don’t find anything, we’ll stay here.”
When they made it to downtown Beirut, his family tried to find a place to stay in schools that were being converted into makeshift shelters, but they were mostly full. “My mom has a mental health condition,” he explains. “The schools are overcrowded, and it bothers her too much.”
That’s why he’s sleeping on the street and using cafes to charge his phone. Karim runs into dukkan, or corner stores, for food, water, or whatever else he needs.
He wants to return to his house, but the strikes have only gotten worse in Dahieh since they arrived. “We have to be patient. What can we do? If we find a house we’ll go, and if we find a school we’ll go. And if we don’t find anything we’ll stay here. We have to have patience,” he says.
“Right now, everything is exhausting. I am just so tired.”
It’s hard to grasp the scale of displacement inside Lebanon. Already, according to the U.N., 667,831 people have registered themselves as displaced with Lebanon’s government. Lebanon’s National Disaster Risk Management Unit reports that “119,700 displaced individuals [are] currently accommodated in 567 collective shelters.” However, reports suggest that more than 1 million people — of a population of just about five and a half million — are displaced, including many who have not yet registered. According to Al Jazeera, about 99,000 homes were already damaged or destroyed in the previous 14 months before this escalation started.
The Lebanese government, with the U.N. and local NGOs, says it is responding to the emergency by opening public schools, the city’s stadiums, and universities as temporary shelters. With support from the U.N. Development Programme, they also created a disaster management unit to coordinate aid, such as essential supplies and cash transfers, and direct people to safer regions like the North and Bekaa.
Despite these efforts, the scale of displacement has far exceeded the government’s capacity to provide aid. Every one of the 36 displaced people in Beirut who spoke with The Intercept said the response has been inadequate.
“Where is the government? What are they doing?” one humanitarian aid worker asks frustratedly.
The man who raises this question over and over again is Mohammed, who shares his frustration while sitting on his motorcycle and smoking a cigarette in front of Ras Beirut’s Public Secondary School, which has been converted into a shelter. He describes himself as part of the “resistance against Israel,” and as “a son of Ras Beirut,” known in the capital city as an upper-scale and religiously mixed neighborhood.
“I am here to help the displaced people in that school behind me,” he points.
Children’s clothes hang to dry on a balcony at the Ras Beirut Public Secondary School, where displaced families have found shelter. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
He doesn’t think the Lebanese government is doing enough for its displaced citizens. “Children, boys, women, girls, are just sitting in the street with no one to feed them, no medicine at all, so we are trying, as the sons of this area, to serve them best we can.”
Mohammed says that there are around 450 displaced people in the school with few resources. “They have no mattresses or pillows to put their heads on right now,” he begins to speak louder and get more agitated. “Inside the school, women and children are sleeping on the floor barefoot covering themselves with their clothes instead of blankets,” he says.
Throughout March, schools in Lebanon have faced a near-total disruption due to the sharp escalation in conflict. Since October 2023, Lebanon’s schools have faced repeated widespread interruption.
The atmosphere inside the school is tense as families bunch together in classrooms trying to find room. One couple has set up a nargileh, and the woman, who is in a black hijab, takes a long, deep pull from the hose and lets out a plume of smoke. “No pictures here,” one of the gentlemen running the displacement shelter tells a European journalist with a camera around her neck. “It is a very sensitive time for all of these people.”
The facade of the school has one blue balcony on the upper left-hand side that overlooks Hamra in Ras Beirut. On it, a pair of red children’s pajama pants, along with several other pieces of clothing, are hung out to dry. “These are the children of the southern suburbs, and where are they? They are on the streets,” Mohammed says.
Tents have popped up along the perimeter of Horsh Beirut, an urban park in Beirut, Lebanon. Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
Hundreds of tents have sprung up along the highway that passes Horsh Beirut, a park that butts up against the southern suburbs of the city. Yara Sayegh has taken it upon herself to help their inhabitants.
Sayegh runs an organization called Truth Be Told, which usually focuses on transitional justice and human rights in Lebanon. Now it is serving as an emergency response initiative, cooking and distributing meals and medicine to families in tents across the area. She has experience after responding the same way in during a period of intense Israeli strikes in 2024.
Recently, she decided to build a makeshift kitchen at Riwaq Cafe near Mar Mikhael in Beirut. “I decided, given how much transparency is needed and the importance and the attention to detail, and the amount of corruption I have witnessed during crises, I would just open up my own [kitchen].”
Meals prepared for distribution for displaced people sheltering near Horsh Beirut park. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
Every day, volunteers show up to the cafe around 10 a.m. to help cook and pack meals for those fasting in Horsh Beirut. Her chef, Omar Khaled, directs volunteers on how to dice onions, squeeze lemons, and cook mujadara. He counts and recounts the boxed meals before they go out to the houseless people on the streets. Sayegh passes out as many as 1,000 meals a day in the park and surrounding areas.
“Whatever I do right now, whatever a lot of us are doing, isn’t enough,” Sayegh says “There are too many families who are displaced.”
On a rainy night in mid-March, Sayegh drives the meals to Horsh Beirut. Along the perimeter of the park, tents lining the streets are sopping wet. Tarps hang over four or five of them at a time. As she backs up her car, a line forms of people who need her help.
“Is my medicine ready?” one woman calls out.
“No, ma’am not yet, but inshallah I will try to bring it to you tomorrow,” Sayegh responds as she jots down another young woman’s information onto an Excel spreadsheet on her laptop.
“I am committed to them, there aren’t enough people helping, and they have nowhere to go,” Sayegh says.
Israel’s attacks on Lebanon extend far beyond Beirut and its suburbs. The most devastating strikes have been across the south of the country.
Evacuation orders took effect both south and north of the Litani River, a crucial and agriculturally rich landscape powered by the river itself, in the last week. But problems for southerners started much before that.
At the height of its war on Gaza in 2024, Israel began a series of strikes in southern Lebanon, aimed at what it said were militant groups, including Hezbollah, that had been launching retaliatory salvos across the border. This included a campaign of deadly Israeli ground raids in the border region and the expansion of what it says is a “buffer zone.”
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According to the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, between November 2024 and the end of 2025, Israeli forces have committed over 10,000 air and ground violations of a November 2024 ceasefire agreement. This included daily airstrikes and ground incursions that killed hundreds in Lebanon, including civilians. Israel never withdrew troops from southern Lebanon and has pushed further into the country as its right wing parties call to settle Lebanon and make the Litani River Israel’s northern border.
Buildings in that area have been leveled to the ground, and the Israeli military has paved roads over Lebanese homes, making sure displaced people can never return. The reality on the ground is “undeniable erasure” says Hanan, a queer Lebanese American art history student at the American University of Beirut. She is among those dealing directly with Israel’s aggression in southern Lebanon.
Hanan grew up in Arizona about 30 minutes from the Mexican border. She came to Lebanon in August to pursue a master’s degree in art history and curation. Ever since Israel’s so-called ceasefire with Hamas, she felt a pull to Lebanon and her family there. She was drawn by bucolic memories of past visits.
“I romanticize the shit out of that time now,” she says. “We literally ate mulberries off the trees on the mosque grounds and chopped vegetables all morning listening to Arabic music.”
Last week, her family’s house in Chehabiye, near the southern border, was destroyed. Hanan is now housing 12 relatives in her two-bedroom apartment in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, an upper-class Francophile, predominantly Christian community.
“Some were more prepared than others when they came. They all mostly left in a hurry,” she explains. Because of the chaos and the traffic, it took her family two days to get to her apartment in Beirut. On the journey, they slept in their cars.
They had jobs at shoe stores and grocery stores, Hanan says. Kids were just beginning school. One relative had finally purchased a motorcycle after saving his money; it was destroyed in the strikes. “All of their lives have become completely upended,” she says.
She thinks her relatives’ building was targeted because a Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Qard Al-Hassan bank occupied the first floor. Founded in 1982, Al-Qard Al-Hassan operates more than 30 branches across Lebanon and is registered as an NGO with the Lebanese Ministry of Interior. But it is not licensed by Banque du Libam, the central bank of Lebanon, to operate as a bank. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Al-Qard Al-Hassan in 2007, stating Hezbollah uses it as a cover to manage financial activities and access the international financial system. This month, the Israeli military conducted a systematic campaign of airstrikes against numerous branches across Lebanon, identifying them as legitimate military targets because they fund Hezbollah’s military activities.
Even in Beirut, Hanan’s family is treated with suspicion. Soon after their arrival, a neighbor threatened to inform authorities that 12 relatives were crammed into Hanan’s two-bedroom apartment.
“My neighbors are afraid we are targets for Israel.”
“It is just because they are southern and could be supporters of Hezbollah, and so my neighbors are afraid we are targets for Israel,” Hanan explains. “What they don’t understand is that the people of the south are helping each other, even when others leave them hanging.”
The tensions got worse on March 13, when Israeli aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets over several neighborhoods in Beirut. They called on the Lebanese citizens to “disarm Hezbollah” and said “Lebanon is your decision, not someone else’s.” Another flier, designed to look like a newspaper, warned that the current situation in Lebanon would turn into something similar to Gaza. The leaflets asked Lebanese people to inform Israel of Hezbollah’s whereabouts using a QR code.
A displaced family in downtown Beirut. Photo: Afeef Nessouli/The Intercept
The point, many believe, is to stoke civil tension and sectarian fractures that will destabilize the country. Sayegh, for instance, says her family and friends don’t support her humanitarian aid work. She comes from a Christian background and is often criticized for helping supporters of Hezbollah. “We are one people and that is the only way forward, and that is why I help. I believe in one Lebanon for all,” Sayegh says.
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Many in Lebanon understand that its diverse religious makeup leaves it vulnerable to outside forces pitting the people of the country against each other. But in the current chaos and terror of Israeli missile strikes, many who supported Hezbollah’s retaliation on behalf of Gaza just a year ago are now changing their minds. “Where were they when Israel was breaking the ceasefire in the south thousands upon thousands of times in the last year?” a young woman whose family hails from the south asks. “It seems like they came alive only for Khamenei’s death, and I don’t fully believe their leaders are doing this for Lebanon anymore,” she says.
Hanan knows the current situation is untenable in the long run. “Their loose plan is to return to the south, but I can’t realistically see that happening anytime soon,” she says.
She and her father are looking at renting an apartment in an area that will be more forgiving to her family’s circumstances and backgrounds, but with 1 million people pushed from their homes, it won’t be easy to find lodging.
An uncle works at a soup kitchen attached to a mosque that has some underutilized office space. “There’s two rooms there that they use as offices,” Hanan says. “So he’s thinking that he can turn them into rooms temporarily before they return south, which is actually crazy, because the building right next door got bombed the other day.”
The post More Than 1 Million People in Lebanon Have Been Displaced. These Are Their Stories. appeared first on The Intercept.
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