“Two wars in two years, that’s too much!”
Hayat struggles to believe it. At 50 years old, she finds herself displaced again, just like tens of thousands of other Lebanese who, since Monday, are fleeing Israeli bombardments.
“I sleep in the car, I have nowhere to go, I hurt all over,”
laments this resident of the southern suburb of Beirut, a heavily populated region under the influence of Hezbollah, which has been a regular target of Israeli strikes for two years.
Sitting on a plastic chair on the edge of a street in downtown Beirut, she nervously lights a cigarette, surrounded by eight members of her family, including young children.
“We can’t take it anymore!”
A first military escalation pitted Hezbollah against the Israeli army in November 2024, after the Lebanese Shiite party opened a front with the Israeli state to support its Palestinian ally, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip.
A ceasefire was reached two months later, but both parties largely ignored it: Israel continued its sporadic strikes on the country, claiming to target Hezbollah positions, while the latter always refused to disarm.
This already volatile truce finally collapsed this week after a Hezbollah attack on Israeli territory in response to the Israeli-American war against Iran, its patron.
Since then, Israel has intensified its strikes on Lebanon and launched a military incursion into the southern part of the country to establish a buffer zone at its border. Dozens of localities have been evacuated, including the southern suburbs of Beirut. The Ministry of Health reports 102 deaths and 638 injuries in Israeli strikes since Monday.
Many displaced people, like Hayat, have ended up sleeping on the streets of Beirut due to lack of space in shelters. This is the case of Ahmad Zbib, who fled his native village in southern Lebanon with his wife and two children aged six and eight.
“These children have only known war and violence,”
says the forty-year-old, watching his children play in the street.
His red 4×4 trunk is bursting at the seams: suitcases, sheets, cases of water bottles, an emergency lamp…
He takes out a briefcase: “All our papers are here,”
he explains. “We always keep them organized here in case we have to leave home in a hurry, like we did a few days ago.”
Woken abruptly by loud explosions on Monday at dawn, Ahmad and his family took to the road to Beirut in hopes of finding refuge. But with the increasing flow of displaced persons day by day, shelters in the capital quickly reached full capacity.
“I tried to set up a tent to shelter my children and my wife, but the police quickly intervened to prevent me,”
he recalls.
“We have nothing left, we live on the street now. There are no toilets, there is no roof. We spend the day under the sun and at night, we sleep in the cold.”
Ahmad tries to keep his cool, but his patience is wearing thin. “I can’t sleep on the street like this for much longer,”
he says. “No, I prefer to go back home, to the South, despite the bombings. I prefer to die in my house rather than die on the street.”<…
