No one wants to spend these days on the highway that connects Rafic Hariri Airport to downtown Beirut. This dangerous road runs for several kilometers through Dahiyah, considered the stronghold of Hezbollah in the southern suburb of the capital, mostly Shiite. Elias, a taxi driver, speeds through the early evening on Saturday, March 7.
“A car was struck by an Israeli drone here this week,” he says, pointing to the location of the attack on a member of the pro-Iranian Shiite movement.
Hezbollah, deemed a terrorist organization by the Canadian government, has been in almost constant guerrilla warfare with Israel since its foundation as a resistance movement in the early 1980s when the Israeli state invaded Lebanon. And once again since March 2 after rocket and drone strikes towards northern Israel to avenge the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, the first day of the Israeli-American offensive against Iran.
This densely populated neighborhood of about 500,000 to 700,000 residents located in the southern part of the Beirut metropolitan area is regularly bombed, day and night, since the start of the Israeli-American war against Iran. As it was during the previous conflict in the fall of 2024.
Tens of thousands of men, women, and children fled mainly to downtown Beirut, seeking refuge in schools, hotels, with friends, or on the streets for the poorest. All swelled the ranks of the Lebanese wanting to escape the violent clashes in the south of the country, which is also under an Israeli evacuation order.
The massive population movement is potentially a “humanitarian disaster” according to the country’s Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam. A week after the start of hostilities, nearly 520,000 people – equivalent to the population of Quebec City – were officially registered as displaced with the authorities.
Many families have set up makeshift camps on the capital’s waterfront. Dozens of cars filled to the brim with bags, mattresses, pillows, and blankets, signs of this precipitous and desperate exodus, are parked along the avenue that follows the coastline.
Cars of refugees along the corniche of Beirut; police asking refugees to leave the corniche; displaced tents in Beirut on a plot near the marina. (Photos: Fabrice de Pierrebourg for L’actualité)
Some are lying resigned on thin foam mattresses on the floor of this palm-lined corniche refreshed by the sea spray. Runners and pedestrians pass by nearby under a warm spring-like sun, barely casting an indifferent eye on their unfortunate compatriots.
“We left in a hurry leaving our whole life behind us. It took us eight hours to go five kilometers [between Dahiyah and downtown] because of the traffic and even people walking on the road,” recounts a man standing next to a green tent where his wife sits inside.
The weariness in this Lebanese man is palpable. “We don’t know what will happen or when we can return home,” he says, before being interrupted by the arrival of three police officers. They have come to inform all these war castaways of the obligation to move to a field about a kilometer away, adjacent to the marina where yachts are moored.
“Why this war? This is not good, this is not good,” sighs a man in his fifties sitting on a bench facing the sea. He too fled Dahiyah in a hurry with his wife, three children, and an invalid uncle. They have all been staying in a nearby hotel. Hoping for a quick return home.
Meanwhile, to pass the time, he watches videos on his phone of Israeli bombings in southern Lebanon. “Israel has been bombing my country for years. And now, Israel, the United States, Iran, Hezbollah, they all have a problem but they don’t talk to each other!”
Just a few hundred meters away, a Ramada Plaza hotel employee sweeps glass shards coating the sidewalk of Raouche, a tourist seaside district. A few hours earlier, in the middle of the night, a targeted strike demolished room 406 on the fourth floor of this hotel filled with displaced persons, killing its five occupants. The walls and ceiling of the suite are charred. Panels of the stone cladding have been ejected. Impacts are visible on the facade around the gaping hole where the windows blown out by the explosion of the projectile fired by the Israeli navy. Ten people, including children, were injured in neighboring rooms.
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This strike against a five-star hotel in a previously spared tourist district has shaken the Beirut inhabitants, exacerbating distrust towards a historically marginalized Shiite community for many. This is the second establishment housing refugees to be bombed in a few days. “Many no longer want to rent to strangers or Shiite refugees, for fear of bombings, because we don’t know who we’re dealing with,” says a taxi driver. According to him, this nightmare will only end when the Iranian regime, sponsor of Hezbollah, is brought to its knees.
In a week, the war has already claimed 486 victims in Lebanon, including at least 83 children, and 1,313 wounded, according to an official tally as of the evening of March 9.
