In Lebanon, the displaced are practically everywhere, including in schools. Photo / David Guttenfelder, The New York Times
Schools, clubs and parks have become places of refuge as the displaced seek safety amid Israeli bombings.
At dusk, the parking lot of Tripoli’s Quality Inn is packed with cars and families milling about. Children’s shouts fill the air, reminding some of better times, when the hotel hosted weddings and birthday parties.
Now, though, the cars in the lot are dusty and battered, the families sit on patches of grass, their faces worn with worry, and the children play in a drained swimming pool. That is because the Quality Inn has been transformed into one of the biggest shelters in Tripoli for displaced Lebanese fleeing Israeli bombing in the country’s south.
“I am lucky. I am with my whole family, and we just want this war to end so we can go home,” said Hassan al-Aaker, 54, voicing a rare note of optimism even though he has no idea whether his house near the southern coastal city of Tyre will still be standing when he finally does go home.
In Lebanon, the displaced are practically everywhere. In Beirut, the capital, where many are staying, they have set up makeshift tents on the corniche by the sea, crafting shelters out of stray metal poles, bits of awnings and blankets. In the city’s parks and squares, some families have placed floor coverings on the ground, anchoring them with cases of water and folded blankets. Others are taking shelter anywhere they can, mostly in schools but also in unfinished buildings.
The Lebanese Government postponed the start of the school year and designated 1000 schools as shelters, Ivo Freijsen, the Lebanon representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said in an interview. Tourist hotels – there are many in Lebanon, which was a major destination for foreigners until the war – are filled with displaced families who can afford them.
Of a population of around six million, including about two million Syrian refugees, just over one million people have been forced from their homes by the bombings, the United Nations and the Lebanese authorities say.
Even the most experienced humanitarian workers say they have been startled by the intensity of the attacks and the rapidity with which people have fled.
“Although we had planned for large numbers of people potentially becoming displaced, the speed with which things unfolded – uprooting over 1 million people in one week – was a surprise,” said Freijsen, who has worked in war-torn countries for 30 years. In a fast-moving situation like this one, he added, the funds and supplies on hand fall far short of meeting people’s needs.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that as of last week, nearly 700,000 people in Lebanon had been displaced since October 2023 – most in recent weeks – and that about only 186,000 had found places in collective shelters. Others are staying with family members or in rented apartments or hotels, according to the Lebanese Government and aid groups.
In addition, nearly 400,000 Lebanese and Syrians have left the country in recent weeks, according to the International Organization for Migration, and more than half of those, about 276,000, have crossed into Syria, as of last week, according to the UN refugee agency; of those, about 70% are Syrian and about a third are Lebanese.
Despite Lebanon’s long history of sectarian tensions that spilled into civil war in the 1970s and lasted 15 years, volunteers from every background across the country have rallied to help. In one of the coolest nightclubs in Beirut, Skybar, the owners have given over the hulking, mostly windowless building to displaced families and organised large numbers of volunteers to help out. Its many bars have become dividing lines between families and places to stack blankets, pots and clothes; its dance floor has been subdivided by stacks of mattresses.
Beirut’s parks and squares have become outdoor kitchens where local volunteers are mounting extraordinary efforts to prepare food for the displaced.
In one such kitchen, in a park opposite a public school turned shelter, Hezbollah boy scouts and volunteers prepare 6000 meals every day. They cook in four or five cauldrons – one for potatoes, another for eggplant, or for fish or chicken, depending on the day. Dozens more volunteers, mostly young women, sit at long tables rolling the fresh food into sandwiches, wrapping them in paper, stacking them on trays and handing them to other volunteers to distribute.
Even with all of the effort, the sheer numbers of displaced are overwhelming these resources, said humanitarian organisations. If the war drags on into the winter, no one knows if the volunteer effort can be sustained or how short of cash the Lebanese Government – already reeling from five years of economic calamity – will be, or whether it will be able to supply even the bare necessities for the displaced.
Most worrying of all is that almost every day, a new place is bombed, and more people are put to flight.
“What we’re seeing now is this vast number of people that are arriving and don’t have a support network, an extended family they can stay with or money to rent a place to stay in a hotel,” said Juan Gabriel Wells, the country director for the International Rescue Committee. “And then some are moving for a second or third time because the places they first went are no longer safe.”
Both Wells and Freijsen of the UN refugee agency noted that the recent bombing of Lebanon’s Bekaa region was troubling not only because it forced more people to move, but also because it is a rich farming area that feeds much of the country.
One of the largest concerns, however, is the rapid and huge shift of Shiites from the Dahiya – a collection of neighbourhoods on the southern outskirts of Beirut – and from southern Lebanon into Sunni Muslim and Christian communities in the centre and north of the country. Lebanon has a bloody history over the past 50 years of sectarian strife between Shiites, Sunnis and Christians, and many fear that uprooting large segments of the population could create dangerous friction.
So far that has not happened. Instead, people of all backgrounds have pitched in to accommodate the displaced, and nowhere more than in Tripoli, the country’s second-largest city, its mayor said.
“Tripoli is a predominantly Sunni city, and when Hezbollah was in charge there was tension,” said the mayor, Riad Yamak. “But the displacement of people in despair, that is totally different. They are Lebanese like us, and the municipality has welcomed them with open arms.”
In just the past two weeks, some 13,000 displaced Lebanese, mostly Shiites, have arrived in the city centre, he said, while another 35,000 have ended up in towns in the surrounding countryside.
And some 750 have found refuge in Tripoli’s Quality Inn, where volunteers do what they can to make them feel at home – organising a clothes closet; supplying mothers with disposable nappies, laundry soap and baby formula; and providing water and two daily meals with the help of the World Food Program and other UN assistance. The volunteers have started a free pharmacy and are hoping to bring in a mobile clinic, said Jinane Mombayyed Skaff, a social worker.
But not everyone is so lucky, relatively speaking, to find a place like the hotel. Among the less fortunate were five members of the al-Ali family, who had ended up in a dark, deteriorating school building a few miles away that the principal and volunteers were struggling to make cheerful.
The al-Ali family had started hearing distant explosions a year ago, the father, Mohammed al-Ali, said, when Hezbollah and Israel began trading fire at each other after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, that Israeli authorities said killed about 1200 people. But in their small village of Ain Qana in the coastal hills of southern Lebanon, the war seemed far away.
That changed in September, when Israeli planes began bombing in Nabatieh, the nearest large town. Amina al-Ali, 40, begged her husband to take them away – their two college-aged children and younger son Hussein, who is autistic and was terrified by the blasts. But Mohammed al-Ali, a carpenter, had just finished building the family’s home and was reluctant to leave.
“I built it with my own hands, room by room. The only thing I had left to do was to paint it,” he said, his eyes filling with tears. “I had picked a beige for the walls and a brown for the trim.”
But then Israeli forces sent an immediate evacuation order. Not even taking time to lock the windows or doors, the al-Ali family joined the tens of thousands of other families fleeing from southern Lebanon toward Beirut on roads jammed with cars.
For now, al-Ali has only his memories to fall back on.
“My house was like a little kingdom. We grew grapes and lemon and olives,” he said as he scrolled through photographs of his carpentry work – tables with curved legs, beds with mirrored headboards and bureaus.
“We want this war to stop and to return to the countryside, to our home, and live our life normally, quietly, so my son and daughter can return to university,” he said softly. “We want nothing but this.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alissa J. Rubin
Photographs by: David Guttenfelder
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York Times: A few pockets of ordinary life bloom in defiance of war.