Chaos in Lebanon as tens of thousands displaced, stranded amid Israeli escalation

Dyala Bajouk, an activist from Ayta al-Shaab, which lies only a kilometer’s distance from Lebanon’s border with Israel, tells Mada Masr she waited for over five hours on Monday night on the six-kilometer road that stretches northward from Ghazieh in the south along Lebanon’s coastline to Saida. “People can’t move at all,” she says. “Everyone is very anxious in the traffic, and there’s no internet.”

“People went crazy,” she said, describing the moment an Israeli airstrike hit Ghazieh at around 7 pm, confusing people on the roads who drove into one another in panic. 

Bajouk is one of the tens of thousands of people who were displaced from villages across south Lebanon after over 1,300 Israeli airstrikes tore through the area, the Beqaa Valley and Baalbek on Monday. Footage shared on social media showed widespread destruction, with homes and shops razed to the ground, roads strewn with rubble and local authorities and residents working to retrieve people trapped beneath the concrete. The Lebanese National Committee for the Coordination of Disaster Response Operations has said that 16,500 people have been displaced in total so far.

“When the first raid occurred in the town and surrounding villages, my first concern was to get my children out, and the first things I took with me were the identification and official documents that we would need later,” Ibrahim Daher from the town of Kfar Kila tells Mada Masr. “We did not want to flee — our village had been bombed before and we held out and did not flee. But this time, it was exactly like the scene of the July 2006 war.”

“I have a child who has a medical condition in his leg and cannot walk normally. I had to carry him on my shoulder. There are many similar cases. There are people who have physical disabilities and cannot move easily. This is a double suffering for the parents and the children,” Daher says.

Many had received recorded phone messages that morning, instructing them to evacuate. The calls, reported by several citizens in the south, came from a Lebanese number that played a recorded voice message in Arabic, ordering them to evacuate immediately 1,000 meters away from any post “used by Hezbollah.” Mada Masr reviewed a copy of the message delivered to a citizen in the Borj al-Shemali area, a village to the south of Sur, ordering them not to return to these areas until further notice.

Justifying the targeting of residential areas, an Israeli military spokesperson published a video early on Monday morning with 3D renderings of an imaginary Lebanese village in which they claim missiles and arms were stored in residential buildings.

Amid the chaos of the past 24 hours, displaced Lebanese have faced terrifying journeys out of their villages in the south while the Israeli military bombed roads, restricting the flow of people seeking safety and gridlocking traffic. Residents seeking safety tell Mada Masr that they spent anywhere from eight to 12 hours stuck in traffic, without access to food, water or bathrooms.

Thousands of vehicles gathered on the roads leading from the governorates of Bint Jbeil, Sur, Nabatieh and Zahrani, stifling traffic on the road north to Saida, Kharoub and, finally, Beirut.

Fifty-nine-year-old Kassem Mheich and his wife took off from Deir al-Zahrani village near Nabatieh at 2 pm on Monday, driving with two other cars carrying his cousins. His car overheated and broke down at 8 pm in Saida, so his wife and daughter moved to the cousins' car, while Kassem stayed to fix their car. 

“We sat on top of each other. What else can we do?” says Mona, his wife. The family finally arrived at a relative’s small apartment in Damour, a Christian town located north of Saida, at 5am on Tuesday.

Others on the road tell Mada Masr that they had to stop their cars on the road to search for food, water or use the bathroom, only making traffic worse.

The influx of people to Saida, where many have fled from villages being targeted in the south, left the city’s entrances blocked throughout Monday, posing a major problem for ambulances that struggled to navigate the packed roads to transfer those wounded by Israeli airstrikes to safety.

Internal security forces visited the central square to intervene but left shortly after, according to a Mada Masr correspondent in the area. People stuck with their families and a few belongings thrown hastily into vehicles began to call on the Lebanese Armed Forces to manage the traffic. The military began traffic coordination efforts on Tuesday morning.

Some residents of Christian villages were able to make their way to Beirut. Charbel Helou from the town of Sarba says that he, along with hundreds of people from his village, decided to head to the capital since a large percentage of residents, as well as residents of other Christian villages, have homes there or in other areas.

However, those without homes in other areas of Lebanon had to rely on a sputtering government-led effort to facilitate shelters. The government has designated 150 schools across the country so far to shelter people, according to Lebanese news outlets.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, Lebanese Health Minister Firass al-Abiad noted that displacement initiatives are already underway in Sur and Saida, the two coastal cities in the south that were already hosting thousands of people displaced by the almost daily airstrikes Israel has conducted on Lebanon since Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8.

Abiad issued a call to private suppliers of medical goods to “be a bit patient” in receiving their payments, saying that the government would do its duty ultimately but that it would require all hands on deck to respond to the moment of crisis.

A Mada Masr correspondent in Saida says that local authorities and NGOs working on relief efforts had not made any provision for those arriving, noting that there were no mattresses prepared and no storage facilities or kitchen utensils available.

Small committees waited in Saida at schools and refuge shelters opened by the National Committee for the Coordination of Disaster Response Operations to coordinate arrivals. Several people sat on pavements with their families on the streets of Saida on Monday afternoon, their belongings alongside them, after finally reaching the city — only to find that shelters had little to offer.

“I only brought these with me,” says Ramzieh Dawoud, gesturing to three small bags in her hands. Dawoud arrived in Saida along with her husband and daughter on Monday afternoon after fleeing Yarine, a village in the outskirts of Besareya that was subject to air raids early on Monday morning. In videos shared on social media, smoke could be seen rising high into the sky from several sites in the area.

Besareya was bombed again on Tuesday morning. Videos from the site show civil defense teams working to extinguish fire burning in the charred rubble of multiple buildings toppled to the ground by airstrikes. The civil defense were also rushing to clear rubble from the roads, where cars continued to stream out of the area.

A member of the Banjak family described leaving Shaatiyeh, a region to the southeast of Sur where, according to the National News Agency, a house was fully destroyed at around midday on Monday. It took them over four hours to reach Saida, says the family member. “I told my wife let’s leave because, today, things are unnatural.”

Others turned to citizen-organized initiatives coordinating for the provision of empty flats, free of charge, to families displaced by Monday’s bombardment.

Hayam Hamzeh, a nurse living around 12 kilometers from Saida in Kfar Hata, in the Tofah region that saw heavy bombardment on Monday, tells Mada Masr that an entire family of Syrian nationals were killed when an airstrike targeted a house in their village. She and her family are currently sheltering with over 20 other families in a restaurant at Jinsnaya, a nearby Christian area, she said.

Hala Karam, from the Hadath area close to Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut that has been subjected for months to assassinations and bombings that have killed civilians, tells Mada Masr that she received two displaced families from Haret Hreik in her building. She says she only charged a small amount for rent because she does not want to exploit the situation, but that, at the time, these apartments are her primary source of income.

People have organized on social media to offer flats in relatively safe areas of the country, including in Christian-majority areas of Beirut and towns further to Beirut’s north perceived less likely to be exposed to the airstrikes than Shia-majority areas.

Some apartment owners are exploiting the situation by asking for exorbitant prices ranging between US$800 and $1,000, several residents who can no longer afford to rent outside of their villages tell Mada Masr.

Other residents of the south, especially the elderly, whether from villages inhabited by Christian, Shia, Sunni or Druze families, insisted on staying in their homes as they are unable to manage the difficult conditions of displacement or because the bombing around their villages was too intense to leave.

Mahmoud Saeed, from the Sunni-majority village of Kfarhamam, says that many of the families from his village left their homes, except for five families who said they “would rather die in their homes than feel pitied or be homeless.”

Rana Fadl, her husband Kassem, their 20-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son, and her mother finally moved from Ansar at 4 pm yesterday. Their travel was delayed because her mother refused to leave and locked herself in her room, Fadl tells Mada Masr. After long deliberations, they finally got on the road. At dawn on Tuesday, they arrived at her son’s apartment in the Palestinian refugee camp of Mar Elias in Beirut.

Shortly after Rana and her family arrived to safety, Israel resumed bombing areas across Lebanon in the early hours of Tuesday. The Israeli military spokesperson reissued a warning as the bombing commenced, ordering families to evacuate areas close to “sites used by Hezbollah” and stating that homes would be targeted. The Israeli military’s chief of staff said that they plan to “accelerate” their offensive today.

As the unprecedented assault on Lebanon enters its second day, residents across the country are not sure how they will continue. "On the first day, residents who stayed in the south began to suffer from bread shortages, anxiety and fears,” says Charbel Helou from Sabra. “If the war continues, how will these people spend their days? There are no hospitals or clinics in all these villages."