Hundreds of families have resorted to sleeping on beaches and in public squares in Beirut after seeking shelter following the Israeli military’s airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Among those displaced were some who had fled to Lebanon to escape deadly conflict elsewhere.
Syrian refugee Fatima Chahine told the Associated Press that she, her husband and their two children fled Dahiyeh – where Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed on Friday – on a motorbike in the night and went straight to the Ramlet al-Bayda public beach.
There was “bombing below us and strikes above us,” she said.
“We only want a place where our children won’t be afraid,” she said. “We fled from the war in Syria in 2011 because of the children and we came here, and now the same thing is happening again.”
Talal Ahmad Jassaf, a Lebanese man who slept on the beach with his family, said they spent “more than three hours going in circles between schools and shelters and we didn’t find one with room.” He said he is considering going to the relative safety of Syria, but he worries about airstrikes on the journey.
Families were also seen camped out overnight around the Martyrs’ Square plaza and sleeping on streets in downtown Beirut, scenes reminiscent of when Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel went to war in 2006.
The Israeli military issued evacuation orders for residents of Dahiyeh, but left little time between the orders and the commencement of additional strikes.
Nasser Yassine, head of the Lebanon Crisis Observatory, told CNN on Saturday that “more than 100,000 have been officially registered (as displaced), but many more – up to 250,000 – are estimated to be in formal and informal collective shelters.”
The increase in cross-border fighting has forced people from their homes in both Israel and Lebanon. One of Israel’s stated war aims is to return tens of thousands of its own displaced civilians to northern Israel.
