ShareBEIRUT: Ali Berri never imagined it would take almost 14 hours to reach Beirut from his home in south Lebanon after he and his family decided to flee heavy Zionist air strikes. It took “from 10:00 am until midnight — the traffic was totally jammed”, said Berri, 55, who fled with his wife, son and elderly neighbor from the Tyre area on Monday. The trip would normally take a couple of hours at most. “We hope that the war will ease so we can return to our homes because what me and my family went through yesterday is really war,” he told AFP.
The United Nations said Wednesday that some 90,000 people had been displaced in Lebanon this week, as the Zionist entity pounds what it says are Hezbollah targets across the country. Since Monday, the UN’s International Organization for Migration has recorded “90,530 newly displaced persons”, a statement said. Among them, “many of the more than 111,000 people displaced since October ... are likely to have been secondarily displaced”, a statement from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs added, referring to the start of the cross-border hostilities between the Zionist entity and Hezbollah.
Zionist raids on Lebanon on Monday killed at least 558 people, in the deadliest day of violence since Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, sending people fleeing for their lives. Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said Tuesday that the number of displaced in Lebanon was “now probably ... approaching half a million”.
Hundreds of families woke up Tuesday morning in a hospitality training institute turned shelter in the Bir Hassan area of Beirut’s southern suburbs after arduous journeys from the country’s south the day before. An AFP photographer saw hundreds of vehicles crawling along the highway that links southern Lebanon with the capital Beirut. Many carried families with children and the elderly, along with whatever belongings they could take. Berri, a farmer and garbage truck driver, expressed hope that “associations, the state and anyone else” would help. “There is real suffering,” he said, putting aside a bag of bread and canned food for the family.
‘A year of war’
Some people “spent the night on the streets, like my sisters and my wife’s sisters”, he added. It was not the first he and his family have fled their homes, but this time was different, he said. “I was displaced for around 20 days” in 2006 when the Zionist entity and Hezbollah last went to war, he said, “but that war was short, while now it is long.” Hezbollah has been trading near daily fire with Zionist forces in support of Hamas since the Palestinian group’s October 7 attack on the Zionist entity. “We’ve had a year of war and we don’t know now when it will end,” Berri said.
The Bir Hassan institute is the largest of a number of educational facilities that have opened their doors in Beirut and its surroundings to receive the displaced. AFP saw families spread across three floors of one of the institute’s buildings, with people resting in some rooms, while one woman was busy cleaning dust off the ground. Others sat near windows looking out over the building’s courtyard, or in the corners of long dark corridors. Many appeared exhausted and refused to speak to journalists. “The bombing intensified on Monday ... everyone was leaving,” said Abbas Mohammed, a football coach from the southern village of Harouf, as his young daughter played nearby.
Hopes to return
“After they bombed a place nearby we decided to do the same thing and we had no choice except to get on the motorbike with my wife and daughter,” he told AFP, adding that the trip took seven hours. Dozens of meals and bottles of water began to arrive, with scouts and volunteers from the Amal movement, a Hezbollah ally, handing them out to families. Rami Najem, an Amal media official who is also with the group’s emergency committee, was watching as people registered the names and needs of the displaced. “Around 6,000 people came to this center between 6:00 pm last night and 6:00 am this morning,” he told AFP.
The displaced, some of whom had simply gathered in the streets or squares, were being distributed across several centers and given mattresses, said Najem, adding that the needs were enormous. He described “basic needs just so people can sit down and sleep — like pillows, blankets, medicine, babies’ milk, nappies, food and water”.
Zeinab Diab, 32, from the Nabatiyeh area, said she fled with her husband and four children, the youngest of whom is under a year old, from the village of Ebba “for the children’s sake”. “Almost all the village was damaged, we didn’t know where the bombing was coming from. We feel as if they are more brutal this time,” she said, referring to the Zionist military. “I hope at this moment to return to my village even if my home is flattened. I’ll live in a tent, it’s better than being displaced,” she said. “When you leave your home, you feel as if you are leaving your soul.” — AFP
