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Fears of a widening war have already displaced more than twenty-five thousand people from Lebanon’s border region, around ten thousand of whom have sought refuge in the southern city of Tyre. Last week, Mortada Mhanna, the director of Tyre’s crisis-management administration, was seated at a long table in his office with several Red Cross volunteers and municipal workers. On the wall were two screens—one presented rolling news on Al Jazeera, and the other displayed the tally of displaced people. He didn’t have much time to chat. “Five minutes, yes?” he told me. Most of the displaced were housed in previously empty apartments or with relatives, he said, and about eight hundred were dispersed among four schools that served as shelters. “I’ve got six thousand mattresses for ten thousand people,” Mhanna said. “Every day, we have to fight for food and mattresses.”
He was already overstretched and underfunded—and afraid that further escalation on the border could propel a hundred thousand more people into Tyre alone. “It’s harder than 2006 because aid is arriving like a drip,” he said. In the 2006 war, up to a million people were displaced, according to the United Nations. Today, Lebanon is in significantly worse condition, a bankrupt state paralyzed by voids in leadership. The country hasn’t had a President for more than a year. The debilitating financial crisis has plunged around eighty per cent of the population into poverty. People struggle to feed themselves, let alone others. “International non-governmental organizations aren’t dealing with the situation as if we are in a war,” Mhanna said. “I am sitting in Tyre, and I say that we are at war. There is a war along the border. It’s a front line.”
History, before it is recorded and retold, is lived—and relived—by women such as Sara Faraj, who is twenty-five, and Nawal, her mother, who is sixty. They are from the southern border village of Ayta ash-Shab. Sara was a child during the 2006 war, displaced and living in a school in the adjacent village of Rmaych. For about a month, she’s found herself back in a classroom, this time in Tyre, now with her own children, and several other relatives. The ground floor of the school houses a dozen other families from several border villages, while the first floor continues to host students and regular classes.
In the 2006 war, the mosques in her village publicly broadcast a message to flee. This time, Sara and her family didn’t wait. “We are used to this now,” she said. “We immediately took the decision to leave.” They brought nothing. Her children are in donated clothes. Mhanna and his team were already working to stockpile heaters and blankets in anticipation of the displaced spending the winter in their school shelters. Sara’s eldest, a six-year-old daughter, doesn’t understand why she can’t go home, and misses playing with her toys. “They are not doing great,” Sara told me. “They’re bored here. I remember everything about the 2006 war, all of it, but mainly the fear, and I worry about what this war will do to my children.”
Nawal puffed on a cigarette as she watched over her grandchildren. Her home was destroyed in the 2006 war; afterward, she bulldozed the remains and rebuilt it. There were older conflicts, too: the twenty-two-year Israeli occupation of a swath of southern Lebanon, including her village, which ended in 2000. Before that, in the sixties and seventies, she remembers “Palestinians who would launch rockets from our village, and the Israelis would strike the Palestinians,” she said. “It was terrifying. What lovely memories! What more could we want? Our problem is that we were born in this country next to Israel.”
In Tyre’s Lebanese German University, which has also been transformed into a shelter, the families are from the village of Dhayra, about a hundred metres from the border. Residents say that shelling has damaged more than two dozen homes there. According to reports by Amnesty International, on October 16th Israel bombed the village with artillery shells containing white phosphorus, a violation of international humanitarian law. Many people fled after that attack. Fewer than a dozen are said to remain in the village.
Last week, the evening before Nasrallah’s speech, Nader Abo Sari, one of those last holdouts, parked his red tractor-trailer outside the German University. He had no intention of staying; he was in town only to sell his tobacco harvest. His trailer was bulging with rectangular burlap packages stuffed with dried tobacco leaves. His wife had taken their four young children to stay with her parents, farther north, but Abo Sari refused to leave his village, where he felt obliged to care for his handful of cows, sheep, and chickens, and to feed stray cats and abandoned animals. “It’s always very tense these days,” he said, standing at a distance from his tractor. “Instead of waking to the call to prayer, I wake to the sound of artillery hitting our area.” In 2006, Abo Sari said that he sought refuge in a mosque in the city of Sidon, about half an hour’s drive from Beirut. This time, he wouldn’t leave unless “the Israelis storm the village and kick me out.”
A few days later, I called Abo Sari to see how things were in Dhayra. He said that four or five families had recently returned to their homes. “People have had enough,” he said. “They’re fed up with displacement. It’s war, but not a war. And to say that it is peace, to feel better psychologically—it’s not peace. It’s not reassuring. If a person wants to return, there are no guarantees that things will calm down or get better. And, if you want to leave your home and live as a displaced person, it’s humiliating.”
As for his situation, he said that he’d “acclimatized,” joking that the missile strikes broke the monotony of village life. “It’s action,” he said, laughing, before extending an invitation to lunch in Dhayra. “It’ll be great,” he said. “The village is beautiful this time of year.” ♦
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