In the courtyard of Beirut’s Azaziyeh commercial complex, groups of children kick around a football while men drag old mattresses into the complex’s many empty shopfronts.
The site, abandoned since Lebanon’s economy collapsed in 2019, has become an ad-hoc shelter for 450 displaced people following days of Israeli bombing on Lebanon.
Youssef sits nursing a wounded hand. He cut it on shattered glass as he was fleeing Dahiyeh, a neighbourhood in southern Beirut in which Hizbullah maintains its strongest presence.
“Everyone is scared, no one knows what will happen now,” he says.
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According to official numbers, 83,000 have been forced to flee their homes after Israel unleashed a barrage of air strikes across southern Lebanon and Dahiyeh – although most estimate the real number is probably be hundreds of thousands.
In this latest round of conflict, 123 people have already been killed in Lebanon. The Israeli bombing comes in response to a Hizbullah rocket attack on northern Israel on Monday, which itself was in retaliation for the assassination on Saturday of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid a spiralling war in the Middle East.
In the early hours of Tuesday, Youssef woke to the sound of bombing and knew immediately it was Israel.
“The sound of explosions was so powerful and so close,” he says. “We left immediately, without anything at all.”
With nowhere else to go, the 22-year-old fled to here, alongside his mother and sister, hoping Azaziyeh’s proximity to Lebanon’s parliament, only a few hundred metres away, would offer a degree of safety.
Like most of those displaced in this war, Youssef feels a grim sense of deja vu.
He was displaced from his home in 2024, during the last war between Hizbullah and Israel, when Israel killed more than 4,000 Lebanese people.
“It’s all so sudden, no one expected this. Neither those with Hizbullah nor those who aren’t,” says Youssef.
Dr Hussein Al-Amar is an official from Harakat Amal – a Shia party that is Hizbullah’s key political ally – and has been tasked with managing this ad-hoc displacement shelter.
“The need is great, every day there are more and more families arriving,” says Amar .
As he speaks, a new Israeli evacuation warning is announced covering all of the city’s southern suburbs. About half of the city, home to half a million people, is now considered a no-go zone.
“We are trying our best to provide bedding, food and water but there isn’t enough, and we don’t have much space left.”
Shelters such as this are opening across the city to accommodate the large wave of displacement that has occurred in Lebanon over the last several days.
In Ras Beirut Girls’ School, tired families broke their Ramadan fast in sullen silence, interrupted by the occasional crash of air strikes on Dahiyeh only a few kilometres away.
Talal Ibrahim (62) sat slumped on his makeshift bed. He had made his way alone to the shelter. “We can’t do anything. Whether we expected a war or not, we are powerless to decide what happens,” he says.
In the last war, he had found refuge in the largely Christian town of Jounieh – but this time, the landlord who had rented him a home told him they were not allowed to take in refugees.
There are fears among Lebanon’s other sects – of which 18 are officially recognised in the multi-confessional country – that housing displaced members from the Shia community could make them targets for Israeli strikes.
On Tuesday, a man was killed after the Israeli military struck a hotel in Hazmieh, a predominantly Christian neighbourhood. The hotel had offered rooms to those fleeing their homes. It is unclear who exactly was targeted. Israel claims they killed an Iranian official, although the owners of the hotel deny they rented a room to any Iranian national.
The morning after the strike, angry neighbours gathered outside the hotel, accusing the hotel owners of bringing danger close to their homes.
On Wednesday, Israel issued an evacuation warning that covers all of southern Lebanon, prohibiting anyone from remaining in the south and sending a large wave of refugees flooding north. Despite that, some, such as Katia, have chosen to remain in their homes.
“We don’t want to leave. Our whole lives are here,” she explained over the phone. “If we leave we don’t know if we will ever be able to come back.”
Her predominantly Christian village of Marjayoun emerged remarkably unscathed during the last war with Israel. Despite the danger, Katia hopes things will remain calm.
“We can hear the sounds of fighting, but there is nothing here yet, thank God,” she says.
Israel announced it had begun a ground incursion into Lebanon on Tuesday. While both Hizbullah and Israel prohibit journalists from accessing the frontline, making it difficult to develop a clear picture, videos posted online appear to show intense ground fighting.
Hizbullah claims to have hit five Israeli tanks over the past few days. The Irish Times was unable to verify this.
There is a risk this war could be far more calamitous for Lebanon than last time. The breadth of evacuation orders is already far wider.
With Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, calling to make Beirut’s southern suburbs “look like [Gaza’s] Khan Younis”, its armed forces seem determined to try to crush Hizbullah by any means necessary.
Alongside that, there is a risk that Lebanon’s fragile internal political system could implode. The Lebanese government has ordered the military to disarm Hizbullah by whatever means necessary, in a move that “raises the risk of direct confrontation with the government”, explains David Wood, senior researcher on Lebanon at the International Crisis Group.
Such a showdown could bring “potentially disastrous consequences”, he adds, especially in a climate of growing antipathy between Lebanon’s sects.
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Yet for most of those displaced, their only thoughts now revolve around how far this war might spread, where they will be able to sleep and what will happen to their homes and their lives.
