Alex Martin Astley is a freelance journalist based in Beirut. He covers conflict, foreign policy, and social justice issues. He has contributed to New Lines,The New Arab,and other publications.
It was supposed to be a Ramadan morning like any other. Zeinab,* bleary-eyed in the dark, joined her family in the living room to break their fast before dawn. Suddenly, an alert flashed on their phones: Another Israeli evacuation order, but this time for all of Beirut's southern suburbs. Zeinab knew Israel's bombs would fall soon, so she grabbed her children and ran.
Displaced for the second time in two years, Zeinab and her family are now sleeping in the open in Beirut's Martyrs' Square. She does not know if she will ever see her home again. "There is no humanity here," she said, speaking over the buzz of an Israeli drone as she put her 20-day-old daughter back to sleep in the shade. "My four-year-old's hair has gone grey. Every time there was an airstrike he would be shaking for hours."
As full-scale war returns to Lebanon without a clear endgame, Israel's actions have left over 800,000 people — including 200,000 children — displaced from their homes in less than a week. It is a near repeat of the humanitarian crisis that gripped Lebanon after Israel's last onslaught against Hezbollah in 2024. That war killed more than 4,000 people in Lebanon and displaced about 1.2 million.
This time, however, the human cost of displacement could be much higher, as an already cash-strapped government scrambles to find shelter for almost a quarter of the population — all while containing a rise in domestic tensions amid Western pressure to disarm Hezbollah.
Displaced for the second time in two years, Zeinab and her family are now sleeping in the open in Beirut's Martyrs' Square.
- Alex Martin Astley
Lebanon's government had sought to spare the country from being dragged into its second war since November 2024, when a so-called ceasefire ended two months of intense conflict — and a year of cross-border fire — between Israel and Hezbollah. However, in the 15 months since the ceasefire, Israeli attacks on Lebanon continued on a near-daily basis.
There is a looming "humanitarian disaster," Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said on March 6, adding that the displaced "are victims of the Israeli war on Lebanon, but also of those who offered a pretext for the Israeli aggression." The statement marked a veiled condemnation of Hezbollah and its decision to launch rockets at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, on Feb. 28 at the outset of the Israel-U.S. war on Iran.
Israel's retaliation came without hesitation. Within hours, Israeli airstrikes pummeled Beirut's suburbs, the Beqaa Valley and south Lebanon — areas where Hezbollah enjoys widespread support. The mass evacuation orders soon followed. In the early hours of March 2, Israel's Arabic Military Spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted across social media calling on the residents of about 50 villages in south Lebanon to leave their homes "immediately" for their "safety."
Another "immediate" evacuation order went out on March 4, this time for the entire population south of the Litani River — including the large southern city of Tyre. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the highway heading north in scenes painfully reminiscent of those just over a year ago.
The next day brought another Israeli evacuation order, transforming Beirut's southern suburbs into a ghost town. Roughly half a million people were made homeless in an instant. Chaos filled the dense urban area's streets as civilians tried to flee.
"There was terror," said Mohammad Shehade, who escaped that night with his wife and two daughters. "It felt like everyone on earth was trying to escape the suburbs." Shehade and his family — who were also displaced in 2024 — had spent three cold nights sleeping under a highway bridge.
This time, he says their forced displacement has been much more difficult, with no spaces available in Beirut's crammed shelters. Now, he hopes to be issued a tent in the city's abandoned sports stadium, recently converted into a shelter to accommodate some 3,000 people.
At the stadium, hundreds of volunteers from the Lebanese Red Cross were busy erecting tents and distributing care packages. Ibrahim Zeidan, Beirut's mayor, visited the site to inspect progress. He said in an interview with Democracy in Exile that the displacement crisis had hit the capital much harder than before.
In 2024, Beirut received around 55,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in the span of a few months, according to Zeidan. This time, the municipality is dealing with 50,000 IDPs in just ten days, according to data from Lebanon's Disaster Risk Management unit. There is less financial support coming from abroad. "If you look at the spike of the curve, of number of refugees in relation to the period, it is worrying," Zeidan said. "But we have a city to run."
The nature and scale of Israel's evacuation orders — constituting roughly 14% of Lebanon's territory, according to an analysis by this author — are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in this renewed war. So far, Israeli military operations have killed 773 people, including 103 children.
Many experts fear the cascading effects of displacement. "[Evacuation orders] have the potential to displace not only hundreds of thousands of civilians simultaneously but turn displacement from a localized crisis into a national one," said Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab, Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, in an interview.
The nature and scale of Israel's evacuation orders — constituting roughly 14% of Lebanon's territory, according to an analysis by this author — are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in this renewed war.
- Alex Martin Astley
However, mass forced displacement increasingly appears to be an active strategy of Israel's war in Lebanon. That constitutes a form of collective punishment against the Shia Muslim population — who make up the vast majority of the displaced. It also isolates Hezbollah from its mostly Shia popular base by reshaping Lebanon's political geography, possibly revealing the broader Israeli strategy.
"Displacement is no longer a byproduct of this conflict," Diab said. "With these blanket evacuation orders, the movement of civilians itself becomes part of how the war unfolds."
Human Rights Watch has warned that the sweeping nature of Israel's evacuation orders raise "serious risks of violations of the laws of war," and raise "concerns that their purpose is not to protect civilians." The laws of war prohibit the forced displacement of civilians, except in strictly limited cases.
To make matters worse for displaced families, shelter limitations will worsen as the return of war deepens sectarian divides. Some experts believe that predominantly Christian and Sunni areas will not be as accommodating to the displaced Shia as they were in 2024, when the country saw a surge in acts of solidarity.
"There is displacement and a conflict fatigue that is quite unprecedented," Diab told Democracy in Exile. "While there have been many examples of solidarity regardless of sectarian background, if the crisis is prolonged and resources become scarce, social tensions could deepen."
Several municipalities have chosen not to open their empty schools to the displaced, and landlords across the country often refuse to accommodate Shia families. Many are fearful that their own areas will become Israeli targets. A pattern of Israeli attacks in 2024 targeting Christian and Sunni villages sheltering the displaced likely served as a message from Tel Aviv in this regard, fueling sectarian paranoia.
As Israel continues to push for Hezbollah's disarmament, its apparent use of forced displacement as a weapon of war risks unraveling Lebanon's fragile social fabric. The country's stability will largely depend on whether its under-resourced government can contain a prolonged humanitarian crisis. Yet for exhausted Lebanese citizens like Zeinab and the broader population, the trials of another war without end will test how much some can bear, and how much others are willing to give.
*Name has been changed.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
