Hassan waited until the last minute to flee. As Israeli warplanes thundered overhead and bombs began to fall on the forests surrounding his home town of Deir al-Zahrani, south Lebanon, on Monday morning, he told himself he still had some time. For almost a year the town, 12 miles from the Israel-Lebanon border, had been mostly spared from the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah that had engulfed much of south Lebanon.
The bombs grew closer. His neighbours began to get calls from unknown numbers with a recorded message, the voice speaking classical Arabic with a strange accent: “If you are in a building where there are Hezbollah weapons, distance yourself from the village.” Hassan had no idea if the homes around him contained weapons. Houses in the village began to get hit.
“Civilians, houses, they hit everything. When they started striking civilians, we had to flee. A few of my relatives were killed,” Hassan, 23, said, sitting in a school in Dekwaneh, a suburb north of Beirut, which had been converted into a shelter for displaced people less than 24 hours earlier.
Dier al-Zahrani was no longer safe as Israel carried out a devastating aerial barrage on swathes of south Lebanon and the Beqaa valley that killed 558 people, injured 1,835 and pushed tens of thousands to flee their homes.
It was Lebanon’s deadliest day in almost 50 years, bringing the death toll of the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel in September to more than 1,200, exceeding that of the brutal 2006 war between the two.
Hassan and the six other members of his family grabbed a few possessions, crammed into a BMW sedan and headed towards Beirut.
“As we put the bags in the car, we were telling ourselves that maybe it would stop, that maybe there would be something that let us stay. But we found nothing that stopped us from leaving,” Hassan said.
As Hassan fled northwards, the fighting followed. Thousands crowded the potholed, narrow roads of the south as Israeli jets and drones circled above them, occasionally shooting off a missile.
“It was horrifying’; there was a strike here, there, we saw it all in front of us. We could see the smoke, hear the sounds of the missiles. Everyone was rushing, our car was hit [by other cars] twice,” Hassan said. A video showed drivers hastily pulling off to the side as an Israeli bomb falls just ahead of them on the Zahrani-Mslihiyeh road that Hassan was driving on.
It took Hassan seven hours to reach Beirut – a journey that usually takes an hour and a half. Others in his family had yet to reach the capital city, almost 24 hours after leaving. Messages circulated on WhatsApp groups, asking for anyone with a motorcycle to meet cars with wounded people stuck on the highway and take them to hospitals.
As displaced people arrived to Beirut, crisis cells, set up months before, sprang into action. Schools were converted into ad-hoc shelters and began to be fitted out with water, food and mattresses.
“We have 12 schools that are welcoming people, with a capacity for 2,500 people. Nine are already full, but we will open more,” Fadi Baghdadi, the official media officer for the Beirut disaster risk management cell, said on Monday night.
By Tuesday morning, lists were published of the dozens of schools across Beirut and the surrounding villages of Mount Lebanon that had been converted into shelters.
Official efforts were bolstered by a wave of donations and private initiatives to house the displaced. Individuals began to offer up their homes; hotels in Beirut offered steeply discounted rates and churches opened up their doors for weary travellers. A message from a Syrian man went viral after he invited Lebanese to come to stay with him and his neighbours in Homs, central Syria.
“We have tried our best to give them the basic needs such as mattresses, blankets, hygiene kits, water and food,” Rafka Rayees, an emergency use worker from Caritas Lebanon, said at the displacement shelter in Dekwaneh. She had come to the centre the previous afternoon and had worked through the night to get it up and running.
The centre was hosting 1,100 people, mostly older people, children and families. Children milled about the grounds of the converted school, moving shyly as they adjusted to their new environment. Cars were arriving steadily, packed with belongings and people whose fatigue was plain on their faces, having driven overnight.
“Here, the situation is OK. We don’t know where we’re sleeping yet,” Hassan said, shrugging.
A woman emerged from inside the school, waving her finger at administrators who had just arrived. “We shouldn’t be treated like this! There’s no electricity in the floor above, we shouldn’t have to be humiliated,” she yelled.
“The cases here in the centre are so severe because there’s a lot of kids and lots of elderly. They don’t want to do anything, they just want to go back home because of the trauma and the situation,” Rayees said. She rushed away to do an inspection tour of the facility with a team of volunteers in tow.
The brutality of Monday’s bombings was still fresh in the minds of many at the shelter. Entire families had been wiped out. Everyone knew someone who had been killed or injured. For some, it was the second time they had been displaced in less than a year.
“We left Majdal Zoun in February and we came to Dahieh [in the southern suburbs of Beirut]; it seemed safer than the south”, Fatima, 20, said. She left Majdal Zoun, in the south of Lebanon, after her cousin, a six-year-old girl, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in February.
Fatima said: “We started to hear the planes and everything in Dahieh as well. My daughter became scared of the planes and the sonic booms. When they hit Dahieh last night, we came here.”
Just two hours later, another airstrike would hit Dahieh – the second time in less than a day. Six people were killed and 15 were injured in the strike, which Israel said was a targeted assassination of a senior commander in Hezbollah’s rocket corps.
“There’s so much destruction and we haven’t even started, it’s just beginning. Maybe soon there will be no safe places for us to go to,” Hassan said.
