Zainab Barakat woke early on Sunday morning to the sound of bombs. During more than 10 months of fighting between Hezbollah and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) near her village of Zebqine, she had grown used to hearing the explosions that have devastated other nearby villages.
So far, Zebqine, almost 7km from the Lebanese-Israeli border, had been spared the worst of the shelling. But this time, she says, “it was right on top of us. It smashed the windows; the whole place shook. The children were panicking.”
It was the fiercest fighting since hostilities began in October. The IDF says that 100 jets took part in the bombardment, while Hezbollah fired more than 340 rockets at 11 military targets in Israel. It was finally enough to convince Barakat to leave Zebqine.
The following day, she travelled the 17km (10 miles) to the coastal city of Tyre with her husband, parents and two young children, checking into a shelter run by the local authority. They join the growing number of displaced people in Lebanon that has risen from less than 99,000 to 112,000 in the past month amid a rising number of airstrikes across the country.
Yet, even as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) warns that this number is likely to rise with people fleeing new areas of the country, such as the eastern Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut, aid organisations report a slump in donations for relief activities.
Barakat’s family was one of 88 who arrived at the shelter after the fighting on Sunday. Almost 30,000 displaced people currently live in Tyre, more than any district in Lebanon. The municipality hosts 309 families across five shelters, but thousands more are living in rented or borrowed accommodation in the city, reliant on food parcels and hygiene kits.
As fighting has worn on, the authorities have had to do more with less. With the central government still in the grip of an economic crisis, the city depends on charitable organisations to support the displaced.
But since October, the number of major donors for the city’s relief efforts has dropped from 51 to five, after many charitable organisations said they do not have the resources to back such a long-term operation. “Nobody expected it would last this long,” says the shelter’s manager, Mortada Mhanna. “They expected one week, two weeks, but not a year.” As a result of funding cuts, the centre has had to slash the number of hot meals it gives residents from three a day to just one.
“What we are providing as the international community is not enough,” says Hans Bederski, national director at World Vision, one of the shelter’s remaining supporters. “We are set up just to provide the basics for survival: food and a roof over people’s heads, and even that is stretched.”
World Vision says it is struggling to keep up education services for children out of school and much-needed psychosocial support for young people experiencing trauma and stress-induced behavioural issues.
Those who end up in free shelters tend to be the most vulnerable. The vast majority – about 98% of displaced people – have found temporary accommodation in rented housing, second homes, with family members or with strangers. There are reports across the country of people opening their doors to those who are displaced.
At the same time, some areas have seen a hike in rents due to “exploitation of the crisis by landlords, real estate companies and brokers”, according to Christina Abou Rouphaël, a researcher at the Beirut-based thinktank Public Works, who has tracked rental properties since the start of the conflict.
IOM officials say the proportion of people living in shelters could rise further as displaced people’s savings are whittled down by months in exile, making it harder to meet rising rent prices.
Job opportunities for displaced people are not always adequate. Lebanon is suffering from a five-year economic crisis, exacerbated by the border clashes since October, which, according to the Lebanese government, have cost the country a further $10bn – more than a third of its GDP – in physical damage and lost revenue.
The IOM predicts a far greater emergency should a full-scale war break out, probably worse than during the 2006 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, in which about one million people were displaced.
They included Faten Khaled. Now 41, she was in her mid-20s when she left her home village of Yarine during the last war. They were gone for just 15 days before the fighting subsided and they could return home.
When Khaled and her family fled the most recent fighting on 15 October, they expected something similar. “We thought we would be gone for a week, a month at most, and then we’d be back,” she says. Her family of six has been living in the displacement shelter in Tyre for more than 10 months.
They receive no monetary support from any government or non-governmental organisation, aside from a $200 monthly stipend that Hezbollah commonly pays displaced residents of the border region. It isn’t enough to make ends meet, and Khaled worries about the impact on her children, who have spent the best part of the last year out of school.
“I wish we could just go back home,” she says.
Khaled doesn’t know if her home is still standing. Yarine is just 1km from the border – so close that she could see the tanks on the other side.
Villages closest to the border have been the most heavily damaged, with entire areas reduced to rubble. Israeli forces have been accused of creating a “dead zone” as a buffer between the two countries.
Khaled knows of nobody left in Yarine who can tell her how bad the damage has been. “There’s not a soul that still lives there now,” she says. “Probably even the birds have been killed in the crossfire.”
