As Israel bombs Lebanon, Lebanese police try to expel Syrian refugees

Tripoli, Lebanon – On September 23, Israel bombed the home of Syrian refugee Fadi Shahab in south Lebanon.

He and his family were in the yard when they felt the ground shake. Then, they saw smoke and flames engulf their roof.

“A missile was launched from Israel and came just within 100 metres [109 yards] from where I was standing,” Shahab, 46, told Jazeera. “I was scared for my wife and children, so we decided to flee right away.”

Fadi Shahab consoles his son in a makeshift shelter in Tripoli, Lebanon. [Lina Malers/Al Jazeera]

Shahab quickly hopped on a motorbike with his wife and two younger children, while his other children jumped on a second motorbike – five squeezed together on a single seat – and followed him northwards.

Under the buzzing of Israeli warplanes, they wove through congested traffic and the mounting rubble obstructing the roads.

Nearly 500 people were killed that day in south Lebanon – Shahab and his family somehow survived as they joined the stream of people being displaced northwards.

Since Israel escalated its war on Lebanon in September, more than 1.2 million people have been uprooted from their villages and homes in the south.

A morning visit from the police

The Shahab family’s ordeal was just beginning

After reaching Beirut, they decided to drive 82km [51 miles] further north until they arrived at the port city Tripoli.

They moved into a school the municipality had converted into a shelter to accommodate Syrian refugees. The family was forced to sleep in the playground due to a lack of space inside.

Despite the hardship, they were lucky to have escaped the Israeli attacks turning south Beirut into a wasteland.

Two Syrian children play in the playground of a makeshift shelter in Tripoli, Lebanon. [Lina Malers/Al Jazeera]

On the morning of October 8, police showed up at the shelter.

They were ostensibly there to take some of the displaced Syrians to a less crowded shelter. Shahab’s family was chosen, along with 121 other Syrians.

The 130 people climbed onto two white mid-size buses, which drove them far north to Tall al-Bireh, a remote Lebanese town near the Syrian border, according to several Syrians who were on the buses and shelter staff members.

The police dropped them off in the village and left. There was nothing around them, except for a few small tents belonging to agricultural workers.

“[T]here wasn’t a school [shelter] there. There wasn’t anything there at all,” Shahab told Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera sent written questions to Ministry of Interior spokesman Joseph Sallem, asking why the 130 Syrians from the shelter were taken out of Tripoli and abandoned in a remote village near the Syrian border.

He had not responded at the time of publication.

Discrimination and expulsion

Abdel Rizk al-Wad, a member of the government-affiliated emergency committee overseeing displacement centres in Tripoli and surrounds, received an order from the government “high committee” to relocate 130 Syrians from the Tripoli shelter to a village in north Lebanon on October 8, he told Al Jazeera.

He explained that the Tripoli shelter was hosting about 550 people – 150 over capacity.

“There was too much pressure on the school here, so we were told [many Syrians] would be taken to another centre where there is space,” al-Wad told Al Jazeera.

“I didn’t give the order. I just implemented it,” he said.

The unfolding humanitarian crisis has triggered criticism of the caretaker government, which has been functioning without a president since October 2022.

In a country reeling from a devastating economic crisis, many say the state is not doing the bare minimum such as providing electricity and running water in makeshift shelters. Most shelters are also full, pushing Lebanese and Syrian nationals to sleep outside mosques and churches, under bridges or in the streets.

But even as the Lebanese state struggles to respond to the displacement crisis, owed largely to its acute limitations and the overlapping crises it faces, it continues to target the some 1.5 million Syrians in the country for expulsion, activists and refugees told Al Jazeera.

For years, Lebanese authorities have carried out sweeping deportations that violate international law and possibly Lebanese law, according to Human Rights Watch and local monitors.

In 2023, at least 13,772 Syrians were deported from Lebanon or pushed back from the border unlawfully, according to a report by the UN Refugee Agency.

Authorities have also coerced Syrians to return to their war-torn country, often by pressuring them into signing “voluntary return” papers or taking them to remote border villages – like Tall al-Bireh – and abandoning them.

“The [ongoing] situation is being exploited to carry out more deportations of Syrians in a random way,” said Mohamad Sablouh, the head of the legal support program at the Cedar Centre for Legal Studies and an advocate for Syrian refugees in the country.

Mohamad Sablouh works in his office in downtown Tripoli, Lebanon. He has long been advocating to protect Syrian refugees from deportation. [Lina Malers/Al Jazeera]

Cold reception

When Mohamad Abu Salim boarded the bus from Tripoli, he thought he would arrive at the new shelter in 10 or 15 minutes.

Two hours later, he arrived at Tall al-Bireh.

“We got out and began asking the [police] officers: ‘Where do you want us to go? Where should we go?’” recounted Abu Salim, a 50-year-old man with white stubble, dark, tanned skin and a nest of wrinkles around his eyes.

“We also saw four other buses filled with people [when we arrived at Tall al-Bireh], but we have no idea where they came from,” he told Al Jazeera.

According to Shahab, the “landowner’’ in Tall al-Bireh had threatened to clash with the police if the people on those four buses were dropped on his land.

The police eventually complied with the landowner by ordering the four earlier buses – presumably filled with Syrian refugees – to turn around and leave.

Shahab and Abu Salim have no idea where those buses went, but they had already been forced off the two buses that took them to Tall al-Bireh, along with the other Syrians from the makeshift shelter in Tripoli.

“The landowner approached us with three other men and said we better leave, or else there would be problems,” Shahab told Al Jazeera.

Abu Salim recalled the landowner swearing at him and his family.

“They called us dogs,” he said. “They said: ‘You dogs have half an hour to get out of here.'”

Abu Salim’s grandchildren at the makeshift shelter in Tripoli, Lebanon. He and all his extended family arrived at the centre on September 24, after fleeing Israeli bombardment in the south. [Lina Malers/Al Jazeera]

Despite the threat, several people in the group said they never considered crossing the border, about 45 minutes away on foot, back into Syria.

Most feared that the men would be conscripted into the Syrian army or even arrested if they returned, distrusting a recent amnesty announced by the Syrian government.

Others said they had nothing to go back to after losing their homes and livelihoods in the Syrian civil war.

In addition, they did not want to cope with the lawlessness in the country.

“Life in Syria is really hard. Making a living is hard and there is exploitation and militias everywhere,” Shahab told Al Jazeera. “Syria is a lot worse than here.”

Full circle

Sorour, Shahab’s wife, said they were more frightened by the landowner in Tall al-Bireh than they were when Israel was carpet-bombing south Lebanon.

She worried the landowner would return with an armed gang to expel or kill them.

“They weren’t holding any weapons when they were threatening us, but we felt they would come back with weapons if we stayed on their land,” she told Al Jazeera.

Luckily, a Syrian living nearby volunteered to help them, arranging vans to take them back to Tripoli at a cost of $100 for each vehicle.

With no other choice, the Syrians agreed to pool their money to cover the cost, then got into the vans and drove back to the only place they thought might host them: the school-shelter in Tripoli they had left from.

The staff at the shelter took them back, yet Shahab, Abu Salim and dozens of others are again sleeping outside in the playground.

Meanwhile, the management has warned that the Syrians sleeping outside will have to leave the shelter when it starts to rain, arguing that there is no space inside for them. During the winter, Lebanon often sees heavy rainfall for days and weeks.

The thought of being kicked out soon overwhelms Abu Salim and his family. They know that nearly all other shelters in Lebanon exclude Syrians.

“There is no security for us, to be honest. All we want is security to live in peace,” Abu Salim told Al Jazeera.

“We just keep being displaced repeatedly and we no longer have hopes or dreams.

“We have nothing left at all.”