Voices of Lebanon: People fleeing for their lives as Israel attacks

Beirut, Lebanon – Twelve-year-old Zahra woke up afraid on Monday morning.

“I was so stressed because of the bombs,” the little girl from Borj Qalaouiye told Al Jazeera.

Zahra’s village lies between Nabatieh and Bint Jbeil in south Lebanon, but in October last year, she and her family fled to Laylaki in Beirut’s southern suburbs, shortly after Hezbollah and Israel began exchanging cross-border attacks.

On the same day, she got another fright.

“I was so scared and then I saw on the news they were going to bomb our building,” she said of the family’s refuge in Beirut.

On Monday morning, people around Lebanon – particularly in the southern suburbs and the Bekaa Valley – received messages from unknown numbers warning them to leave their homes quickly.

In total, around 80,000 messages were sent.

“I started crying,” Zahra said. “I was shouting at my mom to put away her phone and get dressed.”

No place left to sleep

Zahra and her parents went to a relative’s house in the Baabda district, a short drive east of Laylaki.

They fled as Israeli air strikes killed at least 585 people and wounded 1,645, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, many of them reported to be civilians.

It was the single deadliest day in Lebanon in 34 years, since the country’s civil war ended in 1990.

Eyewitness videos showed cars bumper to bumper on roads out of south Lebanon, with some clips showing smoke billowing in the background from nearby attacks.

The two-hour drive from Tyre reportedly took some people more than 14 hours, with drivers and passengers stuck in traffic jams less than an hour away from their homes.

Many were fleeing with no idea where to go.

Diana Younes’s husband was driving home to Sawfar, a village 35 minutes east of Beirut in the Chouf Mountains, when he came across a woman and her daughter standing by the side of the road at 11pm.

Younes said her husband stopped to help, but: “He asked them where they were going, and they said they didn’t know.”

Their house was already full of family members who didn’t feel safe in Beirut’s southern suburbs, but Younes and her husband invited the pair to their home anyway.

“We don’t know them, but haraam,” she said, using a flexible term that expresses sympathy for someone’s suffering in this context.

“We have no place left for people to sleep. They’ll sleep on the balcony.”

Many schools and nurseries closed. Some schools were turned into shelters for the newly internally displaced, a figure that was already at 102,000 before Monday’s attacks.

Even in areas that weren’t hit, few felt safe.

Two women sitting on their balconies in Zouk Mikael, a predominantly Christian area about 30 minutes from Beirut by car, said the muffled explosions in the distance were a reminder that their safety is not guaranteed.

‘We saw death today’

While many fled, others were killed in their homes.

Photos circulated on social media of the 50 children and 94 women killed by the air strikes, according to the Ministry of Health.

Al Jazeera counted at least 37 towns and villages hit by air strikes, while the Israeli military claimed they hit 1,600 Hezbollah targets.

Earlier that day, Israeli officials ominously demanded that Lebanese people avoid areas where Hezbollah “may be operating or storing weapons”.

An Israeli military spokesperson warned people “to move out of harm’s way for their own safety” without explaining where harm’s way or safety were located.

Hussein was in eastern Lebanon’s Rayak, most known for two things: a defunct train station and a very quiet air base.

“It’s a residential area and there’s nothing related to any political parties or any of that,” said Hussein, who asked that his full name be withheld in order to protect his safety and privacy.

Because he was far from any militant activity, Hussein felt safe. But then the Israeli air strikes began.

The strikes landed around a school, a local gallery, and a local dairy factory funded by the European Union and linked to the United Nations Development Programme, Hussein said.

Al Jazeera phoned the factory, Liban Lait, for confirmation, and was told the facility was surrounded by air strikes but not hit directly.

A winery in Rayak posted an Instagram video of the damage it sustained in Monday’s strikes.

“We saw death today,” Hussain said from the nearby city of Zahle, where he had taken refuge.

“The plane was above us and hit left and right, seaside, on the outskirts… they were blowing up everything.”

Israeli officials’ warnings rang hollow to many analysts.

“The Israelis will tell you that every house has a Hezbollah weapon, but can you prove this? Of course not,” Michael Young, a senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told Al Jazeera.

“The Israelis aren’t interested in going after weapons, they’re interested in creating terror in the Shia community… because they want the Shia community to turn on Hezbollah.”

Hezbollah and Israel began trading cross-border attacks on October 8, a day after Israel launched a relentless war on Gaza in ostensible retaliation for Hamas’s operation in Israel during which 1,139 people were killed and another 240 taken captive.

More than 102,000 people have fled on the Lebanese side of the border and an estimated 60,000 or so Israelis are internally displaced from the other side.

On September 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu updated his government’s war goals to include returning those people home.

The events that followed were described as “like a Netflix series” by Lebanese people who spoke to Al Jazeera.

Pagers exploded on Tuesday. On Wednesday, it was walkie-talkie radios, taking the death toll up to 37 people, both Hezbollah members and civilians, including at least two children.

Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over Beirut on Thursday as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech telling Netanyahu that people would not return to the north of Israel as long as Israel’s war on Gaza continued.

On Friday, Israeli missiles levelled a residential building in Beirut’s suburbs where Hezbollah commanders were reportedly meeting.

At least 52 people were killed, including Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil and 15 other Hezbollah leaders.

Israel continued to hit Lebanon’s south and Bekaa hard on Saturday and Sunday before Monday’s bloodshed.

“What we’re seeing now is an Israeli effort to put a lot of pressure,” Young said, adding that the Israelis said they’re “willing to cross all red lines”.

‘Liars … supporting the genocide’

Many of Lebanon’s residents are angry at the international community, particularly the United States, for what they say is its failure to hold Israel accountable in Lebanon or Palestine over the last 11 months.

One is Fatima Kandil, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs who fled to stay with relatives on Monday. She sent a seething message to the administration of US President Joe Biden, which has continued to send Israel weapons despite a UN court order to end plausible acts of genocide.

“The American government that is ‘democratic’ and ‘very concerned’ with peace in the Middle East … the protector of humans that hits us with weapons … and all those countries that care about peace and kids and families, they are liars,” she said. “Because they are supporting the genocide.”

At her relatives’ house, Zahra, the twice-displaced 12-year-old, wishes she could go home to Borj Qalaouiye.

“This is my first time going through war and I don’t like war,” she said with a naive irony. “I cry every day about it.”

While this is Zahra’s first war, many of her family members remember the 2006 war with Israel or the Israeli occupation from 1985 to 2000.

“Sometimes I ask about it, but [my parents] don’t tell me anything because I get so stressed,” she said.

Zahra misses playing with friends and having family stop by her house, she said, adding that in displacement, she doesn’t have any friends so she passes the time drawing or sleeping.

“I don’t like it,” she said, yearning for the war to end so she can go home.

“Back home, my house was filled with friends and family.”