Hiba Tubjanali holds back her tears until she is alone, she caresses the masbaha (a kind of Muslim rosary) and thinks of her father, whom she has just tried, once again, to convince by phone to run away from Yohmor, the Lebanese village that – for almost a year – seemed relatively safe from Israeli bombings and from which now they keep receiving news of dead neighbors on WhatsApp. It was not the plan she decided on this afternoon in minutes, but she has ended up with her in-laws in the primary school in a strange place: Qob Elias, a few kilometers from the border area with Syria that the Israeli army gave civilians two hours to leave and where the bombings can be heard in the background. Tubjanali was actually heading towards Beirut, but someone warned them on the way that Qob Elias was removing the desks in the schools to accommodate hundreds of displaced people and it seemed safer than continuing by road to the capital, where on the way out towards the mountains you can also see an endless line of vehicles and queues at the gas stations. Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in a single day, according to the Ministry of Health, without it being clear where they were going. As the hours passed, Tubjanali was finally proven right. As he took off his shoes, he received the news that the Israeli air force had just bombed there, in Dahiye, the southern Shiite suburb of the capital and a stronghold of Hezbollah, in an attempt to assassinate Ali Karaki, one of the main leaders of the militia.
With thousands of Lebanese fleeing the biggest single-day massacre since the civil war (1975-1990) – with at least 492 people dead – 80,000 messages from the Israeli army urging them to “immediately” leave the south and the Bekaa Valley and hundreds of cars at the entrances with suitcases, black plastic bags and few spare seats, the Qub Elias school has gone from preparing for the start of the school year to freezing enrollment until further notice, by order of the Ministry of Education. Teachers, emergency services and boy scouts Chalkboards and furniture are hastily removed to make room for the first families arriving, with tired and worried faces. Blankets, mattresses, pita bread and bottles of water turn the classroom into their new home for who knows how long, that elephant in the room whose mere mention makes the eyes of the displaced redden.
“We have taken clothes, food for the children and little else. As we don’t have a car, we didn’t want to take big bags, in case we had to ask someone to take us and, seeing us with them, they wouldn’t want to take us. We also don’t want to take up too much space here,” explains Imad Atwi, 27 years old and Hiba’s husband. The school estimates that it could accommodate about 500 people. There is still plenty of room, which is gradually being filled by new families.
For 66-year-old Shaifa Shalguk, this is the second displacement of this war. Almost a year ago, when the first rockets from Lebanon started a then measured crossfire with Israel, she fled her village, Markaba, because it is only a kilometer from the border. She settled with her daughter in Yohmor near the Crusader castle of Beaufort, which – in an irony of history – the Israeli army took from Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters and set up a position there that it held until the last days of its occupation of southern Lebanon (1982-2000), in another failed attempt to put a forcible end to attacks from there forever.
Yohmor is also in the south, but out of danger until Saturday, Shalguk says. “Nothing was happening. And then suddenly there was a bombing right in front of our house. We don’t have a car, so we started calling neighbours to get a ride. The village was empty, there was no one left to pick us up. I tried to convince my husband to come. He didn’t want to. He just said: ‘I don’t want to go, I don’t want to, I’m fine here! ’ And my son, on the phone: ‘Come quickly to Beirut, while the roads are still open! ’ In the end, a nephew came to pick us up and we realised that we couldn’t wait any longer for him to make up his mind, and we went ourselves,” she says. She speaks to him again on the phone and, when she finishes, she cries and beats her chest. He doesn’t want to move. Just then they are told that an acquaintance from the village has died in the bombing of a petrol station where he was filling up. They all cry. “Here in the end,” her daughter-in-law Ruba adds, “we all leave for someone, not for ourselves. I am only afraid of God, but I am leaving for my children. She, for her mother; he, for his wife…”
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Some 35 kilometres further west, Nayat Zarhan, 66, also did not expect to find herself in the Dahiye from which so many are fleeing, in the same conditions as during the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and in the 2006 war, when she left her home “on the first day and without hesitation” only to return 33 days and more than 1,000 Lebanese dead later. She had been resisting for almost a year near the crossfire, which until a few days ago was usually called low intensity. After all, she explains, her city, Nabatiya, had been largely spared from Israeli attacks.
What changed her mind was not the message from the Israeli army ordering them to evacuate immediately. At 66 years old and fumbling with her smartphone, she does not remember very well, in fact, how she received it. She thought it was “something normal” that “everyone in the country” received. It was fear. The vibration of the windows in her house – “I thought they were breaking,” she says – the proximity of the explosions… “Until now I was more or less calm that they would not attack the buildings. Usually they did it in the surroundings, the mountains or fields. Or in some building, but very specific, because there was someone [de Hezbolá] or weapons. But what happened is not normal. I don’t understand this, but they seemed like very powerful missiles. And I’m scared, because I don’t know who is in each and every building in my neighborhood and they might be bombing there.”
She and her daughter hurriedly took the car to the Mediterranean coast and from there to the capital. On the way, she encountered a traffic jam of other displaced people whose images have been seen around the world. “It took us an hour and a half to complete a stretch that usually takes ten minutes,” she recalls.
She tells this story before leaving for a safer part of Beirut, in her son’s house in Dahiye, the predominantly Shiite neighbourhood and a stronghold of Hezbollah. It is clear that she is not calm: on Friday, an Israeli fighter plane had already killed more than 40 people when it bombed a building to assassinate one of Hezbollah’s top military leaders, Ibrahim Aqil.
Sometimes she sighs, sometimes she cries, and sometimes she laughs to make light of it. She still seems a little in denial: she is aware that it may take her “a long time” to return home, but she only has a small black bag with clothes, money, documents and jewellery. She had not prepared it until the day before. “It is the first day that I have felt like I did in 2006 again,” she confesses. “I don’t know if it will be like that from now on.” On the television, the news from Al Jazeera gives way to live images of the huge traffic jam on the coastal road she had just driven through. She turns to her son and says: “I think I did well to escape.”
