As Israel intensifies its attacks on the militant group Hezbollah, Lebanon faces another crisis: tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting are overwhelming Beirut and other cities in the north.
Somewhere between 800,000 (the International Organization for Migration’s estimate) and 1.2 million (the Lebanese government’s estimate) individuals are considered internally displaced people, or IDPs. The difference between the two figures hardly matters in a country one-eighth the size of Lake Superior. Tiny, effectively bankrupt Lebanon cannot cope with the waves of homeless families.
Lebanon’s population is 5.8 million, so the equivalent of 14 per cent to 21 per cent of the country’s residents are displaced. The numbers are bound to rise as Israeli attacks on Hezbollah fighters and military assets intensify, sending civilians fleeing to safety. Some don’t make it. More than 2,400 people have been killed in Lebanon since Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. The majority of the deaths came in the last month.
Beirut is inundated with people fleeing their homes. Thousands of them live in their cars or in tents pitched by the once glamorous seaside-promenade. Many others are in schools turned over to them by the government, or in hotels that have been commandeered by the Amal Movement, the Lebanese Shia political party.
Sectarian violence is a constant threat as some of the displaced Shia move into Sunni areas. On several occasions, the police or the Lebanese Army, or both, have been called in to break up skirmishes between the two Muslim groups. Some of the Shia have been forced to leave Hamra, the predominately Sunni area of central Beirut, as violence increases and tensions build. The Shia generally approve of Hezbollah; the Sunni do not.
In recent days, Siegfried Modola, a photographer on assignment in Lebanon for The Globe and Mail, has chronicled the lives of the displaced on the streets of Beirut and elsewhere, recording their hardships, pain and survival instincts.
Mr. Modola noticed that many of them were Syrian. They had fled their country’s civil war, which began in 2011, for the safety of Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of them are now returning to Syria, because Lebanon has become unsafe; hundreds of thousands of others are moving into the streets and shelters of northern Lebanon.
Some of them arrive with severe wounds from the Israeli air strikes. Mr. Modola’s photos in the trauma wards of central Beirut’s Lebanese Hospital Geitaoui show that the Israel-Hezbollah war has tragic consequences for civilians, many of them children. Mr. Modola’s goal is to cover the human side of the war. “It shows what people lose and what they leave behind,” he told his editors. “Children, women and the elderly are the silent victims of this war. As journalists, it is our responsibility to give them a voice.”
