Mohamed Melhem sits on a scooter outside the Rodin hotel in Beirut, where 500 internally displaced people from the war zone of southern Lebanon currently reside.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
About eight days ago, a member of Lebanon’s Amal Movement, the Shia party that is aligned with Hezbollah’s political arm, banged on the door of the Hotel Rodin in central Beirut. He had an offer the owner could not refuse.
Amal was, in effect, commandeering the six-storey hotel for IDPs, the United Nations term for internally displaced people. The same day, the Rodin, which was under renovation, opened its doors to Shia IDPs, most of them from the war zone along the border with Israel in southern Lebanon. Today the small hotel is bursting with almost 500 Shia – 10 to a room, on average – their daily lives ranging from the unpleasant to the unbearable.
“We don’t have running water, we don’t have electricity, we don’t have kitchens or refrigerators and we don’t have money,” said Ibrahim (Bob) Hinnawi, 31, who worked as an accountant in a hospital in southern Lebanon until an Israeli bomb exploded about 50 metres from his home, forcing him and his family to pile into their car and flee north.
The 500 residents of the Rodin are far from alone. The narrow, car-clogged streets around the hotel are full of IDPs, thousands of them. The Lebanese government says one million Lebanese have been forced to leave their homes as the war between Israel and Hezbollah intensifies, and the number is rising at an alarming rate every day. “The situation was difficult here even before the recent escalation,” said Lisa Abou Khaled, a spokesperson in Lebanon for UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. “Now it is catastrophic.”
The Lebanese government has opened some 875 collective shelters – most of the schools, all of which are now closed to students – to house about 155,000 IDPs, UNHCR said. The rest are staying with relatives or living in parks, their cars or hotels they can afford. More and more of them are moving into hotels commandeered by Amal, where they live on handouts from charities.
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The Rodin is a simple, cream-coloured building from the 1960s that spent most of its life as a three-star hotel. It sits near several luxury hotels in the heart of Beirut, but also in the ominous shadow of the hulk of the 26-storey Holiday Inn, which was wrecked in 1976 during the Lebanese civil war and never rebuilt.
The Rodin has 50 rooms, none of which has furniture. The floors are covered with matts or thin mattresses. Some of the rooms have small propane burners for cooking, presenting a fire threat. Two generators at the back of the hotel provide electricity for only an hour a day – the residents cannot afford to fill the diesel tanks. Tanker trucks deliver non-potable water for bathing and washing clothes; each family pays US$3 a day.
Children run amok in the hotel, trying to entertain themselves any way they can. Among them was 12-year-old Mohamed Melhem, who spoke near-perfect English and was wearing an “Ankoun Football Academy” soccer jersey. Ankoun is the name of his town, which is about 50 kilometres south of Beirut.
The hotel has no running water, no electricity, no kitchens, no fridges and no furniture.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
Mohamed smiled a lot but confessed to be sad, not so much because he was far from his beloved soccer field – he is a star striker on his team – but because his uncle Bassam was killed this week. “He died in an Israeli airstrike,” he said. “He was going to say goodbye to friends who were leaving for Canada when a bomb exploded near him.”
None of the residents know how long they will be forced to stay in the hotel, but no one is expecting to return to southern Beirut or southern Lebanon, where Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets are intensifying, any time soon. In the past year, almost 1,900 Lebanese have been killed and more than 9,100 wounded, according to UNHCR.
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Lebanese charities, many funded by governments, including Canada’s, are trying to cope with the rising number of IDPs but feel they are fighting a losing battle. In response, on Tuesday Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Imran Riza, the UN co-ordinator in Lebanon, launched a “flash appeal” to raise US$475-million for “life-saving” assistance for the IDPs.
The UNHCR contribution will be US$83-million. In May Canada announced $27-million in humanitarian assistance for Lebanon and has since topped up that amount by $10-million.
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Lebanon’s internal refugee crisis threatens to overwhelm the small, crowded county, whose government is essentially bankrupt. As IDPs rush into cities such as Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli, the fear is that sectarian violence will erupt between the largely Shia IDPs and Sunni Lebanese, who represent about 28 per cent of the population.
Beirut police are patrolling the IDP encampments and have reported some street clashes between the two Muslim groups, and Lebanese city residents are already growing weary of the IDP crowds and traffic. “They are taking over our cities and have no respect for the residents,” said Rita Attal, who lives not far from the Rodin.
Some IDPs are aware that their presence is upsetting the locals. “But what are we supposed to do?” Mr. Hinnawi said. “We have young children and don’t want to live in our cars in the middle of nowhere.”
A Shia mother with her and others children stands inside a room where they all have sleep on carpets and mattresses at the Rodin hotel in central Beirut, which is overcrowded with 500 internally displaced people.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail