Bassam Halloum's nine-storey apartment building on Jamous Street in Beirut was levelled on Sept. 20 by an Israeli F-35 fighter-bomber, according to the Lebanese National News Agency.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
Bassam Halloum, a water delivery man in Beirut, was jostling his ancient truck through the buzzy, choked streets of Hamra, a neighbourhood in the heart of the city, when he received a call at 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 20 from a friend in the city’s southern suburbs. Come home now, the caller said, there has been an explosion.
“I was there by 5 p.m.,” Mr. Halloum, 54, told The Globe and Mail. “I could not believe it at first. I could not even find my building. Everything was gone.”
His nine-storey apartment building on Jamous Street had been levelled at about 3:45 p.m. by an Israeli F-35 fighter-bomber, according to the Lebanese National News Agency. It was one of the first attacks on south Beirut, an area just northeast of the airport that has since been hit hard almost every night since then.
Mr. Halloum’s wife, Hasna, two of his sons, Ahmad and Mouhamad, and a daughter, Naya, were killed in the attack, along with at least 45 other people. Two other daughters survived because they were not at home. The excavation teams took a full week to find the bodies of his wife and three children.
Mr. Halloum said he did not know that Hezbollah operatives were meeting two floors underground at the time of the attack. Israel later said the air strike had targeted members of Hezbollah’s Redwan Force, special operations fighters trained to infiltrate northern Israel. Among the 16 or so Hezbollah victims was Ibrahim Aqil, the unit’s commander.
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Today, Mr. Halloum is homeless and so distraught that he barely has the concentration to drive his truck, which broke down Tuesday. He lives under a set of stairs in a building of a small Beirut university that has become a shelter for internally displaced people – IDPs.
As the war intensifies and expands – Israel sent thousands of additional troops into southern Lebanon Tuesday and stepped up air strikes in the area – the number of IDPs is surging and has reached about 1.2 million, the Lebanese government says, about a quarter of the population. About 700 of them live in the university building where Mr. Halloum is staying. “Every day, more refugees come, but there is no space for them,” he said.
Already, Beirut and other cities away from the intense fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli soldiers in the south are becoming overwhelmed with IDPs. Beirut itself has closed all of its 139 public schools and turned them into shelters. They hold more than 50,000 people, and more are arriving every day. Dozens of hotels have been commandeered to house the overflow, and many, perhaps most, have no running water, no kitchens and no more than a couple of hours of electricity a day. Conditions are becoming more unsanitary by the day, raising the possibility of disease outbreaks.
In Beirut, any large space is being taken over IDPs. About 400 former residents of battered south Beirut have found shelter in Skin, a popular underground nightclub whose vast dance floor has become cluttered with sleeping bags and mattresses.
Over the weekend, Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, made a plea for international assistance to help the IDPs. After visiting a school in Beirut that had been turned into a shelter, he said, “We need of course to provide people that are stranded in locations like this school with the basics: food, cash, water and sanitation, and items for everyday survival.”
Beirut Mayor Abdallah Darwich expects more IDPs as the air campaign expands. Israel has hit several targets in central Beirut in the past week or so; previous attacks in the city have been almost exclusively limited to southern suburbs. “You do not know who is living in this building or that building, so you do not know if there is a target there,” he told the BBC Tuesday. “You can no longer say Beirut is safe. Where the next Israeli target is, nobody knows.”
As Mr. Halloum grieves the loss of his family members, he expects to remain an IDP for a long time, adding to his woes. “Before this war, we had a happy family,” he said. “We laughed, had a place in the country, in the Bekaa Valley, and a nice home in Beirut. Now, my family is gone, and my shelter is so crowded that I have to sleep in my truck.”