Beirut suburb’s residents trapped as war fears grow
BEIRUT – When war last came to the edges of Lebanon’s capital nearly two decades ago, Bilal Sahlab drove his family to a secluded mountain town, rented an apartment and waited out the bombing.
This time around, there’s no car, no rent money, and no sense of when hostilities may end.
Residents of Beirut’s mainly Shi’ite southern suburbs, known as Dahiyeh, have been on edge since an Israeli airstrike on their neighborhood killed the top military commander of Shi’ite armed group Hezbollah, along with five civilians.
That same day, the leader of Palestinian militant group Hamas was also assassinated in Tehran. Hezbollah and other allies of Iran have vowed to retaliate against Israel.
Many in Dahiyeh feared the airstrike in their midst signaled that hostilities – playing out for 10 months in parallel to the war in Gaza but so far mostly contained to the border area between Lebanon and Israel – were now hitting home.
In the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, Israeli strikes flattened buildings in Dahiyeh, sending residents fleeing for safety.
For Sahlab, that is no longer an option. A five-year economic meltdown has devalued the local pound, cost him his savings, and brought his monthly salary down from more than $5,000 to barely $500.
So he sent his wife and children to live with his in-laws in the mountainous Aley region east of Beirut for their safety, while he stayed in Dahiyeh to keep working.
“It’s safer for them up there,” he told Reuters, breaking down into tears. “I can’t go up because I need to work to contribute to their expenses.”
Following last week’s strike, residents of Dahiyeh told Reuters that they had begun searching for apartments either in Aley or further east in the Bekaa Valley.
But when demand rose, monthly rent prices in those areas spiked, sometimes reaching $1,000 – far too expensive for those of modest means.
Fatima Seifeddine, 53, found an apartment for $500 a month in the Bekaa. But her monthly salary of just $300 as a university janitor meant it was out of reach.
“Back in 2006, we moved from place to place until we ended up in a hotel hosting displaced families – but there are no options like that now,” she told Reuters by phone.
Even staying with family has become a challenge. The night of the strike, Majed Zeaiter, a 50-year-old man who drives a van taxi in Dahiyeh, drove his wife and five children more than 30 miles north to Afka to stay with his brother’s family in a small apartment.
“The situation scares me... it’s a crisis situation, and when you think about war you’re afraid for your children,” he told Reuters. “The bombing, the war – with every month that passes, the situation gets worse.”
The search for accommodation is complicated by the sectarian enmities and fault lines that still crisscross Lebanon decades after the end of its 1975-90 civil war, making it trickier than in the past for Dahiyeh residents to find shelter.