BEIRUT (AP) — Beirut is bursting.
It’s been a month since Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel after the U.S.-Israeli attack on its patron, Iran, triggering Israeli bombardment of Lebanon and a ground invasion. Since then, more than 1 million people from southern and eastern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs have fled. Many have crammed into the ever-tighter spaces of the country’s capital where the bombs have not yet fallen.
Israel’s attacks and evacuation orders — unprecedented in scope, covering what humanitarian agencies estimate to be 15% of this tiny country — have emptied villages in south Lebanon and pushed almost the entire population of the southern suburbs into Beirut, shifting the city’s center of gravity, reshaping its geography and stirring fears about its future.
A huge tent encampment has sprouted up in the grassy field between a yacht club and nightlife venue, transforming the Beirut waterfront. Some families squat in storefronts, live in mosques and sleep in the cars they drove here, double- and triple-parking convoys on thoroughfares. Others huddle in tents pulled together from sheets of tarp along the curving coastal corniche or around Horsh Beirut, a park of pine trees on the outskirts of an area of the southern suburbs known as Dahiyeh.
“It’s horrid because we feel this tension, that we’re not wanted here,” said Noor Hussein, who settled at the waterfront in early March after fleeing the first Israeli airstrikes on Dahiyeh. She watched a stream of well-to-do joggers navigate a maze of tents and soiled mattresses, her three youngest children clambering onto her lap.
“We don’t want to be here,” she said. “We have nothing here and nowhere to go.”
Experts say this displacement is unprecedented
Waves of displacement have upended this city before, most recently during the 2024 Israel-Hezbollah war. But experts struggle to recall such a dramatic exodus — about 20% of the country’s population, according to government statements — hitting Beirut so fast.
“The scale and intensity of this is just unprecedented,” said Dalal Harb, the spokesperson for the United Nations refugee agency in Lebanon. She said the figure of 1 million displaced is …
