Inside an unfurnished apartment in the Hazmieh suburb of Beirut, 10 members of the Hassan family are sleeping on bare mattresses on the cream-tiled floor. The boxes pushed to a corner of the living room, beside a cage for their yellow-faced blue budgerigar Paco, underscores how fast they had to flee their homes in the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital amid a fierce Israeli bombardment whose scale has few parallels in 21st century warfare.
“One of the explosions was so close we could feel the heat on our faces,” said Rana Hassan. “Even as we drove here we could still hear the bombings happening. We slept on the floor that night,” she added, touching the tiles to emphasize her shock.
The Hassans escaped the Shia-majority southern suburbs—or Dahiyeh in Arabic—fearing Israeli airstrikes that have blanketed southern Lebanon and are now pummeling their neighborhood. The attacks across Lebanon have killed more than 1,000 people in under two weeks, according to the health ministry. Lebanese authorities say more than 1.2 million (in a country of 5 million) have, like the Hassan family, fled their homes.
They hurried first to Rana’s house in nearby Choueifat, where her 16-year-old daughter Rima filmed footage from the balcony that she eagerly shows me on her cell phone, a column of fire and smoke billowing into the sky from an Israeli airstrike some 200 ft. away. The attacks spurred them to flee a second time, one cousin carrying his ailing father down the stairs on his back, before arriving in Hazmieh, in the foothills of Mount Lebanon.
The trail of destruction and mass displacement across Lebanon has rapidly upended a fragile status quo between Israel and Hezbollah. The two sides had been trading fire for almost a year in a low-grade conflict after the militant group began launching rockets into northern Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Gaza.
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