“Internally displaced” doesn’t do justice to those now living on Lebanon’s streets

We spot a lone man sifting through the rubble. I see him pull out a necklace and drop it into an envelope

We go to sleep with the sound of Israeli drones buzzing overhead. We wake up to the sound of drones. Sometimes it feels like one is right outside the window. They bring terror – of impending explosions, of lives about to be violently cut short or upended. Even when it’s quiet, as it is now in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, there is a palpable tension that has its own clamour. The streets are crowded with tents and parked cars with whole families camped inside them. I see mothers rocking babies in the back seats. Young girls sit on kerbs. Ambulances hug the roundabout, ready for the next bombing. Evidence of Lebanon’s humanitarian catastrophe is writ large everywhere. Over a million are now classed as “internally displaced”. The phrase doesn’t do justice to the sheer desperation of living on the streets or in a tent, having fled everything you know. We have no real sense of Hezbollah’s attacks here, just that the militant group is continuing to fire rockets into northern Israel and its communities.

Families running for their lives

The Israeli military regularly issues “warnings” via X and other social media platforms. Those receiving them hear these announcements as chilling threats. “URGENT: The IDF does not intend to harm you,” they read, “but for your safety, you must evacuate immediately.” How long they have is unspecified. It could be 15 minutes or five hours. Few want to gamble with their lives by guessing.

The warnings can be terrifyingly imprecise. Once, more than 50 villages and towns in the south were mentioned by the IDF in a single notice of impending attack. The Israeli military and Netanyahu’s government often boast about how they offer what no other army in the world does by warning the enemy in advance of strikes. The impact on the ground is a collective terror and widespread panic. It prompts huge traffic jams and mass movement of people as frantic families gather up whatever they can and run for their lives.

Homes transformed into ruins

The 100 air strikes on Lebanon on 8 April – a day now known as Black Wednesday – came with zero warnings. Devastating explosions hit simultaneously across the country. The bombs struck the capital, a spread of targets in the south and in the Beqaa valley. “It was raining bombs,” one Beirut resident tells us. Many of the strikes were in areas previously thought to be safe: residential areas and the vicinity around embassies, luxury hotels and government buildings in the capital.

As we turn up to one site in Ain Mreisseh, a neighbourhood in central Beirut just a short distance away from a range of embassies, including the British, we spot a Maserati covered in dust and debris. Half of a seven-storey block has been torn away. It’s as if a giant knife has sliced the building in two. You can still see tables laid for meals, handsome red carpets hanging over the torn floor. The rubble below cannot hide the lives of those who once called this home. There are soft children’s toys; school and university books, a graduation cap and dozens of photographs, snapshots of holidays and gatherings, even a strip of precious baby scans. There is zero evidence this was anything other than a heavily populated residential block.

Qassem’s search

In the middle of the mound of broken cement, we spot a lone man sifting through the rubble. He’s picking out photographs and documents. I see him pull out a necklace and drop it into an envelope. His name is Qassem Abboud and he moved his family from their home in the south of the country to the capital for safety reasons. His two daughters moved in with their aunts who lived in this block. Qassem, his wife, Amal, and their sons were elsewhere when the strike hit and all survived. His elder daughter, Malak, was dragged out from under the rubble alive, and is now in critical condition in hospital. His younger daughter, 26-year-old Zahra, is still missing.

Watching Qassem, my mind can’t immediately process what’s happening. There’s a big digger and several Civil Defence workers and fire crews helping him. They seem to be following his directions. He climbs into the digger’s cab, directing the driver to scrape first here, then there. He climbs down, goes through the rubble. Then the digging continues. There is no one still alive under this compressed mound of smashed concrete, but it isn’t until the second or third time the digger has trawled through the mess that I realise Qassem is searching for pieces of his youngest girl – a body or at least a part. Anything to know for certain, to somehow be able to grieve her brutal end.