The ringing of half a million phones, a pause, and a collective gasp: in an instant, more than 500,000 people were left homeless.
Gunshots in the air, panicked phone calls and honking horns filled the streets of Beirut as people began to flee. Thousands of people abandoned their cars and began the slow march toward the sea, desperate to escape the Israeli bombs they knew would soon fall on their homes, whether they were inside them or not.
The Israeli military issued its largest and most sweeping displacement order yet, ordering the immediate evacuation of Beirut’s southern suburbs, an area the size of lower Manhattan. On Friday, the usually vibrant area was a ghost town, and crowds of people were replaced by debris and fires from Israeli bombing.
It was one more portion of Lebanon declared off-limits by the Israelis. The entire country south of the Litani River, approximately 10% of Lebanon, had already been placed under a displacement order the day before. Family WhatsApp chats were filled with the infamous blue maps issued by the Israeli military spokesperson over X, with more cities and neighborhoods shaded in red every hour.
The Lebanese government told fleeing residents that all shelters in Beirut were full and ordered them to head at least two hours north, where beds were available. The circle was getting tighter and it was harder to find safety.
“A person who leaves his house can only take some clothes and maybe a mattress. All the beautiful memories remain in the house, in the neighborhood,” said Ali Hamdan, a 31-year-old father from the Haret Hreik neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
War had returned to Lebanon before its residents had had time to rebuild after the last one. Israeli airstrikes hit border villages and the southern suburbs of Beirut on Friday, adding to the already accumulating mounds of rubble from 2024.
The pro-Iran group Hezbollah announced that Lebanon was returning to war by launching a barrage of rockets at Israel around midnight on Monday. Israel, prepared for months for a campaign against Hezbollah, responded quickly with bombing just an hour later.
In Beirut, residents knew what would come next. Hamdan did not wait for the orders to move: he immediately put his family in the car and on Monday found them an apartment in a village north of Beirut. In the last war he had waited and been wounded in the same airstrike that killed former Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. This time he wanted to get ahead of the bombs.
When the bombing began early on Friday, entire buildings were leveled and shop windows shattered by the percussive force of the explosions. Residents across the capital left windows open to prevent them from shattering; The windows vibrated all morning with each of Israel’s 26 attacks.
“The destruction is significant. It appears deliberate. Entire buildings are being torn down,” said Ahmad al-Khasneh, mayor of Ghobeiri, a municipality in Beirut’s southern suburbs. He added that there were some elderly people or people with mobility problems who had not been able to evacuate and that, despite their pleas, they had not received help from the Lebanese State to rescue them.
Outside the Shiite-majority areas of southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, where support for Hezbollah is common but not monolithic, hearts had hardened. Gone is the sympathy that was present during the last war in 2024, when Israel’s attacks seemed unprovoked. This time, in the eyes of many Lebanese, Hezbollah and its support base had brought it on themselves.
People viewed the displaced with suspicion and closed their doors with the justification that the refugees could be secret members of Hezbollah and could invite destruction into their homes.
Some Israeli airstrikes hit homes housing displaced people with ties to Hezbollah, a strategy that one analyst said was designed to sow divisions in Lebanese society and isolate the Shiite community. A strike on Tuesday at a hotel in Hazmieh, a Christian area southeast of Beirut, demonstrated to many: the hotel staff had taken in displaced families before the strike.
A homeowner in Achrafieh, a mainly Christian area, described turning away a refugee from a Shiite neighborhood. “He said his name was ‘Bob,’ as if he couldn’t tell from his accent where he was from,” the man mocked.
Others raised the rent taking advantage of the situation. An ad for a two-bedroom apartment demanded six months’ rent in advance, $6,000, well out of reach for most of Lebanon’s impoverished population.
In the Christian areas of Beirut and Lebanon, life went on normally. Nightclubs said they would continue to open on the weekend, although stickers would be placed on cameras and events would be by invitation only, with one nightclub promoting partying as a way to “let off steam.”
Meanwhile, Hezbollah continued fighting in southern Lebanon, announcing volleys of rockets aimed at northern Israel and attacks on groups of Israeli soldiers. Mahmoud Qmati, a senior Hezbollah official, declared that he was in “open war” with Israel, defying the Lebanese government’s demand to hand over its weapons and stop fighting.
To all but the most fervent supporters of Hezbollah, the fight seemed unwinnable. While Hezbollah boasted of wounding eight Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon on Friday, Israel razed entire buildings across the country. Israeli planes flew to Tehran and back, while Jerusalem police tweeted a photo of a turtle that had been lightly injured by shrapnel from an intercepted Iranian missile and was now being treated.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said at least 217 people had been killed and 798 injured by Friday, while hundreds of thousands had been displaced, yet to be counted.
The bombings continued well into the night on Friday, one after another.
“This has become a major war, a war of existence. This new war will be harder, more brutal,” Hamdan said.
