Youssef Zaynat has spent most of the past 10 days aimlessly wandering around the ancient city of Tyre in southern Lebanon, trying to distract himself from the painful reality that his country has been invaded.
Zaynat, in his late fifties, sports the same clothes and wool hat that he was wearing when forced to flee his village on the city’s outskirts soon after witnessing an Israeli air strike on his neighbours’ home that killed an entire family.
The latest fighting between Hizbollah and Israel has halted much of Tyre’s commercial life, and Israeli bombs have destroyed all but one crossing into Lebanon’s fifth-biggest city — leaving one narrow bridge on the old coastal road.
So for want of work, Zaynat rides a borrowed scooter through the city’s famed Roman ruins or the eerily quiet streets of the shuttered market, trying to ignore the regular thuds of Israeli air strikes overhead.
“Every time I hear one, I wonder if my home is being levelled,” he said, standing around a wooden barrel in the city’s docks, sharing a bottle of Arak with a friend. “Israel keeps pushing us — they want us to break.” His village of Burj al-Chamali was pounded by air strikes again on Thursday.
Zaynat is one of about 16,000 people who have been displaced from areas surrounding Tyre, as Israeli evacuation orders, bombardment and the looming threat of a full-scale invasion have forced them to flee to the ancient city some 12 miles from Lebanon’s border with Israel.
With the south of Lebanon under siege, it has turned this once-vibrant beach town into a refuge for holdouts and the displaced. Just 5,000 remain of the city’s pre-war population of 60,000, according to local authorities.
Tyre is a religiously mixed enclave not traditionally dominated by Hizbollah, which triggered the latest conflict by firing across the Israeli-Lebanese border in support of Iran after the US and Israel launched their war against the Islamic republic. Even after Israel included swaths of the city in mass evacuation orders locals still considered it safer than the rest of the south.
But Israel’s military has increased strikes on the area in recent days. “Perhaps because we refuse to leave it,” said Haytham Ezzeddine, a resident of the city, as he fished for his friend’s car keys in the rubble of a building flattened by an air strike.
Israel’s military sometimes called rescue workers to ensure villages were evacuated before strikes began. “In others, they hit without warning, leaving dead civilians in their wake,” said Moussa Nasrallah, the head of the area’s state-run civil defence.
Bridges and access roads around Tyre have been systematically hit, cutting the city off almost entirely from the rest of the country. Residents say a massive air strike last Sunday drove home the sense of isolation: a gaping hole sits where traffic once crossed the bridge, the acrid smell of bombardment wafting amid the birdsong.
Aid organisations are now reluctant to use the one crossing left into the city, local officials say. The sound of fighter jets constantly overhead and the thumps of nearby explosions are doing little to assuage their concerns.
Israel’s military has deepened its invasion of Lebanon this week, pouring more troops into the south of the country and clashing with Hizbollah in more than a dozen villages.
It has already forced the displacement of more than 1mn people across the country — some of whom were already displaced during a previous round of fighting in 2024.
It is not clear how deep into Lebanon Israeli forces are now operating. But Israeli officials say they are seeking to create a “buffer zone” dozens of kilometres into the country. Defence minister Israel Katz has referred to the Litani River as the “forward defensive line”.
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Katz has also threatened to level entire cities, as Israel has done in Gaza, prompting widespread fears in Tyre that it will be subject to the same tactics. Many of the displaced are sleeping in their cars, fearing schools, shelters and hospitals will be hit soon like they were in the Palestinian enclave.
Oscillating between fear and defiance, the mood has shifted among residents since the city’s main bridge was bombed. More shops and restaurants have closed this week, more people have fled and more displaced people are trickling in from nearby villages under assault.
Only 4,000 of the displaced are in formal shelters in Tyre. Others fill rows of vehicles parked along Tyre’s beachfront in the Christian Mina district — one of the only neighbourhoods not under an evacuation order.
Hoda Sweidan, 30, herself displaced from her family’s village of Yater near the border, has spent most of the past three weeks organising help for those newly arrived in Tyre.
Working with a network of volunteers, she helps distribute milk, nappies, food and water. Sometimes two dozen people are crammed into a single room in government shelters. “There’s not enough assistance coming in from the government, local authorities or even aid organisations,” she said. Individual donations were “the only way anything is getting done”.
Sweidan spoke in front of one church in Mina currently housing the displaced. In Tyre, Christian spaces have taken in some of the displaced, who are from surrounding areas that are majority Shia Muslim.
It stands in stark contrast to other parts of the country, notably Beirut, where Shia refugees have been pushed out of Christian neighbourhoods over their perceived affiliation to Hizbollah. Some families from Lebanon’s south who evacuated to Beirut have returned to Tyre claiming mistreatment, Sweidan said.
Fears of mistreatment and humiliation are motivating many to stay behind, she said, as is the prospect of never returning home.
Israel’s military this week accused Hizbollah of launching rockets from Tyre and using civilians as human shields. That statement alarmed many in the city who told the FT they had not seen evidence to support the claim.
“They can just hit any time, anywhere, whatever they want,” said Tareq Kadado, a gardener from the city, calling it “the project of Greater Israel”. “Leave where?” he said of the evacuation orders. “This is our town. This is our land.”
Tareq, 33, spends his days feeding abandoned and stray dogs and cats — sometimes the only signs of life in near-empty neighbourhoods.
Hizbollah has escalated its attacks on Israel in recent days, maintaining a steady salvo of projectiles and attack drones. The FT saw rockets launched from a village outside Tyre as well as ones further south.
At the same time Israel’s military has expanded its aerial campaign in areas surrounding Tyre, calling local civil defence workers to evacuate surrounding villages where there are still civilians.
“We try and get people to leave when those evacuations come in because we know the Israelis are serious. But not everyone can, especially not the disabled, the elderly or the poor,” said civil defence head Nasrallah, who receives many of those calls. “That is going to mean more people dying at the hands of this barbaric war. More bodies for us to pick up.”
Those bodies will be brought to Tyre’s hospitals, as many have over the past three weeks. They will be taken to a new cemetery on the edge of the city — a temporary resting place before they can be reburied, one day, in their own villages.
Source:
www.ft.com
