Aley, Lebanon – The traffic in Aley was unusually heavy for 11am on Thursday last week as people from all over southern and eastern Lebanon continued to arrive to escape the intense air attacks by Israel which had continued since Monday.
The shops in the central area of the city were open as usual, but nothing else could be described as “normal”. With the numbers of people on the road, heading towards Aley to seek shelter, what would usually be a 10-minute drive from a nearby village was now taking as long as 40 minutes.
Vans full of people and cars stuffed with personal belongings of all kinds, sometimes strapped to roofs, clogged the narrow streets of the city in Mount Lebanon, which is 20km uphill from Beirut, and usually home to about 100,000 people.
On Monday, September 23, Lebanon had awoken to at least 80,000 messages and phone calls from the Israeli military, calling on residents of southern and eastern Lebanon to immediately evacuate places where, it claimed, Hezbollah stores weapons.
At the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP)’s headquarters in Aley, a day of preparations was already in full swing. Founded in 1949, the Druze party affiliated with the historic landowning Jumblatt family is the primary political force in this area. After the assassination of party founder Kamal Jumblatt in the early years of the Lebanese civil war which lasted from 1975 to 1990, his son Walid Jumblatt took on the leadership, becoming an influential figure in Lebanese politics.
“Around 13,000 refugees have arrived in the district of Aley,” Reabal Abou Zeki, an official of the PSP in Aley, told Al Jazeera. The immediate question – where to put them – in a small district usually home to about 250,000 people, including those in the main city.
So far, at least 1,300 people have been housed in shelters set up in five schools in Aley city while 2,500 are in rented accommodation. The rest (about 9,200 people) are in the wider Aley district, similarly split between sheltering in schools and paying for private rented accommodation if they can find it.
Alongside local and youth organisations, the PSP has largely taken on the task of coordinating the response – something it has been anticipating for some time. “We have been preparing for the past month for a scenario of mass displacement,” Abou Zeki said.
Still suffering a debilitating economic crisis that has gripped the country since 2019, the Lebanese government lacks the capacity to manage the crisis. Therefore, political parties, local NGOs and youth organisations have stepped in to handle the mass displacement on the ground.
Much of these efforts revolve around schools, which are being used across the country to shelter people displaced by Israel’s bombardment which killed nearly 600 people on the first day alone.
‘We worked like a beehive’
On Monday, when the bombing began, schools were still officially shut ahead of the start of the new academic year at the end of the month. Only the administrative offices were set to be open as staff dealt with late enrolments and preparing schools for the start of term.
Hanan al-Lama, director of the Khalid Jumblatt Public School in Aley, which is named for the Jumblatt family, said the school’s staff rallied to work flat out from 11am on Monday until late into the night to get the school ready to welcome people arriving from the south. They “worked like a beehive, to make sure no one slept without a mattress”, al-Lama said.
“The first people started arriving at 2am. We had prepared ourselves psychologically to receive a wave of arrivals, but we did not expect it to happen within hours.”
In Aley, volunteers wearing PSP party vests were stationed on the road at every entrance to the city. They directed cars coming from the hardest-hit areas of the country towards the five schools, filling them up one by one.
By Thursday, at the entrance of the two-storey Khalid Jumblatt Public School, children were playing on the sun-drenched basketball court, while laundry was hanging out of the school’s windows to dry. Inside the classrooms, desks had been moved aside to make space for mattresses and displaced families’ belongings.
The school is used to managing crisis situations. On a normal day, it effectively runs two full school days – welcoming 600 Lebanese students in its morning session, and 720 Syrian refugees in the afternoon. “We were excited to start a new fresh academic year with our students,” al-Lama said. Now, she noted sadly, no one knows when that will happen.
No time for a proper burial
The school is sheltering 260 people from Lebanon’s southern districts – usually no more than two hours away by car. The journey here took far longer for most, however.
“We moved immediately after the air raids started and spent 12 hours on the road,” a 32-year-old man from Tyre, 90km south of Aley, who declined to share his name to protect his privacy, told Al Jazeera.
He agreed to answer some questions in the crowded, green-walled corridor of the second floor as he was sharing a classroom with at least 10 other people. The situation back home was desperate, he said. “My brother was martyred on Monday, and my uncle as we speak. We cannot even go and give them a proper burial.”
Displaced people here say the situation has brought back memories of the 2006 war that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in 34 days. “But this is more difficult than the 2006 conflict because it has been going on for a year now,” a 65-year-old woman from the southern town of Seddiqine, about 20km from the border with Israel and 100km from Aley, who also did not wish to be named, told Al Jazeera.
Wearing a large pair of sunglasses, she sat on a carpet inside a classroom divided in two by a makeshift curtain. Next to her, her 60-year-old brother – a farmer from the same village – said that at first he found himself running towards the bombardment, rather than away from it, due to the shock.
“On our way [leaving the south], a strike hit the side of the road and the kids started screaming. They have no idea what war is,” he said. He called on European countries for help: “If they are civilised and care about the environment and animal rights, just look at us and stop this.”
As he spoke, other family members gathered around, including two children, as a man began the afternoon prayer in the background.
A young member of the same family said his car broke down in Sidon, halfway between Seddiqine and Aley. They had to abandon it on the side of the road and hitch a lift in other people’s cars.
Lives ‘turned upside down’
Further south, about 95km from Aley and close to the border with Israel, the Druze-majority town of Hasbaya has been receiving displaced people en masse.
Hasbaya has been surrounded by continuous bombardments but until now, has not been directly affected by the near-daily exchange of fire between Hezbollah and Israel since October 8 last year.
“We did not expect to host people as we are not safe ourselves,” Rania Abu Ghaida, the 48-year-old director of the Hasbaya Public High School, told Al Jazeera over the phone.
As she spoke, a loud noise interrupted her. After a few seconds of silence, she said, “a sonic boom” – referring to the sound made by Israeli fighter jets flown low over the country – before resuming where she left off. “[When the escalation started] the situation was hectic and turned upside-down in a few hours.”
The municipality of Hasbaya is organising its emergency response with the help of local and international NGOs and the World Food Programme, which announced an emergency operation to provide food assistance for up to one million people affected by the escalation on September 29.
People started arriving in Hasbaya from other areas of south Lebanon on Monday night. “However, the school was not ready to accommodate them, and some had to spend the night in their cars until the next morning,” said Abu Ghaida. Helped by municipality staff, the school personnel set about cleaning the classrooms, moving desks and chairs and gathering basic items such as blankets, water and food to distribute.
About 50 people have sought shelter in the school, where about 200 students usually attend classes. “People here are physically safe, but they are not comfortable as they live in constant uncertainty,” Abu Ghaida said. “While I was assisting one family, they received a phone call saying their house was gone.”
No water to wash
All around the country, schools are providing roofs over people’s heads, but are not equipped as proper shelters. “There are no showers in schools and a limited number of toilets,” a volunteer at Khalid Jumblatt school told Al Jazeera.
“Water for hygiene use is scarce,” Egyptian baker Mohamad Jaber Sharif who has lived in Tyre since 1990, told Al Jazeera at the school. As he spoke, people gathered around, but did not want to talk much. Most were still wearing the same clothes they had arrived in.
“Each one of the five schools turned into shelters in Aley needs about four water trucks per day,” for washing purposes, Abou Zeki said, a figure confirmed by al-Lama.
Reina al-Indari, 23, a volunteer, described the situation at Maroun Abboud High School, less than a 10-minute drive from the Khalid Jumblatt school in Aley, as “very depressing”. At the entrance, a large group of people carrying blankets, clothes and mattresses were being admitted by young volunteers wearing the PSP party’s vest at the gate.
The three-storey, grey-walled school has a large courtyard in the centre. Where there used to be a cafeteria for students, donated clothes were piled up.
“This was my school for three years, and now it is a shelter for 330 people,” al-Indari, a master’s student of nuclear fusion at the American University of Beirut, told Al Jazeera.
Everyone staying in the school has been registered by volunteers on arrival, resulting in the creation of a large database.
While children played behind her, she pointed out basic needs: “Medical and psychological support, medicines, but also sleeping mattresses, cleaning supplies and hygiene products of all sorts. At the moment we are also trying to schedule entertainment activities for kids.”
As Israel’s bombs rain down across the country, strikes on areas that have never been affected before mark a further escalation towards all-out war.
“There is no timeline for this crisis. A bigger one is ahead: we need stoves and gas,” the PSP official in Aley, Abou Zeki, said.