‘The one toy I took from my war torn home’: Plight of the 400,000 children displaced by Israel’s war on Lebanon
Clutching a pack of Uno cards and a Little Mermaid colouring book, eight-year-old Nour* was forced to leave her home in southern Lebanon as Israeli forces bombarded the region.
Clothes were the only other item she carried as her family fled their town and joined the more-than one million internally displaced people fleeing Israeli attacks, which have razed villages to the ground.
These treasured possessions, Nour says, were gifts from her mum and dad. “They mean so much to me,” she says from a collective shelter in Beirut where she now lives with her sister Tala* and mother Sarah*.
It is a story all too common in Lebanon’s 632 collective shelters for refugees, where nearly 130,000 people are residing as they seek safety from ongoing shelling near their homes, which has continued despite a ceasefire agreement being extended for another 45 days.
“My children always say, ‘We want to go home. When are we going back home and back to school?’ They tell me they just want to play in the garden again,” says Sarah, 31, Nour’s mother.
“Sometimes my children do not express how they feel in words, but I can notice that they are scared. My daughter puts a pillow over her head when she sleeps, and she asks me to go with her to the toilet.
“They still remember the sound of the warplanes.”
Since the conflict erupted on 2 March, when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in response to the launch of the US-Israeli war on Iran, at least 3,020 people have been killed in Lebanon, with another 8,824 wounded, according to the Lebanese health ministry. A total of 211 children have died.
Nora Ingdal, Save the Children’s Lebanon country director, says the conflict has “ripped children from their homes, friends and any sense of normal routine, replacing it with fear and uncertainty”.
The trauma suffered will have “devastating consequences for years to come”, she adds.
Just over a week ago, Israel and Lebanon agreed to extend a ceasefire for an additional 45 days following talks in Washington.
But Israel and Hezbollah have continued launching attacks on each other, as was the case during the first truce which began on 16 April.
Of the million displaced people, children make up 400,000 of them, many now sharing overcrowded rooms with poor toilets and no space to play.
Far away from home, and with many unlikely to see their homes again following the Israeli bombardment, children in the Beirut shelter – and others across the country – are clutching on to the few remnants of their childhood.
