Beirut shelter rarely empties as crises continue driving people there

High in the mountains above Beirut, in the village of Aintoura, a former school has taken on a very different purpose. Classrooms no longer hold lessons; they now hold families driven from their homes.

Inside, Omar Toni Azar works alongside his mother and father to manage the shelter they set up there. It resembles a family enterprise in one sense only: they do the work without pay.

“There are around 160 people here now,” Omar told RTÉ News.

“I hope there will not be more, because some rooms are divided between two, three, four families. There are two rooms with six and seven families – around 30 people per room. It is hard for them,” he said.

For those staying here, the flight from this war is only the latest chapter. Many speak as though they have spent much of their lives running from one threat or another.

Even so, the routines of ordinary life persist where they can. In one room, several men tried to carve out a brief escape with a card game – a few hours of distraction from everything outside.

Omar Toni Azar helps to run the shelter with his parents

Elsewhere, children thread through the corridors, meals are cooked on improvised hobs, and conversations shift uneasily between everyday concerns and unspeakable loss.

Yet thoughts of home remain inescapable. In room after room, phone screens glowed with the same grim evidence – images of devastation. Villages flattened. Lives torn apart.

Abdallah Nazzal showed me videos of his hometown.

“This is my village that Israel strikes in the day and in the night and kills civilians,” he said. “My friends died. About 20 of my friends.”

For hundreds of thousands across Lebanon, such scenes are not headlines from afar. They are pictures of home.

Israel has ordered the evacuation of roughly a fifth of Lebanon’s territory, displacing more than 1.2 million people – almost one in five of the country’s entire population.

The evacuation zone extends to the Zahrani River, 40km north of the Israeli border. Israel says it intends to hold a so-called security zone up to the Litani River indefinitely – some 30km inside Lebanese territory.

This centre first opened its doors in 2006

In practical terms, that would mean an occupation of sovereign Lebanese land with no clear end point.

And if no ceasefire is secured when Israeli and Lebanese negotiators are expected to meet in Washington next week, the people sheltering in Aintoura may be waiting a very long time to return.

When word of the US-Iran ceasefire spread through the shelter in the early hours of Wednesday morning, it brought a burst of celebration.

People had gone to sleep unsure whether the next sound would be bombs or silence. They woke believing a deal had brought peace.

It did not hold.

Tala Hijazi has been sheltering in Aintoura since 2023

Instead, Wednesday became the deadliest day of this war in Lebanon. More than 300 people were killed as Israel launched over 100 strikes in 10 minutes – hitting not only the south, but also central Beirut, the seafront and residential neighbourhoods that, until that morning, had seemed removed from the conflict.

Israel said the ceasefire did not apply to Lebanon. The United States agreed.

Tala Hijazi has been sheltering in Aintoura since 2023 – through two wars with Israel.

She recalled the emotional whiplash of seeing hope appear, only to vanish again within hours.

“We woke up shocked – like, it’s a ceasefire. We couldn’t believe it. And some people actually packed their things and were prepared to go home. And some people actually went,” she said.

“But then, no, it didn’t stop. And it was a horrible day because we were happy and then suddenly sad. The energy was up and then down. We just want to go back. We hope to go back. We don’t know when.”

For now, it is a hope with nowhere to land.