From the crest of a mountain several kilometres from home, Abbas Ayoub watches helplessly as his neighbourhood collapses. The 33-year-old knows this helplessness well. He watches from about 12 kilometers away as Beirut's Dahiyeh is being destroyed, no stranger to displacement after fleeing his lifelong home twice before.
Fifteen kilometres north of the city, shielded by altitude and distance, he can still hear the impacts. From his vantage in the mountains, he can hear Dahiyeh being struck, describing "a deep explosion sound" and columns of smoke. His uncle's house has become shelter for 15 people; his immediate family, his uncle's family, and his sister's family crowded into rooms designed for far fewer.
Abbas first fled Dahiyeh as a teenager during the 2006 Lebanon war, a 34-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that displaced up to one million people at its peak. He left again in 2024, when Israel launched a massive aerial campaign and subsequent ground invasion of southern Lebanon, the biggest escalation since 2006. Now, he has fled for a third time, joining an estimated 1.3 million people displaced from their homes since 2 March.
What strikes in Abbas's account is not the panic but the resignation. He observes that most Lebanese people are now adapted to displacement, that "it's a normal thing now. We just pack our important things and we leave." The language of catastrophe has become the language of routine. But beneath this adaptation lies a fracturing of the social fabric that no routine can repair.
The scale of the current crisis is staggering. More than one million people, including over 300,000 children, have already been displaced. According to Lebanon's Disaster Risk Management Unit, the total number of registered displaced people has reached 1,049,328, with 132,742 living in collective shelters. The pace of displacement has outstripped the country's shelter capacity, leaving many families unable to secure accommodation and spending nights in streets, vehicles, or public spaces.
For many, this displacement echoes earlier rounds of flight. Between October 2023 and November 2024, hundreds of thousands of residents of southern Lebanon's border villages were forcibly displaced; at its peak, 899,725 people were displaced, but most had returned by last October, only to be forced to flee again.
The humanitarian response, already strained before March, now faces a crisis of capacity and resources. An estimated 4.1 million people urgently needed support even before the fighting resumed, and Lebanon's 2025 humanitarian response plan was only one-third funded. Schools have been converted into shelters. Pregnant women are sleeping on the sidewalk and others on the beach or in parking lots.
But the numbers, however sobering, can obscure the human pattern. Across Lebanon, families are returning to the very same shelters they occupied just months ago. One woman in her 90s who had lost 11 members of her family during the 2024 attacks is now displaced again, staying in the same school that was turned into a shelter, illustrating the fear, uncertainty and repeated trauma families are facing.
The most unsettling stories emerge from those who have never known anything but displacement. A two-year-old named Sarah, born in a shelter in Mount Lebanon after her family fled Israeli bombardment in 2023, has again been forced to flee; her guardian says "She was born in displacement and now she is displaced again." Children like Sarah only know displacement; more than 300,000 children have been uprooted in less than three weeks.
Abbas, sheltering in the mountains with his family, tries to maintain routines. He keeps routines as normal as possible, doing sport and hobbies as he puts it, trying his best to keep on track. Yet he carries no illusions. He believes "it's going to be a long war because it's not only Lebanon involved."
What his story reveals is a humanitarian system near breaking point, not because of any single crisis but because of their accumulation. Lebanon was already hosting approximately 1.35 million Syrian refugees and 250,000 Palestinian refugees, the highest number of refugees per capita in the world. The economy had collapsed. The state infrastructure was fragile. Now, Israeli operations in late 2024 damaged 67 hospitals and forced over 150 health facilities to close, cutting off access to healthcare and critical support services for thousands.
Abbas holds onto hope. He has not given up on Lebanon, saying "I want to live and I want to stay. I love this country." But hope is a luxury for those with somewhere to go. Those without relatives to fall back on are in a far worse position, with many poor families unable to afford to rent an apartment or a hotel.
For now, Abbas watches from the mountains and waits. Three times displaced in two decades; a rhythm that would break most people, but which has instead become, in his telling, simply the way things are. That normalisation of catastrophe may be the most troubling measure of Lebanon's crisis.