Residents of South Lebanon, displaced again, deplore the lack of aid from Beirut

by Maya Gebeily, Aziz Taher and Hassan Hankir

BESSARIEH, Lebanon, June 26 (Reuters) – Ahmed Abou Della was born in the village of Yarine in southern Lebanon, before the territory to the south was named Israel, and there he intended to spend the last days of his life.

But eight decades later, with the Israeli army bombing his home village, the old man received an ultimatum from his children: leave Yarine or see them arrive at his side to die together.

Along with his younger brother, Ahmed Abou Della was one of the last diehards still living in the village at the beginning of the spring that had just passed.

Most of the families had decided to leave Yarin last October, shortly after Hezbollah and the Israeli army began, on the sidelines of the IDF offensive in the Gaza Strip in response to the attack by the Palestinian Hamas, to exchange border fire with a frequency and intensity unprecedented since their 2006 war.

“What allowed me to last so long was the land itself,” explains Ahmed Abou Della, moved to tears, describing the house he built in Yarine, in the middle of agricultural land, surrounded by his livestock. “If you turn the earth over, you will find our footprints there,” he says.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than 95,000 people living in southern Lebanon have been displaced by the fighting that began more than eight months ago. On the Israeli side of the border, some 60,000 people have been forced to flee.

But unlike Israel, where the state funds hotel rooms and other temporary accommodation for those displaced by the war, Lebanese families have received almost no support from the public administration.

“YARINE DISTRICT”

More than 80% of the displaced have found refuge with relatives or friends, according to IOM data, while others (14%) are renting accommodation and 2% have taken up residence in collective shelters.

The residents of Yarine are among those who have mostly asked relatives to accommodate them. Like a return to the past.

Many of them still remember having to flee Yarine in 1978 during the incursion carried out by the Israeli army at the start of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990).

They then made their way to the city of Sidon, along the coast, and through the mountainous region of Chouf, before finally settling on the outskirts of Bessarieh, a city located about fifty kilometers north of Yarine, to build modest homes there.

This exodus continued in the 1980s and, as more people arrived, gave rise to a “Yarine district”, where the former inhabitants of the village installed water pipes and built their own school.

Samer Abou Della, Ahmed’s nephew, was born there, in this neighborhood at the gates of Bessarieh, in 1979.

Having become a teacher, he built a house in Yarine in 2011, thinking that the relative calm on the Lebanese-Israeli border after the 2006 conflict would allow him to live there with his wife and their six children.

But here he is today again “in the neighborhood”, having fled Yarine after the start of the Israeli bombings in October.

A TRIVING FEELING OF DEJÀ VU

“This feeling, these experiences from the past, they remain. It becomes something that we pass on from generation to generation,” he confides in front of the entrance to his mother’s small house, where he is currently staying.

“We said to ourselves: ‘In two days we will be back (home),’ but then 30 years passed before we got back,” he continues. “That’s the feeling some people are afraid of.”

For months, Samer Abou Della’s two young sons have been sleeping on the living room sofa, while his wife and their four daughters are crammed into a single bedroom.

For meals, while the dining table is too small to accommodate the 11 people now living under the same roof, Samer Abou Della’s mother prepares two courses each time, so as not to disadvantage anyone.

According to him, at least 70 other families from Yarine are in the same situation as his in Bessarieh, with far from sufficient means.

Lebanon has been plunged for years into a deep economic crisis, with the consequences of banks freezing their customers’ savings, the severe devaluation of the Lebanese pound and the lifting of public subsidies which made basic necessities affordable. .

So far, the Lebanese government has not announced any subsidies or long-term aid for people affected by the hostilities in the south of the country. The area is a stronghold of the powerful Hezbollah, which distributes money to families and is responsible for paying the rent for some.

The Abou Della family says they received a basket of fruit from a public organization, considered very meager compared to their needs since they fled their border village.

“No one has come to knock on our door to ask about us (…) Everyone has to deal with the situation on their own,” says Lamia Abou Della, 74, Samer’s aunt.

“We were displaced in 1977 and we are still scattered here and there. What can we do? It fell on us.” (Reporting by Maya Gebeily, Aziz Taher and Hassan Hankir; French version by Jean Terzian; editing by Blandine Hénault)