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Lebanon's Palestinian Refugees Fear for their Families in Gaza

Hayat Shehadeh's daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week. ANWAR AMRO / AFP
Hayat Shehadeh's daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week. ANWAR AMRO / AFP
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Lebanon's Palestinian Refugees Fear for their Families in Gaza

Hayat Shehadeh's daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week. ANWAR AMRO / AFP
Hayat Shehadeh's daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week. ANWAR AMRO / AFP

In a ramshackle Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Hayat Shehadeh wrings her hands as she watches the Israel-Hamas war. Her daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week.
"I can't sleep. I get up at 3:00 am... I go to watch the television," said the 69-year-old from her dark flat in south Beirut's Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian camp.
"Sometimes she writes to me, 'I'm fine'. She doesn't write more than that" because she has no way to recharge her phone battery, said the elderly woman, a baby grandchild playing with a Palestinian flag on the floor nearby.
Gaza-based Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking about 240 hostage, according to Israeli officials.
Israel has since carried out a relentless air and ground offensive in Gaza that the Hamas government says has killed some 12,000 people, including thousands of women and children.
With pain in her voice but trying to maintain her composure, Shehadeh said her daughter had separated her three children, sending them away with different relatives.
"She was crying, she said 'I split up the kids'," her mother said, so that "if someone dies, they don't all die."
The Burj al-Barajneh camp is a labyrinth of alleyways, some bearing pictures of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, or stencils and posters in support of Hamas and other Palestinian groups, some glorifying the October 7 attacks.
Lebanon hosts an estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees, many living in the country's 12 official camps, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
'Dear to me'
Shehadeh said her daughter, aged in her thirties, had been living in Lebanon in recent years but a few months ago "her husband came and took her" back to Gaza.
"She's moving around... I don't know what area she's in now," Shehadeh said, requesting the young woman not be identified by name.
More than 1.5 million people have been internally displaced in Gaza, and UN agencies have warned of rapidly deteriorating conditions.
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini has described children sheltering at a UN school "pleading for a sip of water or for a loaf of bread".
On Friday, network provider Paltel group said communications with Gaza were severed due to a lack of fuel.
Shehadeh's family came to Lebanon from the Acre area, now in northern Israel, survivors of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or the "catastrophe", when more than 760,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by the 1948 war over Israel's creation.
She said the family had feared for their lives, including after Jewish paramilitary groups massacred more than 100 Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, in April that year.
The elderly woman said if she could talk to her daughter, she would tell her not to cry.
"I want to tell her that her tears are dear to me," she said.
'Nothing left'
Beirut's dilapidated Burj al-Barajneh camp was partially destroyed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Beirut and during Lebanon's 15-year-long civil war, according to UNRWA.
In her small flat in the camp, Palestinian Fatima al-Ashwah, 61, is also glued to the television, praying her family members in Gaza are not among those being pulled dead from the rubble, or hoping to get a glimpse of them in footage of displaced people at shelters.
Originally from Al-Kabri, now in northern Israel, Ashwah has some 70 extended family members in Gaza, including her cousins and their families, the eldest in their seventies, the youngest just one year old.
They used to live in northern Gaza's Beit Hanoun, near the Erez crossing with Israel, Ashwah said, but now "their houses are all gone... because they're on the front lines. There's nothing left."
Israel has for more than a month been calling on the population in northern Gaza to evacuate south as it pushes ahead with its war against Hamas.
Ashwah's relatives have fled from place to place, with some now sheltering in schools near Gaza's southern Rafah crossing with Egypt.
She said sometimes she had been able to hear bombing during short telephone calls.
Her relatives have told her: "'We're hungry, we're afraid, the children are afraid, they're terrified'," she said.
"The situation breaks your heart," she said. "I can't stand the sound of crying and screaming anymore".
Fighting back tears, she recounted how she had visited Gaza in July, and how the family greeted her and another relative with drums and dancing in celebration at the Rafah crossing.
"God willing it will be over and Gaza will go back to how it was before," she said.

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”