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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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Israel’s Retaliatory Responses to Houthis Must Begin by Drawing Intelligence Plan

A person inspects damage at the site where a projectile fired from Yemen landed in Tel Aviv on December 21, 2024 (EPA)
A person inspects damage at the site where a projectile fired from Yemen landed in Tel Aviv on December 21, 2024 (EPA)
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Israel’s Retaliatory Responses to Houthis Must Begin by Drawing Intelligence Plan

A person inspects damage at the site where a projectile fired from Yemen landed in Tel Aviv on December 21, 2024 (EPA)
A person inspects damage at the site where a projectile fired from Yemen landed in Tel Aviv on December 21, 2024 (EPA)

Israel is considering options to respond to repeated attacks fired from Yemen in the past few days, the latest of which was a Houthi missile strike that injured more than a dozen people in Tel Aviv.
But military experts say Israel should first consider an intelligence plan for confronting the new front after it faced significant difficulties in both defending against and responding to the Houthi attacks.
On Saturday morning, Houthis launched a missile that triggered sirens throughout central Israel at 3:44 am. It was the second attack since Thursday.
Israel's military said the projectile landed in Tel Aviv's southern Jaffa area, adding that attempts to intercept a missile from Yemen failed.
“The incident is still being thoroughly investigated,” the army said, adding that following initial investigations by the Israeli Air Force and Home Front Command, “some of the conclusions have already been implemented, both regarding interception and early warning.”
Israeli military experts say the recent Houthi attacks have revealed serious security gaps in Israel's air defense systems.
“The pressing question now is why none of the other of Israel’s air defense layers managed to intercept the warhead,” wrote Yedioth Ahronoth's Ron Ben-Yishai. “The likely explanation is the late detection and the flat trajectory, which prevented the operation of all available defense apparatus.”
He said these incidents might expose a critical vulnerability in the army’s air defense system protecting Israel’s civilian and military home front.
According to Ben-Yishai, two main reasons might explain Saturday’s interception failure.
The first is that the missile was launched in a “flattened” ballistic trajectory, possibly from an unexpected direction.
As a result, Israeli defenses may not have identified it in time, leading to its late discovery and insufficient time for interceptors to operate.
He said the second, and more likely scenario is that Iran has developed a maneuverable warhead.
Such a warhead separates from the missile during the final third of its trajectory and maneuvers mid-flight—executing pre-programmed course changes—to hit its designated target, he wrote.
And while Israel has launched initial investigations into the failure of Israeli defense systems to intercept the missiles, it is now examining the nature, date and location of its response.
When Houthis launched their first missile attack on Israel last Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned them, saying, “The Houthis will learn the hard way.”
But Israeli political analyst Avi Ashkenazi wrote in the Maariv newspaper that Israel should look at reality with open eyes and say out loud that it cannot deal with the Houthi threat from Yemen, and has failed to face them.
Last Thursday, 14 Israeli Air Force fighter jets, alongside refuelers and spy planes, flew some 2,000 kilometers and dropped over 60 munitions on Houthi “military targets” along Yemen’s western coast and near the capital Sanaa.
The targets included fuel and oil depots, two power stations, and eight tugboats used at the Houthi-controlled ports.
But the Maariv newspaper warned about the increasing involvement of Iran in supporting the Houthi forces.
“Iran has invested more in the Houthis in recent weeks following the collapse of the Shiite axis, making the Houthi movement a leader of this axis,” the newspaper noted.
Underscoring the failures of Israel’s air defense systems, Maariv said the “Arrow” missile defense system, Israel's main line of defense against ballistic missiles, had failed four times in a row to intercept missiles, including three launched from Yemen and one from Lebanon.
Yedioth Ahronoth's Ben-Yishai also warned that the threat posed by maneuvering warheads on Iran's heavy, long-range missiles would become existential for Israel should Iran succeed in developing nuclear warheads for these missiles.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Channel 12 said that in recent months, the Middle East has changed beyond recognition.
The channel said that for the first time in more than half a century, a direct and threat-free air corridor has been opened to Iran through the Middle East. Israel will benefit from this corridor to launch almost daily attacks on the border crossings between Syria and Lebanon, it said.
Channel 12 also reported that according to the Israeli military, the new threat-free corridor will help Israel launch a future attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
“From Israel's perspective, the fall of the Assad regime and the collapse of the Iranian ring of fire are changing the balance of power in the Middle East,” the report added.