Beirut is bursting.
It's been a month since Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel after the US-Israeli attack on its patron, Iran, triggering Israeli bombardment of Lebanon and a ground invasion. Since then, more than 1 million people from southern and eastern Lebanon and Beirut's southern suburbs have fled. Many have crammed into the ever-tighter spaces of the country's capital where the bombs have not yet fallen.
Israel's attacks and evacuation orders — unprecedented in scope, covering what humanitarian agencies estimate to be 15% of this tiny country — have emptied villages in south Lebanon and pushed almost the entire population of the southern suburbs into Beirut, shifting the city's center of gravity, reshaping its geography and stirring fears about its future.
A huge tent encampment has sprouted up in the grassy field between a yacht club and nightlife venue, transforming the Beirut waterfront. Some families squat in storefronts, live in mosques and sleep in the cars they drove here, double- and triple-parking convoys on thoroughfares. Others huddle in tents pulled together from sheets of tarp along the curving coastal corniche or around Horsh Beirut, a park of pine trees on the outskirts of an area of the southern suburbs known as Dahieh.
"It's horrid because we feel this tension, that we're not wanted here," said Nour Hussein, who settled at the waterfront in early March after fleeing the first Israeli airstrikes on Dahieh. She watched a stream of well-to-do joggers navigate a maze of tents and soiled mattresses, her three youngest children clambering onto her lap.
"We don’t want to be here," she said. "We have nothing here and nowhere to go."
Experts say this displacement is unprecedented
Waves of displacement have upended this city before, most recently during the 2024 Israel-Hezbollah war. But experts struggle to recall such a dramatic exodus — about 20% of the country’s population, according to government statements — hitting Beirut so fast.
"The scale and intensity of this is just unprecedented," said Dalal Harb, the spokesperson for the United Nations refugee agency in Lebanon. She said the figure of 1 million displaced is almost certainly an undercount because it misses anyone who has not formally registered as displaced with the Ministry of Social Affairs.
The government has converted hundreds of public schools into shelters and pitched tents for displaced families beneath the bleachers of the city's main sports stadium. Charities have scrambled to help, with one refashioning an abandoned slaughterhouse destroyed in Beirut's 2020 port explosion into a dormitory for almost 1,000 displaced people.
But urban researchers note a staggering number of people on the streets compared with past conflicts, making it difficult for ordinary residents to block out the war and the misery it has wrought.
"This is relatively new, that you have so many people spending time in these open spaces, who are very vulnerable, living in very precarious conditions," said Mona Harb, a professor of urban studies at the American University of Beirut. "You have to confront this visually when you’re coming and going to work, to school ... and there are strong, mixed feelings associated with this presence that’s unregulated."
Families say they’ve struggled to find space at government-run shelters in Beirut and would rather brave the elements than travel north to cities where they might find better accommodations but where they have no relatives or connections.
"The further away we go, the more we'll lose hope about finding our way back," said Hawraa Balha, 42, when asked why her family of four was squeezing into the small car they drove from the devastated southern border village of Duhaira rather than sleeping in an available shelter further north. "We don't want to move again."
Residents of the suburbs of Dahieh have largely opted to remain in Beirut. That way, every so often, they can retrieve belongings and check whether their homes are still standing, albeit in furtive dashes under the threat of bombardment. Hussein said her kids grew so desperate for a shower after nearly a month without a bathroom that they rushed home to wash up last week despite the incessant buzz of Israeli drones.
Lebanon's sectarian balance is at risk
The prospect of hundreds of thousands of Shiites on the move has inflamed Lebanese sensitivities about the country’s fragile sectarian balance. Ever since its bloody 15-year civil war, Lebanon has relied on a power-sharing agreement to accommodate the interests of Christians, Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims, the country's largest religious groups, which make up roughly equal shares of the population.
"It's generating anxieties in Beirut, where the bulk of the displacement is, that this may cause a significant transformation in the demographic balance within the country, or within certain spaces and cities," said Maha Yahya, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center.
Each day that passes, more tents appear at the waterfront settlement. Children have started to complain of skin rashes. Heavy rainfall recently flooded the grassy lot and seeped into tents, leaving a trail of soggy clothes and sore throats. A fight broke out last week as volunteers arrived to distribute donations.
"We're not used to living like this — we had a house, we had normal lives," said Lina Shamis, 51, warming herself by a fire at the foot of a billboard advertising luxury watches. She, her three adult daughters and their small children set up camp here after heeding Israeli evacuation orders for Dahieh in a panic, carrying almost nothing with them.
"Now the kids are out of school and hungry, and our neighborhood is gone," she said. "All I feel is despair."
With Israel thrusting deeper into Lebanon and threatening to seize Lebanese territory as far as the Litani, a river 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of the Israeli border, the situation of displaced people in Beirut "will be even worse than what we’re seeing now," warned Harb, from the UN refugee agency.
"The needs will continue to increase," she said. "It's an imminent humanitarian catastrophe."
