On Sept. 27, the Israeli military dropped tens of thousands of pounds of bunker-buster munitions on a residential neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a group of municipalities known as Dahiyeh. Hezbollah leaders were meeting at the time; the blast killed the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah. U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris referred to Nasrallah’s death as a “measure of justice” for his victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese. Neither referenced the operation’s civilian cost.
Six apartment buildings were entirely leveled; others were damaged to the point of being uninhabitable. Although the official death count stands at 33 people, with an additional 195 injured, Lebanese officials have noted that many more victims could have been buried or completely incinerated by the blasts. The Washington Post described a U.S. Defense Department official as saying he had “never seen so many bombs used against a single target.”
This dramatic attack followed a steady escalation. On Sept. 17 and 18, Israel detonated thousands of booby-trapped communication devices used by Hezbollah—operations that injured thousands of people and killed at least 37, including four civilians. Then, on Sept. 23, Israel rapidly intensified its missile strikes across Lebanon. It was the single deadliest day in the country since the end of its 1975-90 civil war. On Sept. 30, Israel announced a ground invasion of Lebanon. Since then, Israel’s air campaign has expanded. Hezbollah has responded with barrages of missiles, some reaching Israeli cities.
While Israel has called its missile strikes “extensive and precise,” they have killed more than 1,400 people in a little over two weeks, the majority of them civilians. This number already exceeds that of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, which lasted 34 days; it also brings the total killed in Lebanon by Israeli bombardments since October 2023 to more than 2,000 people.
Beyond the stark death toll, Israel’s most recent assault on Lebanon has displaced more than 1.2 million people, approximately a quarter of the country’s population. Israeli evacuation orders now cover a quarter of Lebanese territory. It is Lebanon’s largest displacement crisis to date.
Israeli politicians are already deploying the threat of extended—and potentially permanent—displacement as a pressure tactic against Lebanese civilians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently addressed the Lebanese population via video, declaring, “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.” Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told Lebanese civilians that “now is your time to kick [Hezbollah] out—don’t let them come back!” Both statements link Lebanese communities’ fates with their ability and willingness to reject the militant group.
Several Israeli politicians and commentators have also framed mass flight from southern Lebanon as an opportunity, arguing in favor of establishing a “buffer zone” or “security area” on the Israel-Lebanon border. This would, in Yedioth Ahronoth commentator Yossi Yehoshua’s words, involve “clearing the land of southern Lebanon” of its residents.
Forced displacement, especially in contexts of military occupation, violates international humanitarian law if it is not justified by extreme circumstances and if it does not adequately consider civilians’ safety and dignity. Parties to conflict are bound to treat civilians humanely and to shield them from the effects of military action. Beyond humanitarian law, forced displacement also profoundly disrupts civilians’ local economies and social relations. Civilians understand evacuation orders and forced displacement as collective punishment.
It may be counterproductive, too: Israel’s weaponization of Lebanese civilians’ lives could further destabilize Lebanon and its neighbors. Images of humanitarian catastrophe feed popular anger and resentment toward Israel, polarizing a region where immediate de-escalation is imperative.
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‘The Human Toll Is Staggering’: Aid Groups Triage Yet Another Middle East Crisis
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon has triggered a new wave of displaced people in a region already under record strain.
Prior to the current crisis, Lebanon hosted the highest number of refugees per capita of any country in the world, including approximately 1.5 million Syrians and 210,000 Palestinians. Additionally, the International Organization for Migration recorded 176,504 migrant laborers in Lebanon in August 2024, 70 percent of whom are women and tens of thousands of whom lived in areas that have been heavily impacted by missile attacks and bombardment. The country’s 1.2 million displaced people include Lebanese citizens as well as Syrians, Palestinians, and migrant workers from countries such as Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Sudan.
Many of those fleeing Israel’s invasion have been displaced multiple times in less than a year. Israeli bombardments of its border region with Lebanon and areas of the eastern Bekaa Valley began on Oct. 8, 2023, in response to Hezbollah rocket fire, which followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Those Israeli strikes compelled more than 110,000 residents to leave their homes. The vast majority of those who fled initially stayed within their regions, opting to seek refuge in relatively safer but familiar locales. During this period, shelling would intensify sporadically, but most attacks were targeted and geographically concentrated in nature.
On Sept. 23, however, things changed. Populations across a far broader area of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley escaped unprecedented Israeli bombardments that seemed to be “targeting everyone,” Mona Fawaz, a professor at the American University of Beirut, told Democracy Now. On that day alone, more than 550 people were killed and thousands injured. Entire regions of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Dahiyeh saw their populations flee in a matter of hours toward Beirut, the mountains surrounding the capital, and farther north. Resultant traffic jams transformed what would have usually been a short hour-and-a-half or two-hour trip to the capital into a grueling 10-hour journey or even longer.
Now, as missile strikes target previously untouched neighborhoods and Israel’s ground invasion progresses, many of those who have already relocated once are moving again. Tens of thousands of people, including Palestinians from Lebanon’s 76-year-old refugee camps, are sleeping on Beirut’s beaches and streets. Over 400,000 people have even fled to Syria since Sept. 23, three-quarters of them Syrians who had been displaced due to the country’s civil war. An Oct. 4 Israeli airstrike near the Masnaa border crossing led to the closure of this major artery linking the two countries, raising even greater concerns about civilians’ ability to flee violence.
Such mass displacement has strained Lebanese society. Lebanon is home to many international aid organizations and United Nations agencies—including the World Food Program, U.N. Refugee Agency, and U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—but they are chronically underfunded. Although UNRWA is currently operating 11 emergency shelters housing 4,570 displaced Palestinian refugees, it was also forced to shutter most of its operations in the southern city of Sour due to the threat of bombardment. Other international organizations have been slow to respond to the escalating war.
Instead, more localized responses have prevailed. Some 1,000 collective shelters have been set up over the last few weeks, with 80 percent already at capacity. Public schools across the country are shuttered, as nearly half of them have been transformed into shelters for approximately 200,000 people, alongside a number of private initiatives that are providing shelter and relief to thousands more. Many families are hosting dozens of extended relatives, and even total strangers, in cramped apartments.
Overall, grassroots Lebanese responses to the war have been remarkable; it is a dark silver lining that Lebanon’s repeated crises and weak state have primed self-organized groups, municipalities, and advocacy organizations to quickly mobilize limited resources to support those in need.
However, there are also some worrisome reports—for example, of Syrians and Palestinians being denied entry to shelters or evicted under the guise of making space for Lebanese people. In recent years, the majority of Syrian refugees in Lebanon resisted returning to Syria, fearing military conscription and arbitrary arrest, among other concerns; they are now effectively being forced to return due to Israeli bombardment. At least nine Syrians fleeing Lebanon have already been arrested by regime forces in Syria since the mass displacement began. In Lebanon, social divisions may arise if residents in safer areas treat displaced civilians as potential threats.
The renewed war is also a financial earthquake in a country that was already economically devastated. In 2019, Lebanon’s corrupt, elite-owned banking sector imploded, and the Lebanese pound has since lost 98 percent of its value. Capital flight ensued, the dollar peg collapsed, banks imposed strict withdrawal limits on depositors, and the majority of Lebanese people saw their life savings illegally captured by the system. According to the World Bank’s most recent statistics, which do not include full data for southern Lebanon, a third of Lebanese and nearly half of Lebanon’s population, including Palestinian and Syrian refugees in the country, live in poverty. What’s more, emergency World Bank subsidies for wheat ended in late September after the program mandate expired, contributing to what on-the-ground sources report as 20 to 100 percent increases in bread prices.
The large-scale destruction of villages, such as the border town of Yaroun, as well as of critical infrastructure such as hospitals, raises fears that those displaced may not have viable paths to return home when the fighting stops. Government scientists have already warned that Israeli munitions deployed in southern Lebanon will adversely affect crop yields, including the olive harvest, which under normal circumstances would have started in the coming weeks. Only days ago, Israeli strikes hit a main aqueduct in the south, drowning the surrounding areas and depriving others of water. The south and the Bekaa Valley—the areas most heavily impacted by strikes—are the country’s agricultural hubs. The coast and Mediterranean waters up to the Awali River are also included in recent coastal evacuation orders, depriving fishers in this region of their livelihoods.
Israel’s use of forced displacement as a political weapon is all too familiar to Lebanon’s population. Part of Israel’s strategy rests on the theory that displaced, exhausted, financially insecure people will somehow pressure Hezbollah to leave Lebanon. But this tactic has not worked against Hamas in Gaza. Nor did it work the first time the Israelis attempted it in Lebanon, during its 1982-2000 occupation designed to halt Palestinian factions’ shelling of northern Israel.
Rather, as they have today, civilians from the border region fled, with many settling permanently in Dahiyeh. Hezbollah, alongside the Amal Movement, Palestinian, and leftist factions, fought a two-decade insurgency against Israel and its ally, the right-wing South Lebanon Army. Most people squarely blamed Israel and its proxies for their inability to return home, even if they disagreed with the Palestinian factions’ tactics or Hezbollah’s growing political power. Even though Israeli attacks may disrupt Hezbollah’s military and political capacity, they will ultimately only fuel further resentment and resistance to Israeli aggression in other forms.
For months, the international community has been unsuccessfully demanding a “day after” plan for Gaza, noting the danger of leaving a destroyed territory indefinitely in ruins with a starving population and no viable governance structure. Now, Israel is set to add another country and acutely suffering civilian population to places it has demolished. As in the past, mass displacement and misery could be precursors to more acute instability in Lebanon. And their effects won’t stop there: Continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon will also worsen the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and force Syrians to make unsafe returns.
Israel cannot bomb its way into security. It can only plunge the region into more protracted, violent instability. With every passing hour, this shifts closer to an eventuality, making an immediate cease-fire both a humanitarian and geopolitical necessity.