BEIRUT/LONDON: Mahmoud Sarhan has been displaced five times since the Israel-Hezbollah war began on March 2. Now sheltering in the Beirut neighborhood of Tariq El-Jdideh, the 67-year-old hopes one day to return to his hometown of Kfar Kila in southern Lebanon.
Kfar Kila is just 150 meters from the Blue Line, the UN-drawn boundary demarcating Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. Sarhan first fled to another part of the south before Israeli military evacuation orders pushed him north to the capital.
“There is nowhere else to go,” he told Arab News. “But I haven’t yet lost hope of returning.”
Israel’s military campaign in southern Lebanon was launched after Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel on March 2 in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes on Iran. In the weeks since then, more than 1.1 million people have been displaced, according to UN figures.
Israel said it was creating a buffer zone to allow residents displaced from northern Israel by Hezbollah rockets to return safely.
But for the Lebanese families displaced from this planned buffer zone, the pull of home runs deep.
Sarhan studied civil engineering in the US but chose to return to Kfar Kila to work in agriculture, underscoring his deep-rooted commitment to his community and identity, spanning generations.
“My grandfather was taken by the Ottoman army at the beginning of last century to Yemen, but he walked back to Kfar Kila,” Sarhan said. “We are like the roots of an oak tree, we do not wither. There is nothing left for us to lose.”
This latest displacement, however, may be different. The Lebanese government is preparing for the possibility that it could become permanent.
“Long-term displacement is something we are concerned about, of course,” Haneen Sayed, Lebanon’s social affairs minister, told Reuters on March 31. “We hope it does not happen, but as a government, we have to prepare and think about it.”
Displaced women clean outside their tents at an unofficial camp erected along Beirut's seafront area during a sandstorm on April 3, 2026. (AFP)
She said the government was considering its options, including cash-for-rent programs and “physical places where people might go,” but was not planning to construct camps at this stage.
“It all depends on how much of a land grab the Israelis will insist on and of course it’s totally unacceptable for us,” she said. “This is a huge violation of our sovereignty and we will do everything we can to ensure that this doesn’t happen, whatever we have in our means.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that all homes in Lebanese villages near the border “will be destroyed, in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza,” in order “to remove, once and for all, the threats near the border.”
The Israeli military “will establish a security zone inside Lebanon … and will maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani River,” The Times of Israel quoted him as saying.
Katz said also that Israel would bar the return of “more than 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon” to areas south of the Litani, “until the safety and security of northern Israeli residents is ensured.”
On April 8, Hezbollah urged displaced families not to return to “targeted villages, towns and areas in the south, the Bekaa and the southern suburbs of Beirut before the official and final ceasefire declaration is issued.”
But the prospects for peace remain distant. Although direct Lebanon-Israel talks began in Washington on Tuesday — the first of their kind since 1993 — Israel said it would not discuss a ceasefire with Hezbollah.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (C) speaks during a meeting with Lebanon's Ambassador Nada Hamadeh Moawad (2R) and Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter (2L) at the State Department in Washington, DC, on April 14, 2026. (AFP)
Hezbollah, meanwhile, urged the Lebanese government to withdraw from the talks, which its chief Naim Qassem described as futile.
Since the US and Iran announced a truce on April 8, Israel has intensified its attacks on Lebanon, killing at least 2,100 people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Aid agencies are also concerned about prolonged displacement in Lebanon. Amy Pope, head of the International Organization for Migration, said the prospects for extended mass displacement were “very alarming.”
“There are parts of the south that are being completely flattened,” she told news agency Agence France-Presse on April 2. “Even if the war ends tomorrow, that destruction remains and there needs to be a rebuilding.”
Reconstruction would require funding, resources and peace, she said.
“Unless we start to see those things come into place … people will be displaced now for who knows how long.”
First responders carry a body into an ambulance at the site of an Israeli airstrike in the southern Lebanese village of Abbasiyeh, on the outskirts of Tyre, on April 15, 2026.
Lebanese authorities said that more than 136,000 people were living in collective shelters, including schools and stadiums, while others were staying with relatives or sleeping in the open air. More than 200,000 people, mostly Syrians, have crossed into the Syrian Arab Republic.
“A cycle of coercive displacement is unfolding,” warned Tom Fletcher, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator.
Pope said the current displacement crisis was “far more severe” than during the previous Israel-Hezbollah war, which ended with a fragile ceasefire in November 2024.
The scale of destruction makes the question of return not just political, but existential.
Tarek Mazraani, head of the Association of Residents from Southern Border Towns and a native of the border village of Houla, believes that even those who insist on staying in their homes will eventually be forced out.
“Some southerners who have clung to staying in their villages, particularly Christian and Druze villages, despite the warnings may be forced to flee as well,” he told Arab News.
“There are no medicines, no hospitals, no food supplies and bridges have been destroyed, movement is blocked by fire and even paramedics are being targeted.”
Yet Mazraani and others from the south have said that people would return once the fighting stops, even to scorched land. Once safety seemed possible, he said, “they will return, even if they pitch a tent next to their destroyed home.”
But that optimism has limits.
“Villages need decades to be rebuilt, assuming sustainable peaceful solutions are reached,” Mazraani said.
“Emotionally, yes, we want to return but practically, that enthusiasm has faded. How can I return when I see Israel actively seeking expansion and the UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon) forces set to depart soon?
“What guarantees do I have to go back and rebuild what was destroyed? Does the Lebanese army have the capacity to protect me?”
Those questions carry added weight given the scale of destruction left behind, with entire villages demolished.
Dr. Ali Faour, head of the Center for Population and Development and a member of Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research, has pushed back on Israel’s assumption that southerners will not return.
“They operate under the banner of emptying the south and this has been going on since 1978. Yet every time the war stops, southerners return to their villages,” he told Arab News.
“The reason is people’s deep bond with the land.”
Hassan El-Rashidi, president of the Sidon-based Education Planet Association, shares that conviction.
Once a ceasefire was declared, “many families will go back to their villages, even if it means living in tents amid ruin, simply to stand again on their own land,” he told Arab News.
“Their ties to the land are unbreakable. These are the people of the south — farmers, families and workers whose lives have always revolved around the soil beneath them.
“Throughout history, wars have swept through the southern region, displacing its people time and again, yet never before has the devastation been so vast,” he said.
“However, the connection between southerners and their land runs deep. Even those who build their lives in Beirut often return to their villages every weekend, cherishing every chance to be close to home.”
That attachment resonates among those who have been displaced. Jawad, who has been repeatedly uprooted from his village, described the experience as “the most painful thing.”
“It’s never easy, but as always, we’ve learned to hold on to even the tiniest fragment of hope,” he told Arab News.
“This time, the hope may be fainter but it’s still there. Justice doesn’t vanish. One day, it finds its way to us. And when there are people still demanding that right, it won’t die.”
Still, he conceded that this latest displacement felt different. “Things have become too unpredictable: the aggression, the enemy’s attacks, the way everything unfolds,” he said.
Social worker Salah Eddine Agha drew a sharp contrast between recent events and the previous conflict. Unlike in 2024, he said, the displaced were unlikely to return immediately after a ceasefire “given the scorched-earth tactics and indiscriminate shelling carried out by Israel.”
“I remember in 2024, once the ceasefire was announced at 4-5 a.m. people were already on their way back to their homes, villages and lands out of love for their place and a deep desire to rebuild their houses,” he told Arab News.
Today, the picture is starkly different. “Some of the main roads leading to Sidon and the southern villages have been bombed and others connecting towns have also been hit,” Agha said.
“We’ll have to wait for the Lebanese state, or international or Gulf support, to help repair those roads and make them safe for people to return.
“Those who lost their homes near the border or in southern towns won’t be able to return until prepared shelters and rebuilt houses are available so they can live again with dignity, under a roof, with daily access to food and water.”
Israeli airstrikes in March destroyed two bridges over the Litani linking southern Lebanon with the rest of the country. Rights groups fear Israel is trying to isolate the region.
Faour said the prolonged displacement would have lasting demographic consequences.
“Villages subjected to continuous forced displacement suffer human losses, the majority of whom are young people and heads of households,” he said.
“There is a significant increase in the number of widows, which means a drop in birth rates, a decline in the labor force and the compulsion to emigrate.
“This is precisely what Israel intends: reducing the demographic fabric and creating fractures in Lebanon’s population structure while accelerating aging.”
He warned that in the absence of comprehensive policies, “the continuation of these dynamics could deepen social divisions and structural fragility,” and that “managing displacement in Lebanon is a decisive test of the state and society’s capacity to contain a complex crisis before chaos sets in.”
Addressing displacement could not remain merely within the framework of emergency response, he said.
“It requires transitioning to the management of a long-term structural crisis, including developing flexible temporary housing policies, equitable geographic distribution, providing full support for host communities and early planning for housing solutions before camps become permanent entities.”
But as officials sound alarms, Lebanon and Israel hold talks and the bombardment continues, more than a million people remain in limbo, displaced, uncertain and deprived of the ability to imagine a better future.
