Ahmed Issa and his family spent 20 hours on the road from southern Lebanon, most of it stuck sweating in bumper-to-bumper traffic, before reaching a shelter in Beirut on Tuesday afternoon. Already, he was looking for another place to go.
The shelter itself wasn’t so bad — he was grateful for the warm welcome from the volunteers running it and the water they handed out — but with every plane that flew overhead, to or from the nearby airport, the children panicked. Was it another missile?
“Even the sounds of regular planes freak out the kids,” said Mr. Issa, 33, holding his 3-year-old with one arm and pointing to a passenger jet overhead with the other. “That’s the reason we’re trying to get to another place.”
They had been sitting together on Monday afternoon at their farmhouse in Majidieh, a small village in green, fertile south Lebanon, when an Israeli missile struck close enough to see and hear, he said. They quickly dressed to leave, piled into the taxicab that Mr. Issa drives to make ends meet and joined the masses of cars heading toward Beirut, a journey that would normally take about two hours.
They were just a few of what Lebanon’s foreign minister has said are the half-million Lebanese displaced by Israeli airstrikes. About 400 people had come to this school-turned-shelter in the Bir Hassan neighborhood after it opened on Monday afternoon, and more were still coming through the gate, only to be turned away.
The government has designated 42 buildings as shelters, while other, private shelters have sprung up ad hoc. But after years of political and economic crisis, the country is badly equipped for this latest one and the many thousands of people fleeing to Beirut. Because the government did not provide supplies or staff, it fell to local aid groups, individual donors and volunteers affiliated with political parties to run the shelters and stock them with mattresses, bedding, food, water and medicine.
Mr. Issa’s family, like most of those fleeing, found a place to go through word of mouth and lists of shelters circulating on WhatsApp. All told, 60 members of their extended family had taken shelter in Beirut.
But Mr. Issa’s father stayed behind to take care of the house, cattle and farm, the work of 35 years.
“I’m so worried about my husband, but what can we do?” said Zeinab Awada, 60, Mr. Issa’s mother, who sat on a bench in the same clothes she was wearing when she left home, sat in traffic, slept in the car and trudged into the shelter.
Ms. Awada wiped tears from her eyes with her veil. “We couldn’t bring anything with us,” she said. “We barely managed to get dressed and get in the car and get out of there. We’ve lost everything, and now we’re homeless.”
At the shelter, there was nowhere to shower. They had been given a few thin mattresses to sleep on among the wooden desks in a classroom, and there was bread and water in the courtyard downstairs. Wires once used for hanging student artwork had been repurposed as laundry lines for the displaced.
Young men on motorbikes soon zoomed through the gate, shouting, waving and hauling black garbage bags full of snacks and other donations into the courtyard — not much, but something.
Mr. Issa said he was grateful for the help. But what comforted him more than material support, he said, was knowing that someone — what he called “the resistance,” meaning Hezbollah — was fighting for the south. It wasn’t like in the past, he said, before Hezbollah grew into a force to be reckoned with and “Israel could just march into Lebanon and no one could say anything.”
Now it was different. “Someone is defending you and your land. You’re not just pushed aside,” he said. “I left my village and my house, I left my father there, but I still feel empowered.”
He acknowledged that there was a price for such a defense. His family was homeless, their neighbor in Majidieh perhaps dead. They had not heard from him since Monday, when they said they saw four missiles strike near his house.
Others in Lebanon blamed Hezbollah for bringing such destruction to Lebanon. But Mr. Issa said it was Israel’s aggression that had caused all of this.
“People think we in the south just love death and war and blood. That’s wrong. We love life,” he said. “But at the end of the day, this is the reality forced on all of us.”
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