In a run-down Palestinian refugee camp near Beirut, Hayat Chehadeh wrings her hands as she watches the war between Israel and Hamas on television: her daughter, who is in Gaza, hasn’t spoken to her in a week.
“I can’t sleep. I get up at three in the morning (…) and watch TV,” says this slim 69-year-old woman in her dark apartment in the Bourj Barajneh camp.
“Sometimes she texts me: ‘I’m fine.’ “That’s it” because she can’t charge her phone battery, she adds, as one of her grandchildren plays with a Palestinian flag on the floor.
She tries to remain calm by saying that her daughter has decided to separate her three children and divide them among different family members.
“She cried, she said ‘I’m separating the children’ (…) so that if one dies, another stays alive,” says Hayat Chehadeh.
In the camp’s alleys, portraits of historic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat adorn the walls, sometimes alongside slogans glorifying the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the Hamas attack on Israeli soil that sparked the war.
According to Israeli authorities, the attack on October 7 killed 1,200 people, the vast majority civilians. According to the Hamas Health Ministry, retaliatory attacks in the Gaza Strip killed 12,000 people, mostly civilians, including 5,000 children.
The small Palestinian territory, which has been under a “total siege” by Israel and a spate of bombings since October 9, lacks water, electricity, food and medicine.
Communication is interrupted because there is no fuel to run the generators.
More than 1.5 million people, more than half of Gaza’s population, have been displaced by the war, according to the United Nations, which warned of an “imminent threat of famine.”
“We are okay”
Hayat Chehadeh explains that her daughter, in her 30s, lived in Lebanon, but a few months ago “her husband came and took her” to Gaza.
“She’s moving (…) I don’t know where she is now,” she adds, asking not to identify the young woman by her name.
She just wants a short message from him: “We’re fine,” she says.
The family of Hayat Chehadeh, survivors of the “Nakba,” the “catastrophe” that marked the founding of Israel for the Arabs and the exodus of more than 760,000 Palestinians, fled to Lebanon in 1948.
She says her parents feared for her life, especially after the Deir Yassine massacre, in which Jewish paramilitary groups killed more than a hundred villagers in April 1948.
She herself was born in the Bourj Barajneh camp, which was partially destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and then besieged by militias during the civil war in the mid-1980s.
According to the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), around 250,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon.
“Nothing”
61-year-old Fatima al-Ashwah also stares at the television in her cramped apartment in the camp and prays that her family members in Gaza are not among the victims rescued from the rubble. She hopes to see them in the pictures of the displaced people in the emergency shelters.
She also comes from the Acre region and says she has around 70 relatives in Gaza, including her cousins and their families.
They lived in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, whose residents were called by the Israeli army to evacuate. Today “their houses no longer exist (…) because they are on the front lines. There is nothing left.”
Fatima al-Ashwah’s relatives fled from place to place, some finding refuge in schools near the Rafah border crossing into Egypt in the south.
She said she heard the bombs during the brief calls she received from them. His relatives told him: “We are hungry, we are afraid, the children are afraid.”
“The situation is heartbreaking,” she adds.
Holding back tears, she recounts going to Gaza last July, where her family greeted her and another relative at the Rafah border crossing with drums and dancing.
“God willing, this will all end and Gaza will be as it was,” she says.