In southern Lebanon, mornings no longer begin with the sound of an alarm clock, but with an image.
An image opened in haste on a phone, at its center a red rectangle enclosing the names of towns whose residents know well that seeing them there means hours of fleeing, waiting, and fear. At the top of the image, the phrase “Urgent Warning” dominates the scene in bold lettering, enough on its own to raise anxiety levels inside homes.
From early morning, hands reach for phones. The “X” app first, then the account of the Israeli army spokesperson, Avichay Adraee. Then begins the frantic search through maps, coordinates, and village names.
For residents of the south and the western Bekaa, the war is now measured by the number of warnings in which the Israeli army asks residents to “evacuate villages and towns and move at least one thousand meters away for their safety,” warning that “anyone near Hezbollah elements, its facilities, and its military equipment is putting their life at risk.”
Dozens of southern towns have witnessed, in recent weeks, evacuation warnings and waves of displacement.
Samar, a mother of three living in the Sidon district, says her relationship with her phone has completely changed. It used to be a way to pass time, then gradually turned into something like a mobile alarm system.
“With every notification that reaches my phone, I open it in fear,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady.
“I am not looking for politics or for news. All I am looking for is whether the Israeli army has issued a new warning. I am afraid to see the name of our town,” she adds.
Inside her home, things are no longer arranged as before. Bags are ready for departure. Even the children’s toys no longer return fully to their places, as if the house itself lives with the possibility of leaving.
“We are exhausted. We are just trying to live,” she says in a low voice.
In the south, as in the Bekaa and Beirut’s southern suburbs, people know well how everything changed from the moment rockets began to be launched across the border under the banner of “supporting Iran.” At that point, displacement began, before evacuation warnings started gradually extending from border villages to north of the Litani, then toward north of the Zahrani.
“Abu Ali,” a man in his sixties displaced from Nabatieh to Beirut, says that what exhausts him most is not just displacement, but the feeling that his entire life has become tied to decisions he has no ability to influence. He says: “In the end, we are the ones who lost our homes. We are the ones who left our work and our land.”
In one of Beirut’s cafés, conversation had been about electricity and traffic congestion, before one of those present suddenly whispered, “Adraee posted.”
Within seconds, heads dropped toward phones. No one asked this time about the number of casualties, nor about the location of the strike.
The only question was, “Which towns?” A brief silence prevailed. Then a man in his fifties, displaced from Tyre, said as he slowly extinguished his cigarette, “Every day it gets closer.”
Sometimes, a single image is enough to empty dozens of towns within minutes.
Then everything begins at once: successive phone calls, mothers hastily gathering clothes, men carrying bags, medications, and documents, cars filling the roads, and children asking, “Where are we going now?”
“Abu Hassan,” displaced from the town of Habboush, sits inside a small shop owned by a relative in Beirut, his phone never leaving his hand. Weeks ago, he believed his town was relatively distant from the danger zone. But everything changed on the day of the warning.
He says the news reached him through a WhatsApp group, followed by a series of calls between relatives and neighbors. Within minutes, the calm of the house turned into confused, rapid movement. “I shouted to my wife: get the children ready,” he says.
They began gathering what they could carry: some clothes, medications, identification papers, and phone chargers. His young daughter was crying because she did not understand why she was being asked to leave her room so quickly, while his son moved between rooms in confusion, trying to take things without knowing whether he would need them or see them again.
Outside, cars filled the roads. The sounds of engines mixed with loud phone calls, and the entire village moved at once.
Abu Hassan says the road to Beirut took many hours due to traffic and fear. “No one really knew where they were going,” he says. “Everyone was just fleeing.”
Before the war, Abu Hassan managed a small agricultural season and tried to maintain a stable life despite the economic collapse. Today, he says everything he built over years stopped after a single warning.
In Beirut, a relative received him into a small apartment already crowded with its residents. Within days, rooms filled with bags, mattresses, and exhausted faces. Children sleep pressed together on the floor, while the adults follow the news and maps in heavy silence.
“You feel like you have become a burden even on the people who opened their home to you,” he says quietly. He adds: “But what can we do? We have no home to return to, and nowhere else to go.”
In the capital, the war sometimes appears distant to those watching it on screens. But in neighborhoods that have received thousands of displaced people, the south can be seen in the small details: schools turned into shelters, apartments filled with additional families, and daily congestion growing heavier with each new wave of displacement.
In a small apartment in the Tariq al-Jadideh area, a family of nine has been living in two rooms for months. “Umm Mohammad,” displaced from Tyre, says that the hardest part of displacement is not the fear of bombardment, but the feeling that life itself has become temporary.
“We have started living on edge,” she says as she arranges blankets laid out on the floor. “Even while we are in Beirut, we do not feel safe. Every time a new warning comes out, we feel that the entire south is running here with us.”
She says her children no longer ask when the war will end. Their only question now is, “When will we return home?”
After the announcement of the ceasefire, many families returned to their homes, but they did not return with a sense of stability. They returned with a mixture of fear and apprehensiveness. It’s like they are expecting something bad to happen at any moment.
In Ghazieh, which was previously struck by air raids, a woman who returned with her children after displacement says her children have not regained their normal relationship with the house. “The children are exhausted. And we are even more exhausted,” she says.
Today, those who remain in the south live in a state of waiting. Waiting for the next warning.
The next map. The next town. The most they can hope for is not to find the names of their villages inside the next red rectangle.
The article is a translation of the original Arabic.
