Families and MSF staff Struggle in Southern Lebanon’s Shadow of War
Israeli airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs and southern Lebanon are escalating, causing deaths, injuries, and mass displacement. After 15 months of an ineffective ceasefire, civilians are again being forced to flee with few safe options. In response, MSF has launched a nationwide emergency operation, providing mobile care, relief supplies, and support to hospitals and shelters.
In the Chouf district near southern Lebanon, where thousands of families have sought refuge, MSF has set up emergency mobile-clinic activities and is supporting shelters to help address urgent health and basic needs. Many of the families we meet there—especially mothers and children—have been displaced time and time again, carrying exhaustion and fear on top of immediate medical needs. Below are their stories.
Testamonials from children, staff and families caught in crisis
Lebanon, Anout, 2026. Ali (12 yrs old), sits in a clinic founded by Msf in Chouf district.
He fled from Ebba, in the district of Nabatiyeh, with his mother Khadija, father, and sister Sanaa, 8, at around 3 a.m. on Monday March 2nd, as Israeli air strikes began.
In the darkness, the roads were choked with cars and the thuds of airstrikes. What should have been a short route to safety turned into hours, fear rising each time the night lit up in the distance. By noon, they reached Anout in the Chouf district, exhausted, hungry, and unsure of what would come next.
They headed to a school that had been designated as a collective shelter, but when they arrived, the doors were still closed. So, they waited outside until 5 p.m., sitting close to other families doing the same. When the shelter finally opened, the reality inside was overwhelming: three families, up to 17 people, sharing a single room. Khadija tried to imagine her children sleeping there, living there, trying to be children there. She couldn’t.
They left.
That night, they found a makeshift alternative: a repurposed metal container, acting as a shed inside a plant nursery. A small space where they could at least exhale. Her husband started working there too, taking jobs on a truck when he could, trying to keep the family afloat day by day.
Life inside the container is a constant negotiation with scarcity. They carry water into the room in jugs to wash and clean. At night, they rely on a small battery light or candles. The simplest routines—bathing, cooking, sleeping—take more effort than they ever used to. And nothing feels temporary anymore.
The children are not in school. Ali, 12, is restless—full of energy with nowhere for it to go. His mother calls him “hyperactive,” but what she sees most is a boy who used to have structure, friends, and a normal day, and now has only waiting.
Sanaa, 8, speaks about school like it is a place that still exists somewhere, untouched. She misses her pink-and-blue Barbie desk. She misses P.E. the most: running, moving, laughing. Her favourite sport is basketball. Now, when she hears airstrikes, her body tenses. Her mother says she picks at her nails until the skin around them breaks.
Khadija is trying to hold everyone together while she is also running out of strength. Her husband is diabetic. She herself takes chronic medication for a nervous condition that began after two years of stress—stress that started with the war and only deepened with displacement. “I don’t know where to go in case my condition worsens.”
Nonetheles,she smiles and thanks God often, quick to make whoever in front of her feel at ease, but exhaustion haunts her eyes, and the fear seems to have settled in her chest permanently.
Their larger family is scattered across the country: relatives displaced in Saida, Barja, Beirut. Everyone is somewhere else, and no one is truly safe. Khadija says it feels like Lebanon has become a map of temporary stops.
Still, each morning, she wakes up and does what mothers do: she checks on her children, counts what they have left, plans the day around what’s missing. Inside the container, you can tell someone has been trying to make a home. The clean swept floor.. The wood-burning heater.. clothes folded neatly in the corner... Every part tells the story of a container fighting against its reality and a mother trying to make the container feel less cold. She tries to sound calm when she tells them they will be okay.
And in the quiet moments, when the candles are out, Khadija holds onto the smallest hope: that her children will return to a classroom, that her husband will have his medicine, that her family will be together again, and that one day, ‘home’ will go back to meaning something more than a place to hide.
Displaced and Waiting for Treatment
For months, his life has been organised around chemotherapy appointments at Bahman Hospital, one of the hospitals in Beirut’s southern suburbs that is under forced displacement orders by Israel and has since been evacuated. Now, what used to be guranteed has become an unanswered question: where can he continue treatment?
He is originally from Khirbit Silim in southern Lebanon and used to live in the southern suburb of Beirut. Years ago, he worked in a hotel and earned a steady living, until a road accident left him with a leg disability. Since then, even walking has become a daily struggle... one that takes time, effort, and pain.
For a long time, he says, hardship was something he could still survive with the people around him. He and his 33-year-old sister lived alone, relying on each other and on the community who helped them with what they couldn’t manage by themselves. “We used to live well enough,” he says quietly. “People never left us.”
But now, the people who once formed their safety net are displaced themselves, scattered and struggling to meet their own needs.
Mohammad and sister left their home in Beirut’s southern suburbs and now sleep in a park in an area called Al Khandaq. Every day, they walk to a nearby mosque to wash and shower.
“I had hope that I almost beat cancer,” he tells me avidly, with a tremor that never seems to leave his body. “I just need to get my medication, and I will be better.”
