“They said they had targeted a Hezbollah leader. There were people from the south who had just arrived, but all we saw were civilians pulled from the rubble. It’s a massacre.” Mohamed Hachem, a shopkeeper, doesn’t hide his anger, tinged with despair.

He was speaking from Basta, a mixed Sunni and Shiite working-class district of Beirut, on October 11, the day after an Israeli strike killed 22 people. Among them were 10 displaced Shiite people, who had come from the south of the country. A few steps away, on the ruins of two buildings flattened by the explosion, a group of young people planted a black banner, pledging their loyalty to the resistance.

The expansion of Israeli bombardments, now aimed at Sunni, Christian and Druze-inhabited areas of the greater Beirut area, has sparked fears among their inhabitants of being targeted because of the presence of displaced Shiite people. In the space of a year, almost 1.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes. This has accelerated since the Israeli bombings intensified three weeks ago.

In Beirut, rumors of displaced people occupying buildings, unauthorized, have proliferated across social media – to the extent that the caretaker interior minister, Bassam Mawlawi, stated on October 10 that law enforcement agencies would not tolerate any trespassing on private property. The previous day, police had cleared away tents and makeshift shelters set up on Beirut’s corniche, provoking a scuffle.

On Saturday, October 12, several families hailing from the town of Nabatieh, in the south of the country, which has been battered by the Israeli army, once again set up their tents on the seafront. From the Zaytouna marina to the Manara lighthouse, at the other end of the waterfront, the restaurants and cafés lining the coast have fallen silent – most of them closed. “It’s a disaster,” said the manager of a one fashionable establishment in Zaytouna. “From 700 covers a day, we’ve dropped to 70 since the war. Some of our customers are afraid to come because of the displaced people,” he added.

‘We’re all tired’

“The bombs were already flying here when I was 10 years old, in 1982, during the Israeli invasion,” recalled Naïm, 52, near Hamra Street in the west of the city. The Hamra district was the commercial and cultural heart of Beirut in the 1960s and 70s, but fell into decline during the civil war. Rehabilitated in the 1990s, it declined again after the 2019 financial collapse. The record store owner, who has lived in the neighborhood since he was a boy, has seen people displaced by this latest war flock to the district since late September. “It’s a mixed neighborhood, with Sunnis, Shiites, Christians. A little village. For the past few weeks, there have been displaced people everywhere,” he observed, pointing to an apartment building on Abdelbaki street, in which dozens of families were squatting.

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