(Tyr) After Israeli strikes on the outskirts of his village in southern Lebanon, Moustafa el-Sayyed, haunted by images of dead children in Gaza, decided to flee with his family.
“What we see on television, the massacres taking place in Gaza, the children, it breaks our hearts,” declares this 53-year-old man, who left with his two wives and 11 children from Beit Lif, a small village located less than six kilometers from the border with Israel.
“If I hadn’t been afraid of this happening to us, I wouldn’t have left my house,” he says.
Mr. Sayyed’s family, almost half of whose children are under 10, are among nearly 4,000 people who have flocked to the city of Tire from border areas, according to local authorities.
About half found shelter in three public schools. The others moved in with relatives or friends.
PHOTO MAHMOUD ZAYYAT, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Moustafa el-Sayyed and his children.
In the courtyard of one of the schools transformed into makeshift shelters, cars carrying mattresses, blankets and food follow one another. Part of the aid is stored, the other distributed by volunteers to the displaced, among their hastily packed belongings.
Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, triggered on October 7 by a deadly and unprecedented attack by the Palestinian movement on Israeli soil, violence has spilled over to the Israeli-Lebanese border.
More than 1,400 people have been killed in Israel, the majority civilians, since the attack according to authorities. In the Gaza Strip, more than 4,380 people, mostly civilians, died in Israeli retaliatory bombings, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
The almost daily exchange of rockets and gunfire between the Israeli army and Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, has emptied villages in southern Lebanon.
At least 23 people, including four civilians, were killed on the Lebanese side, according to an AFP count. At least three people have died in Israel.
Having already lost a brother in the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, Mr. Sayyed does not want to take risks.
“All my children are small, in the event of an apocalypse, how am I going to bring them out at once? “, he declares from a classroom strewn with mattresses. “So I thought it best to leave now. »
” I’d rather die ”
Fears of a conflagration are strong in the border villages, occupied by the Israeli army for 22 years before its withdrawal in 2000.
A steady stream of families, mostly from the shooting-hit village of Aita al-Shaab, queued this week at Tire municipality to secure a place in one of the schools.
“All our shelters are full,” says the mayor of Tyre, Hassan Dbouk. “We are looking for a place to open a fourth reception center. »
In the border town of Dhayra, farms and olive groves were abandoned in the middle of the harvest season.
Lebanese farmers, already hit by an unprecedented economic crisis, are preparing for an uncertain future, even if the fighting were to stop.
“We only have God and agriculture” in Dhayra, says Moussa Souwaid, 47, refugee in the same school as Moustafa el-Sayyed. “I have five sheep, each worth about $500, I left them without food and ran away. »
But above all, Mr. Souwaid had to leave his 88-year-old father behind. “He told me: ‘I would rather die than abandon my house and my cow’.”
Motorcycle, hitchhiking
On motorcycles, by car or by hitchhiking, the villagers tried to reach a safe place.
Yolla Souwaid, no relation to Moussa Souwaid, waited for two hours, bleeding, for her brother to come pick her up after she was injured in an Israeli bombing that destroyed their home in Dhayra last week.
The 43-year-old teacher was running down the stairs when sections of a wall fell on her legs.
“If I had completely lost my legs, what would I have done, who would have taken care of me,” she told AFP in one of the schools in Tyre, both legs bandaged after her operation.
At a nearby school, Ahmad, from Beit Lif, had planned to get married this month.
But the 26-year-old young man, who did not want to give his name, buried his father, who died of cancer, under Israeli bombings before fleeing with his fiancée’s family to Tyre.
Holding back his tears, Ahmad says that his father, just before his death, had gone to his fiancée’s family “to ask her to marry him.” “I smile but deep down I am very sad.”