BEIRUT, Lebanon — Mariam Allawiya and Kafa Wehbe sit on a sun-drenched balcony, smoking.
They both grew up amid olive groves in southern Lebanon. Allawiya’s son married Wehbe’s daughter. They’re grandmothers now.
But this is not how they expected to grow old: Squatting in a vacant building in central Beirut, displaced many times.
Yet they conjure hospitality for visiting reporters, pull up a donated plastic chair, and unspool the stories of their lives — which also tell the history of southern Lebanon.
“What can I say? It’s all anxiety and war,” Allawiya, 60, says.
She and Wehbe, 67, are among the more than one million people the Lebanese government says have been displaced by Israel’s current invasion, which began last month after Lebanese Hezbollah militants fired rockets into Israel. They said they were retaliating against U.S. and Israeli attacks on their benefactor, Iran, and for 15 months of Israeli attacks on Lebanon that continued after a previous ceasefire in November 2024.
Now, with a fresh ceasefire, both Israel and Hezbollah are warning displaced people not to return south. And Allawiya and Wehbe say they’ll stay put — it’s too dangerous.
This isn’t the first time these grandmothers have had to flee Israeli attacks.
Born in the south, displaced to Beirut, now fleeing again
Allawiya was born in the Lebanese village of Maroun al-Ras, near the Israeli border. Israeli troops invaded in 1982, destroyed her family’s house, and occupied south Lebanon for 18 years after that. The Allawiya family fled north to Beirut, settling in the capital’s southern suburbs with other displaced Shia Muslims.
But they road-tripped home every summer, and rebuilt their house — a labor of love while under occupation, she says.
“Our village, our land, our houses, our trees, our olives, our apples — our soil,” Allawiya says wistfully.
“And also Israeli checkpoints and soldiers!” her friend Wehbe interrupts. “Back then you needed a permit to move around, like in the Palestinian Territories. We don’t want that again!”
“That’s why we support the resistance,” she declares.
By that, she means Hezbollah.
Why these grandmothers support Hezbollah
Hezbollah was founded during that 1982 invasion. Back then, Israel was targeting Palestinian militants. But Hezbollah said it was fighting for the Lebanese, against foreign occupation, and endeared itself to people like Allawiya and Wehbe. It funded the reconstruction of thousands of homes, often with Iranian money. And it celebrated victory when Israeli forces finally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.
“Oh how beautiful that moment was,” Allawiya recalls. “It was perfect.”
But it was fleeting.
The Allawiya family never managed to move home permanently. Israeli troops invaded again, in 2006 and 2024, in pursuit of Hezbollah militants, destroying the Allawiyas’ house each time.
They rebuilt after 2006 but didn’t have a chance to rebuild again, for a third time, before last month’s invasion displaced them again — this time from their apartment in Beirut’s southern suburbs to this vacant building in a central part of the city, which the landlord offered to displaced people. They’ve gone from one temporary home to another.
Not everyone in Lebanon supports Hezbollah. Many blame the group for these successive wars. Wehbe says she worries some of her fellow citizens might give up the south — acquiesce to another era of Israeli occupation — in exchange for a ceasefire.
Despite the current ceasefire, Israel says its troops will continue to hold Lebanese territory south of the country’s Litani River, which runs 10 to 20 miles north of the current border, to create what it calls a buffer zone from which Hezbollah can no longer fire rockets.
“How could the south not be part of Lebanon? It’s on our map!” Wehbe says. “If we could all just stand together, united against Israel, then Israel would leave us alone.”
She believes Hezbollah is her country’s best bet for getting Israeli troops to withdraw, since they did it before, in 2000.
Sheltering with 35 relatives — including a pregnant woman and children
Allawiya, Wehbe and 35 of their relatives are all squatting in this vacant building together. On April 7, they stayed up all night, awaiting the announcement of a ceasefire between the United States and Iran. They trusted early accounts from Pakistani mediators that the deal would include Lebanon, and assumed that would mean Israeli attacks would end and they’d be allowed to go home.
“We were happy! We started cleaning, preparing to leave this place,” Allawiya recalls.
But her hopes were dashed the next morning, on April 8, when Israel struck Lebanon 100 times in 10 minutes — killing more than 350 people, according to Lebanese authorities. Many of the strikes hit central Beirut — shaking the building where the Allawiya and Wehbe families were huddled.
Allawiya says that experience makes her wary of trusting in an Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, announced by President Trump on April 16. As long as it’s described as temporary — for 10 days, rather than permanent — she says it still feels too dangerous to go home.
“To be honest, we don’t feel safe going back,” she says. “The Israelis may break their promise.”
Former neighbors, displaced like them, keep calling. They’re trying to figure out if their homes in Beirut’s suburbs are still standing. The area is home to some of Hezbollah’s offices, and Israeli airstrikes have hit many times.
But it’s not that apartment Allawiya is dreaming of. It’s her family’s previous home in the south, in Maroun al-Ras, which is now under Israeli control yet again. It’s part of the “buffer zone” Israel says it may hold for months, even years.
Dreaming of rebuilding again
One of Allawiya’s tech-savvy kids has made a video of their ancestral home, with a carousel of photos from when it was still standing, set to a ballad written by an Egyptian singer, Sherine, about Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon. It’s called “Lebanon in the Heart.”
In this barren, borrowed, barely furnished apartment, Allawiya hunches over her cell phone, replaying this video over and over.
“Wake up, oh South! The sun is setting,” she mumbles the lyrics to the music. “Lebanon is in the heart.”
The refrain continues: “There is no one but us to protect our homeland.”
This renewed war has interrupted treatment Allawiya had been getting for cancer. One of her daughters-in-law is seven months pregnant. The grandchildren are bouncing off the walls, without school.
They can’t stay in this donated apartment forever. But even with a ceasefire, they don’t know when it’ll be safe to go home.
Copyright 2026 NPR
