Lebanese Christians, Caught in Crossfire, Refuse to Leave War Zone

The Washington Post / Abbie Cheeseman, Suzan Haidamous

17:01 JST, October 20, 2024

QLAAYA, Lebanon – The Israeli fighter jet, roaring overhead, unleashed devastation on its nearby target. The blast shook Marita El Hajj’s house and rattled the windows.

The 9-year-old continued to stare straight ahead. Eyes glazed, face impassive, she barely flinched. In this Maronite Christian village less than three miles from the Israeli border, such strikes are now nearly constant.

Through the past year, Marita has physically felt the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah growing more intense. The symptoms of her autism have deteriorated sharply in the past three weeks, her parents said, as the fight around their village has exploded into all-out war.

“We just want peace,” said Marita’s mother, Manal El Hajj. “We do not want this war.”

While much of southern Lebanon falls under the de facto control of Hezbollah, the ancient valleys here hold a scattering of towns and villages that are predominantly Christian, Druze or Sunni Muslim. None of them have rallied to support Hezbollah. Their neutrality largely protected them during the first 11 months of the conflict, but now the war is creeping quickly toward them.

While most residents have evacuated, people in some Christian towns – and their priests – are refusing to leave their homes again.

Their reasons are a kaleidoscope of defiance, resolve and generational trauma. Some say they can’t afford to relocate. Some believe their presence deters attacks on their lands. Some fear they won’t be able to return.

For Robert and Manal El Hajj, Marita’s parents, and many across the country, this war in particular has brought feelings of complete helplessness: Lebanon’s five-year-long economic crisis has left them unable to escape the danger zone of a war they do not even support.

When Israel issued an evacuation notice to Qlaaya this month, Manal said, she collapsed in tears. She wanted to leave, but it’s not an option. The family, already dependent on food aid before the war, simply doesn’t have the money for accommodation elsewhere. Enduring the “humiliation” of staying in a shelter for displaced people in Beirut would worsen Marita’s symptoms tenfold, Manal said. Her eldest daughter, 15, told her it would be better to die at home. The younger children begged to leave the country.

Her voice and hands shaking, she glanced at the TV, with its endless coverage of children in Gaza and Lebanon pulled, lifeless, from the rubble of their former homes, and cried some more. “All I pray for is that nothing happens to my children, that they don’t end up like the kids I see on TV.”

On Monday, the deep thuds of incoming artillery every few minutes reverberated across the steep open valley, punctuated by the periodic thunder of apartment-shaking airstrikes. As the day wore on, the strikes grew closer and louder. The nights, the family said, are hell.

Their top-floor flat looks out over southern Lebanon and northern Israel. “It’s a strategic view,” Robert said, and laughed. From their living room window alone, they see smoke rising from between 10 and 20 airstrikes each day. Waves of rockets, missiles, artillery and machine gun rounds assault an otherwise serene soundscape. On a border so accustomed to violence, some children can discern the difference in sound of incoming and outgoing fire. The force of the blows has broken tiles in their kitchen.

Israeli ground forces have advanced into Lebanon from several directions to fight Hezbollah in villages emptied of people. They have yet to enter any Christian areas, but they can be heard. Vehicle tracks in satellite imagery taken on Sunday, provided by Planet Labs, show evidence that Israeli troops had been in an area just four miles from the El Hajjs’ house.

Each evening, when the bombing grows heavier, volunteers gather to prepare aid packages for the community. On Monday, it was winter clothes. People need the help, organizers said, but it’s also keeping the community together and distracting them from the sound of war being waged just a few miles away.

“If the village is empty and anyone can come and go then it will be even more dangerous for our homes,” said the Rev. Pierre Raï at St George’s Church. “It’s better if we stay here and protect our home or land. Even if we don’t have weapons, we will protect it with our presence.”

But religion offers only thin protection. In Ebel El Saqi, six miles from Qlaaya, the Rev. Gregorius Salloum, a Greek orthodox priest, was mortally wounded in an Israeli airstrike in September. Christian villages that have largely evacuated, such an Ain Ebel, have also been hit hard.

Mass displacement under relentless airstrikes is testing Lebanon’s fragile sectarian balance. The Israeli air force has brought down entire buildings of displaced people in Christian areas to target single Hezbollah targets passing through the area, including in the north of the country.

The Rev. Phillipe Al Akla, an Orthodox priest in Jdeidet Marjayoun, less than three miles from Qlaaya, said a Hezbollah member fired several rounds at him this month after he barred him from sheltering at his church. He escaped unharmed and the man was detained, he said, but a parishioner who witnessed it said one bullet whizzed past his ear.

People here believed the conflict would escalate and stockpiled food. But they fear the coming winter and the security of fuel supplies, particularly if Israeli airstrikes continue cutting roads to and from the villages. If the fighting continues, it could become increasingly difficult to supply these villages with food and fuel, UNICEF spokeswoman Tess Ingram said.

More than 250 people displaced from mixed-religion villages are sheltering in a church in Rmeish, a Christian village that sits on the Israeli border. It’s one of the most difficult populated areas to reach along the border.

As Israeli troops work to clear a stretch of southern Lebanon of Hezbollah and its infrastructure, people in the few largely untouched Christian villages say they quietly fear they could soon be subsumed into a temporary Israeli buffer zone – or another occupation.

Marjayoun has not yet been issued an evacuation warning, but it’s still a ghost town. Only 121 families, most of them just one person, remain, local officials said. Apples have been left on their trees to rot; abandoned cats and dogs roam streets of shuttered businesses. The one event that gets the remaining residents out of their homes is Sunday Mass. Last week, only 40 attended.

Fighter jets roared overhead. Samy Abla, the mukhtar, or local leader, of Jdeidet Marjayoun, opened his windows in case of an explosion. No one here wants to leave their land, not knowing if they will be able to return or what they will return home to, but his ties to his land now run deeper than ever. He pointed to the grave in his backyard. His youngest daughter died of cancer three years ago at 24. “There is a piece of me here,” he said. “How could I leave her?”

For the most part, Abla and Al Akla said, the choice to stay is rooted in history, not money. Marjayoun was the headquarters for the South Lebanon Army, a Christian-led proxy militia armed funded by Israel during its decades-long occupation of southern Lebanon.

When Israeli tanks rolled through those villages in 2006, all but two or three residents fled, Al Akla said. Israeli aircraft attacked the panicked evacuation convoy, killing six people. At the time, then-Mayor Fouad Hamra told The Washington Post he hadn’t left Marjayoun in previous wars and vowed to return. This week, he said the incident has never left him.

If the tanks returned, would he evacuate? He dabbed tears from his eyes. “Never again,” he vowed.