Tripoli, Lebanon – In 1948, Manal Matar’s grandparents fled Akka (Acre) in what was then northern Palestine and crossed into Lebanon. They expected to return, but the borders closed and the family settled in Rashidieh camp, near Tyre. They have lived there ever since.
In the early hours of March 2, Israeli forces began heavy attacks near their home, Manal said. “There was bombing all around us,” she recalled. Her family packed and headed north as explosions echoed, traveling for more than a day before arriving at her maternal aunt’s home in Beddawi refugee camp, in Tripoli.
Manal is one of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon reliving generational displacement. “God protect us that this situation won’t last longer than this,” she said, voice weary. Many know displacement may not be temporary. “God willing, it ends,” she added.
‘New Nakba’
Israel intensified its campaign in Lebanon on March 2 after Hezbollah attacked Israel for the first time in more than a year. Hezbollah said it was responding to the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei just two days earlier in an Israeli strike that it characterised as the start of a US-Israeli war on Iran. A ceasefire in Lebanon had been nominally in effect since November 27, 2024, despite the UN and Lebanese authorities reporting more than 15,000 Israeli ceasefire violations since then, which left hundreds dead.
Israel has issued mass evacuation orders covering more than 14 percent of Lebanon, including south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut known as Dahiyeh. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz warned that those displaced by the fighting “won’t return home” until northern Israel is safe.
Palestinian refugee camps affected include Rashidieh, Burj Shemali and el-Buss in Tyre, and the Beirut camps of Burj al-Barajneh and Shatila. Lebanon’s camps house refugees from the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa, when hundreds of thousands were expelled and villages destroyed. Around 200,000 Palestinian refugees still live in Lebanon, often among the country’s most vulnerable because restrictive employment laws limit job opportunities.
Wartime vulnerability has been magnified by the recent attacks and evacuation orders, which have displaced more than 800,000 people in Lebanon since March 2. Displaced people are staying with relatives, in hotels, or renting apartments; the Ministry of Education has opened schools as temporary shelters. Aid workers and refugees say those centres are prioritising Lebanese, leaving Palestinian refugees, Syrian refugees and foreign domestic workers to find other options.
Yasser Abou Hawash, who has lived near el-Buss camp since the 1960s, fled to a friend’s apartment in Beirut during heavy fighting in 2024 and stayed for two months. As fighting resumed and Israel announced a new ground operation in south Lebanon, he considered leaving Tyre again. “I’m living what my parents lived in 1948,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is a new Nakba, and it repeats every 10 years.”
Generational displacement
Officials in Beddawi said more than 250 Palestinian families have fled there from Beirut or southern Lebanon. Dalal Dawali, born and raised in Beddawi, moved to Dahiyeh with her husband 20 years ago. When the fighting began she took her four children back to her mother’s house in Beddawi; her husband stayed behind. “Every day, we say we want the war to end so we can go home,” she said. Dahiyeh had become her home; she spoke warmly of neighbours and community.
Dalal’s family traces its origins to al-Khalisa in the former Safad governorate, a Palestinian village on the border with Lebanon that was ethnically cleansed; the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona stands on its ruins. Her grandparents fled to Lebanon, her mother was born in Nabatieh camp, and after Nabatieh was destroyed in 1974 Dalal’s mother, Em Ayman, fled to Beddawi. Em Ayman said most of her family were killed in that period. “Now, just like what happened with my family, the same is happening with me,” Dalal said, a map of Palestine on the wall behind her.
The trauma of displacement is widespread among Palestinians in Lebanon. Elia Ayoub, a Lebanese-Palestinian academic and researcher in the UK, told Al Jazeera that many Palestinians view the Nakba not as a single past event but as an ongoing process: the Nakba has been a core component of the Israeli state since its inception, he said.
Israeli troops have returned to southern Lebanese territory repeatedly – with invasions and occupations in 1978, 1982-2000, 2006, 2024 and 2026. Some in the south fear they may not be able to return home this time. For others, like Manal, the situation has become untenable.
“We’ve stopped feeling that we live in security or stability,” she said. “Life is terrifying, honestly. Even before the war, there were assassinations every day on the roads. We no longer feel safe sending our kids to their schools or jobs. We honestly don’t know where the strikes will come from. The situation, especially in the south, is a lot.”
That insecurity has pushed some to consider leaving southern Lebanon. “I was telling my husband, ‘Let’s leave. Let’s find a house somewhere outside the south’,” Manal said. While many Palestinians said they want to return to their homes in Lebanon and hold onto the hope of returning to Palestine, others say recent years have exhausted them and made relocation plausible.
Dalal hopes to return to her home in Dahiyeh one day. Em Ayman, her 68-year-old mother, wept as she spoke: “Our parents were uprooted from Palestine, but we felt that Lebanon was our homeland. All our children live here. But we still need to return to our country, to Palestine.”