No cookers, showers or gas – displaced people shelter in Lebanese schools
Al Jazeera
Schools around the country are receiving thousands of people fleeing Israel’s bombardment.
Aley, Lebanon – The traffic in Aley was unusually heavy for 11am on Thursday last week as people from all over southern and eastern Lebanon continued to arrive to escape the intense air attacks by Israel which had continued since Monday.
The shops in the central area of the city were open as usual, but nothing else could be described as “normal”. With the numbers of people on the road, heading towards Aley to seek shelter, what would usually be a 10-minute drive from a nearby village was now taking as long as 40 minutes.
Vans full of people and cars stuffed with personal belongings of all kinds, sometimes strapped to roofs, clogged the narrow streets of the city in Mount Lebanon, which is 20km uphill from Beirut, and usually home to about 100,000 people.
On Monday, September 23, Lebanon had awoken to at least 80,000 messages and phone calls from the Israeli military, calling on residents of southern and eastern Lebanon to immediately evacuate places where, it claimed, Hezbollah stores weapons.
At the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP)’s headquarters in Aley, a day of preparations was already in full swing. Founded in 1949, the Druze party affiliated with the historic landowning Jumblatt family is the primary political force in this area. After the assassination of party founder Kamal Jumblatt in the early years of the Lebanese civil war which lasted from 1975 to 1990, his son Walid Jumblatt took on the leadership, becoming an influential figure in Lebanese politics.
