When 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in the port of Beirut it launched 75-year-old Georges Abi Khalil from his bed. At least 220 people were killed and more than 7,000 wounded in the explosion on 4 August 2020 that blew out the doors and windows of Abi Khalil’s one-bedroom apartment and caused $4bn of damage throughout the city.
Sitting in the same apartment, four years later, Abi Khalil and his 69-year-old wife, Afaf, recall how their church and local charities assisted in the aftermath. “You wouldn’t believe how many people came out to help us,” says Abi Khalil.
As with many others in Beirut, they had already been financially wiped out the previous year, victims of the 2019 economic crisis that erased their life savings. With the crisis entering its fifth year, the couple still need support, but any government and charitable assistance available then has all but dried up.
Abi Khalil is interrupted by two loud bangs: sonic booms caused by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jets buzzing the city at low altitude. The IDF flyovers have been increasing over the past week following Hezbollah’s promise of “rage and revenge” in retaliation for two Israeli assassinations. Afaf gasps, briefly mistaking the noise for the opening blows of a full-scale war that the Lebanese government says could displace a quarter of the population. “We’re so tired,” says Afaf. “We can’t handle a war.”
According to a World Bank report, 44% of Lebanese people live in poverty, triple that of 10 years ago. Georges and Afaf receive no pension and no welfare. A local charity, Loubnaniyoun, pays for their medication and brings them one hot meal a day. However, the charity can now only support 50 vulnerable families in Lebanon as its funding has declined by 50% in the past year due to donor fatigue.
In March 2023, the International Monetary Fund warned of Lebanon becoming mired in “a never-ending crisis”. The Lebanese pound has lost 98% of its value since 2019, public-sector salaries have been slashed, and the dollarised economy is struggling with 40% inflation.
In the face of possible war, Nasser Yassin, the environment minister, says that authorities are “very stretched, underpaid, and have a lot of challenges”.
When Hezbollah and Israel began exchanging daily missile attacks at the border in October, Yassin was charged with coordinating a government contingency plan in case the conflict escalated. It projected between 1.2 million and 1.5 million people becoming displaced and requiring “food assistance, shelter management, water and sanitation assistance”, he says.
The projections are modelled on the outcomes of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, but Yassin says that a war now could have an even greater impact. “People had money in the banks in 2006,” he says. “They could withdraw a couple of thousand dollars and rent a place for a couple of months.” If war breaks out now, he projects more than a million people will require temporary accommodation in repurposed school buildings.
Compared with 2006, “the preparedness for war is very low”, says Sami Zoughaib, an economist at the Policy Initiative, a local thinktank. Deep in debt and unable to borrow more money, the government’s annual budget has been cut by about 80% compared with pre-crisis levels.
Zoughaib believes that war would severely impact trade links for an economy desperately dependent on imports. The resulting shortage would probably lead to a spike in prices for even basic goods, including water and medicine, making life yet more intolerable for the country’s poorest.
“We already see this happening,” says Zoughaib, referring to the roughly 100,000 people forced to leave their homes in the south due to the fighting. “A lot of landlords that are renting out houses to the displaced have begun asking for incredibly high rents.”
Lebanese officials say that current food supplies are enough to last four months. Fuel, on the other hand, is measured in weeks, says Yassin. Lebanon already experiences daily blackouts. Georges and Afaf say they have gone without municipal electricity for the last five days, relying instead on expensive neighbourhood generators. The contingency plan prioritises fuel supplies for strategic industries, such as bakeries and water-pumping stations, increasing power outages for ordinary citizens.
Last week, the World Health Organization sent 32 tonnes of medical equipment, including 1,000 trauma kits to treat war injuries. Public health minister Firass Abiad pushes back on suggestions that the country is woefully undersupplied for a war, but admits that the ministry is working within a “low-resource environment”. Large numbers of trained medical staff have left Lebanon since the crisis. Those who stayed have had to accept big salary cuts.
Abiad says that the ministry benefits from the institutional knowledge it has gained through decades of crisis management, but adds that “my major concern is the mental wellbeing of the population” after the manifold crises of the past five years.
“Unfortunately, this is bearing a lot on the mental wellbeing of our community and the refugee community,” he says. “I think that going through another crisis might result in wounds and scars more serious than any physical scars you could imagine.”
• This article was amended on 14 August 2024. An earlier version of the caption on the top image said that the explosion took place in 2024, instead of 2020.
