Stay or flee? South Lebanese villagers’ dilemma as Israel expands bombardment

Communities neighbouring Jouaiya are regularly attacked as Israel-Hezbollah conflict worsens

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Ziad, his wife Hiba and their three children spend much of their day glued to the news at their home in Jouaiya, a Lebanese village just 15km from the volatile border with Israel.

They watch reports of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, protests in Tel Aviv, and of the war being waged across the Lebanon-Israel border.

“It will come to us, I feel it will come to us,” says the couple’s eldest child, 23-year-old Helena, with a nervous laugh.

“They are scared,” says Hiba of her three girls, and Helena “is always preparing her bag to go”.

Seven-year-old Elen, Hiba’s youngest, “cries any time she hears something”, she says.

“At night when they are sleeping, they hear the sounds. Boom, boom, boom. The houses shakes.”

So far, Jouaiya, a bastion of support for Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, has been largely spared in Israel’s intense and daily bombardment of southern Lebanon.

But surrounding villages have been hit regularly and the sounds of war have become a constant as the conflict intensifies and expands from the immediate border area.

When media travelled along a nearby road on Sunday it was quiet. But 24 hours later an Israeli attack on the same stretch killed a Hezbollah commander in his car.

As the conflict expands, the key question facing the residents of Jouaiya becomes more urgent – should they stay or should they go?

“If its gets worse then we will leave [for Beirut],” says Ziad, 52.

“If they start bombing Jouaiya, if they start killing civilians, of course we will leave,” he adds, listing all the neighbouring villages that have been hit.

The family describe an almost predictable routine: from 6am until around 10 or 11am things are quiet, then typically the exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah start again.

“It’s very bad and getting worse and worse. We are always watching the news,” Hiba says.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears on the TV screen, the conversation turns to the contrasting stance of the West; supporting and arming Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion, but doing little to stop Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza.

As the spokesman for Yemen’s Houthis appears on screen, the family say they did not know who Hamas spokesman Abu Obaida or Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Hamza were before the Gaza war, but now they do.

Throughout the village, famed for its olives and surrounded by rolling green hills, the situation is the same – all everyone talks about is the war.