In Lebanon, residents fear Hezbollah could be hiding among people displaced by war

BEIRUT — Every evening, from dusk until dawn, a group of guards fan across the predominantly Christian Beirut neighborhood of Ashrafieh.

With nothing more than a flashlight and a baton, they hide in plain sight, under the shadow of a tree or the dark entrance of a boarded-up business, where they're on high alert for anyone who looks out of place.

"We're anxious. We see new people in the neighborhood and we try to check on them, discreetly," says Kamil Helou, who wanders the streets and manages the 20 or so guards on night watch. "You don't know who your new neighbor is; they might be a target."

What he means is: targets for Israeli airstrikes.

Since September, Israel has been tracking down and killing the leaders and fighters of the Iran-backed militant and political group Hezbollah. Civilians have not been spared. Israel's airstrikes have leveled residential buildings, sometimes with no warning, decimated entire towns and villages and forced more than 1.2 million people — mostly from Shia Muslim areas where Hezbollah holds support and sway — to flee their homes.

As the displaced people have settled into new cities, towns and neighborhoods, there's a growing fear from longtime residents that Hezbollah operatives may be hiding among them, and that Israeli airstrikes could soon follow. Lebanon's decades of sectarian strife — that resulted in a civil war from 1975 to 1990, when Christians, Druze and Muslims fought each other in a bitter conflict and led both Syria and Israel to send troops, backing rival militias — have some residents and experts fearing that this displacement could stoke sectarian violence.

"We don't know the men"

The neighborhood watch program in Beirut's affluent district of Ashrafieh was founded a few years ago when Lebanon was mired in a severe economic crisis that endures to this day. The group was formed to quell anxieties among residents worried about the potential for crime. Now, with Israel's war against Hezbollah underway and the demographics of so many neighborhoods changing, the guards are keeping an eye out for more than theft and attempted break-ins.

"The circumstances require our patrols to be more attuned than ever," says Nadim Gemayel, a right-wing member of parliament and a founder of the organization behind the neighborhood watch program. "There is a big fear of Hezbollah members coming and hiding in some apartments, in some houses and we're trying to be available at any time [residents] ask us to check any suspicious activity."

If the guards — many of whom hold day jobs as shopkeepers, teachers, actors — do see something that raises their suspicions, like an unfamiliar car with tinted windows or more people than usual, particularly men, frequenting a residential building, they try to quietly gather information from longtime residents and neighbors before calling the Lebanese Armed Forces, who ultimately take over investigating.

This fear of new neighbors is beginning to fester beyond Ashrafieh and throughout other Christian quarters in Beirut.

"For children and women, we welcome everyone, but we're on high alert for every man coming into our neighborhood," says 24-year-old Elee Jaber, who manages a family-owned bakery in Ein el Remmene, which sits next to Dahieh, a once densely populated Shia neighborhood and Hezbollah stronghold that Israel has been pummeling.

Jaber insists their intention is not to discriminate against anybody, but rather a necessary precaution. "We don't know the men and maybe they are fighters with Hezbollah, so Israel could bomb this building if Hezbollah men are staying in it," Jaber says, while preparing bread orders for customers early one Saturday morning.

For families settling into new neighborhoods, the onus is increasingly on them to prove where they stand.

"A good Shia"

Thirty-three-year-old Ezzat has had no luck finding his family an apartment to rent in Beirut.

His parents fled their home in the predominantly Shia city of Nabatieh in September with only the clothes on their backs. His father didn't even have time to grab his ID as airstrikes rained down on their city, much of which now lies in ruin.

They've been staying at his apartment in Ashrafieh for weeks while Ezzat, a strategist at an advertising agency, scours listings looking for anyone willing to lease a unit to his displaced parents, but it's been tough. He did not want to provide his last name out of fear that doing so would make finding his parents a place to live even more difficult.

"I'll call people and they'll say, 'Oh, we're not renting anymore,' but then I'll call again and start talking in English and then it's a different story," he says, highlighting how any hint of a displaced person looking for a place to stay, even an inquiry in Arabic, is immediately shut down. "If you talk in French or English, it's like 'Oh, he's OK, he's cool, he's a good Shia.' "

Still, with so many displaced people looking for new homes, and with anxieties growing, rents have skyrocketed, leaving families like Ezzat's with few options. He's happy to have his parents stay with him for as long as they need, but it's been hard watching his mother and father go out of their way to make sure their neighbors feel secure. To keep a low profile, they don't invite friends or relatives over even though he knows it would bring them great comfort, and his father, who owned a bookstore in Nabatieh before the war displaced them, never leaves the apartment for fear he'd draw too much attention and be seen as a threat. It has sent him into a deep depression.

Ezzat says he understands where the fear is coming from but wishes the empathy would run both ways.

"In these situations when someone goes to another town or city and then they bomb the building, people get afraid," he says. "I would ask questions as well if someone is coming to my building, because there is a real threat."

It's a threat that some people believe has already materialized in some villages and towns that were not considered to have links or sympathies with Hezbollah but have been hit by Israeli airstrikes after displaced families relocated there. Others see the new targets as something else: an attempt by Israel to sow divisions along sectarian lines and stir up old simmering tensions alongside its campaign to degrade Hezbollah.

Sowing divisions

In a show of solidarity, Hezbollah renewed its rocket attacks on Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas militants attacked several towns in Israel. It triggered a low-scale conflict between Hezbollah and Israel that turned into a full-fledged war in September, when Israel killed Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, sent ground troops into Lebanon, and expanded its airstrikes.

Israel's military at first mostly targeted Lebanon's south, where support for and the presence of Hezbollah are strongest. But as Israel's fight has escalated and airstrikes have expanded, so too have targets outside Shia-dominated areas of the country. Villages in Lebanon's Christian heartland, far from Hezbollah's predominant base of support, have been targeted in recent weeks. Towns with a vibrant Druze community have come under fire. Nowhere, and no one group, feels safe.

Israel's bombing campaign could ignite tensions across Lebanon's kaleidoscope of communities, and that, says Amal Saad, a lecturer on politics at Cardiff University in Wales who is a leading expert on Hezbollah, may be the point.

"There has been an upsurge of tensions and that has been primarily the work of Israel's bombing campaign, which has targeted not just Shia areas, but also mixed areas throughout Lebanon, thereby making many people that belong to other sects wary of Shia displaced in their midst," Saad says.

Last month, in a video speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Lebanon's main religious groups and called on them to turn against Hezbollah.

"Christian, Druze, Muslims — Sunni and Shia — all of you are suffering because of Hezbollah's futile war against Israel," he said. "Stand up and take your country back."

Netanyahu's messaging — alongside Israel's pattern of airstrikes across Lebanon, which have so far killed more than 3,100 people and injured more than 14,000 others since October of last year, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry — has some wondering if the toll in Lebanon is on track to match that of Israel's war in Gaza. Israel's military offensive in Gaza has killed more than 43,000 people in the same period, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.

The mounting casualties have also prompted questions about whether degrading and eliminating groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are the Israeli government's only goals.

"Israel's strategy has been one of, I would say, attempted ethnic cleansing of the Shia community," says Saad. "Its destruction is on such a vast scale that it's very clear this has very little to do with dismantling Hezbollah's military infrastructure and a lot more to do with ensuring these towns and villages are uninhabitable, preventing the Shia from returning there."

Israel has accused Hezbollah of using ordinary houses for weapons storage. It says the aim of its offensive is to drive Hezbollah back from the border and stop it from firing missiles across the border. In a statement to NPR, the Israeli military said it "makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes," and called the claims of ethnic cleansing "ridiculous," adding that Israel's military is "fully committed to respecting all applicable international legal obligations."

In a country where memories of the brutal civil war are still vivid and the eventual reconciliation among groups remains fragile, it may not take much to trigger tensions between religious groups. Lebanon has avoided a national census for nearly a century to avoid reviving a sectarian conflict.

But those who lived through the civil war are not so sure the writing is on the wall this time.

"There is an awareness and a will among the people that they don't want to go back to this type of conflict," says Gemayel, one of the founding members of the neighborhood watch group and whose family played a part in Lebanon's civil war. His father, Bashir Gemayel, led the Lebanese Forces, the country's main Christian militia in the 1980s that was an ally of Israel's. That alliance cost him his life. Soon after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the elder Gemayel was elected president and then assassinated weeks later by a fellow Maronite Christian in the very same neighborhood that the night guards now patrol.

While Nadim Gemayel doesn't believe Lebanon will repeat its past, he does think this is the moment to bring Hezbollah in line with other civil war-era militant groups that gave up their arms at the end of the war as part of the 1989 Taif Agreement.

For others, after a year of tremendous losses, Hezbollah is intolerable in any form.

"[Former Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah took us to this war without even asking us. He didn't even have the idea to build shelters in case of war," says Akram Nehme, another founding member of the neighborhood watch. "Now we are the collateral damage. Our country is below zero, the economy is below zero, all the villages of the south are destroyed, the suburbs of Beirut are destroyed, there is no economy, nothing. This doesn't mean I'm a Zionist or with Israel, I want a Lebanon that looks like me, like my culture and I don't want anybody to tell me how to live."

But the way Israel is waging its war in Lebanon — and in Gaza — says Saad, suggests chances of a permanently diminished Hezbollah may be slim.

"If there was a very low possibility of that happening before this war, there is zero possibility of that happening after this war," Saad says. "This war has not only proved to Hezbollah and its constituency that Israel — and the U.S. backing it — has expansionist designs on not just Gaza and the Palestinian occupied territories, but also on Lebanon."