At the school in Sour, where displaced people from South Lebanon have found refuge for a year. (Credit: João Sousa/OLJ)
If they had held on away from their land for nearly a year, it was thanks to a tenuous but resilient hope that they could soon return to the border villages they had fled after the fighting began between Hezbollah and Israel on Oct. 8, 2023. From a school converted into a reception center in Sour, a rented apartment in the governorate of Nabatieh, or an abandoned hotel in the heights of Saida, a handful of the approximately 100,000 displaced individuals from South Lebanon returned in early Sept., reminiscing with melancholy to L’OLJ about the beauty of their abandoned orchards in Kfar Kila, Taybeh, or Beit Lif, and the bitterness of a life now amputated.However, with the start of the large-scale Israeli offensive in Lebanon on Sept. 23, most of them had to take the path of exile again, this time drowned among hundreds of thousands of...
If they had held on away from their land for nearly a year, it was thanks to a tenuous but resilient hope that they could soon return to the border villages they had fled after the fighting began between Hezbollah and Israel on Oct. 8, 2023. From a school converted into a reception center in Sour, a rented apartment in the governorate of Nabatieh, or an abandoned hotel in the heights of Saida, a handful of the approximately 100,000 displaced individuals from South Lebanon returned in early Sept., reminiscing with melancholy to L’OLJ about the beauty of their abandoned orchards in Kfar Kila, Taybeh, or Beit Lif, and the bitterness of a life now amputated.However, with the start of the large-scale Israeli offensive in Lebanon on Sept. 23, most of them had to take the path of exile again, this time drowned among hundreds of thousands of...
