Loss is not new to Hiba. In August 2020, the Beirut port explosion destroyed much of the building where she lived. She persevered and rebuilt her life in another part of the city.
Then war uprooted her family once again.
“It hits differently when you’re the mother of young children and war breaks out,” she says. “I was scared to leave my children at home, but I had to go to the office and keep working. I am a frontline worker. I am needed, but my sons need me as well.”
When the conflict escalated, she and her family had to flee again.
“I didn’t know where to go. I had my baby in my arms, and there was smoke everywhere. I didn’t know where to turn: the bathroom, the stairs, or the street. The voices were so loud.”
Hiba doesn’t describe the cacophony as sounds. She calls them “voices.”
“You hear the plane coming above you. You hear it firing. You don’t know what will be hit. Then you hear the hiss of the missile flying through the air. The loud boom of the impact. Then the building collapsing.”
She pauses.
“I feel those voices throughout my whole body. I tense up and think, ‘I’m going to hear them again. It’s coming.’ And then I do.” She pauses, then says, “I’ve lived through war before. But when it started again in 2024, I couldn’t bear the voices.”
Now, her sons are beginning to hear those ‘voices’ too.
“When the bombs fall, my three-year-old says, ‘Mommy, Mommy, it’s thunder.’ And I tell him, ‘Yes, it’s thunder.’ Then he looks out the window and asks why there isn’t any rain. So, I tell him maybe it’s fireworks. He’s too young to understand war.”
She remembers being that innocent.
“Whenever there was fighting when I was little, my father would bring the mattresses into the hallway and lay them side by side. We all slept there together. I felt safe. It’s one of my good memories because I didn’t understand what war was then.”
Today, she is the one trying to create that same feeling of safety for her children.
Supporting displaced families while living through war