A mother heartbroken by the sight of her terrified children. An elderly man forced to leave the home he had lived in for decades. A teenager uprooted from school.
These are just some of the tens of thousands of people displaced by Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, which it launched after the Iran-backed group Hezbollah fired projectiles into Israel in response to the joint US-Israeli military campaign in Iran.
Nearly 700,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon, including 200,000 children, the UN’s children’s agency said on Monday. Israeli strikes have killed at least 486 people, according to the country’s health ministry, at least 83 of them children.
The offensive has intruded on the daily lives of every generation – with parents, elderly people and children at a shelter in Lebanon struggling to comprehend the scale and velocity of attacks, in testimony shared with CNN by the non-profit, CARE International. Some were haunted by the sound of children crying.
A mother-of-five had “only minutes” to wake her children and flee airstrikes, she said. “We ran with nothing but the clothes on our back … My children keep asking when we will go home, and I feel helpless because I don’t know,” she added.
One father-of-five said he felt “useless” because he was “unable to protect” his children. “We had a home, a job, a life we were proud of,” he added.
For one elderly man, the pain of leaving his home compounded his sense of loss. “I spent over 40 years in my house, watching my children grow up, planting the garden, building my life piece by piece,” he said, adding, “Leaving it behind without even locking the door felt like leaving my soul.”