Nowhere to hide for Lebanese facing war threat without civilian shelters

Despite witnessing several conflicts, country lacks purpose-built spaces to protect population from attacks

A congregation hall in Aita Ash Shab, southern Lebanon, that was damaged in an Israeli strike. Matt Kynaston / The National

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Lebanon's civilians have watched with alarm over the past week as the country has moved closer to another all-out war with Israel, knowing that once again, their safety would rest largely in their own hands.

A deadly Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday, days after booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded across the country, have raised the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese armed group to a new level after almost a year of cross-border exchanges of fire. Altogether the attacks in the past week killed more than 70 people and injured thousands.

“This seems to be a turning point,” Fadi, a resident of Saida city in southern Lebanon, told The National. “People are living in fear.”

Israel has signalled a desire to change the status quo in its northern region by making the return of residents to their homes in northern Israel one of its war goals. Tens of thousands of people were ordered to leave the area after Hezbollah began launching cross-border rocket and drone attacks last October, seeking to pressure Israel into a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza.

Across the border in Lebanon, more than 100,000 civilians have fled parts of the south, seeking to escape Israel's retaliatory strikes. But with spectre of a wider conflict looming, residents of Beirut and other areas have also been making contingency plans in recent months: renting apartments in the mountains, stockpiling food and leaving their windows open a crack to save them from being shattered by the sonic booms of Israeli jets or blasts from missile strikes.

But there is one major problem: the lack of proper shelters to provide refuge from attacks.

“We estimate there are only 10 per cent of buildings with some form of shelter, but they lack adequate protective conditions to safeguard civilians as they are old and poorly maintained,” Andira El Zouhairi, president of the Lebanese Association of Properties, told The National. "Lebanon has converted old shelters from the 1970s into garages or warehouses, despite the adoption of public safety standards.

“This is especially dangerous in the southern regions, which, despite the continuing damage caused by Israeli attacks, do not have safe shelters for people to take refuge in.”

In the border areas, where about 60,000 people live under constant bombardment from Israel, residents said they had no access to shelters.

“We don't have shelters; we just take refuge in our homes and hope for the best,” Merhej Shamaa, deputy mayor of Deir Mimas, a village close to the border, told The National. "Where else could we go?"

The disaster management unit for southern Lebanon told The National that there are no public shelters designed for the population. In the coastal city of Tyre, about 20km north of the border, displaced southern residents are being hosted in various schools but there are no safe areas in the event of direct shelling. The government’s contingency planning for full-scale war notes that the number of shelters for the population is “far from adequate”.

“We need safe places for civilians, such as smart shelters connected to a GPS device that can direct them to the nearest safe location, equipped with proper ventilation, medical supplies and corridors,” Ms El Zouhairi said. "Despite the crises and wars, there is no alarm or emergency system that informs citizens about any impending attack or conflict."

Makeshift shelters

A country that has suffered decades of conflict would be expected to integrate safe shelters into its urban planning, but not so in Lebanon. Over the years, people have been forced to transform all sorts of places into makeshift bunkers.

In the latter days of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, Mervat Amand and her toddler would sleep in a cinema under the Saroula building in the western Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra. When the bombardment was especially bad, her family and the other residents of the nine-storey building would shelter there for days at a time, she told The National.

“During the truce periods we would leave the building to buy food. When the shelling began again we would run downstairs with all the food and with gallons of water,” she said. “The Hamra neighbourhood was always under bombardment. We’d sit underground with the neighbours for hours. Drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes. Just passing time until the next pause.”

Over the course of the war, residents of the building had dismantled the seats of the cinema to make room for themselves, but it was not Ms Amand's first makeshift bomb shelter.

In the mid-1970s when the civil war began, Beirut had not completed its transformation into a concrete jungle and affluent residents still owned estates big enough for gardens and farm animals. The Amand family kept cows, goats and chickens. When the bombardment began, her grandfather converted a basement used to store cow fodder into a shelter. It was where Ms Amand spent much of her childhood.

“We couldn’t stand up straight in that basement and it smelt like cows. But it was shelter,” she said.

Most of Beirut’s so-called war bunkers are underground spaces – basements, car parks or businesses – converted into shelters during the 15-year civil war. They bear little resemblance to purpose-built shelters, lacking steel reinforcement, cots for sleeping, and stockpiles of food. The capital’s basements and car parks were once again turned into bunkers during the month-long 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. This time, the attacks so far have been mostly in the city’s southern suburbs and in southern Lebanon.

Ms Amand now lives in a suburb overlooking Beirut that she believes is less likely to be hit in an Israeli strike.

“We have a direct view to the airport and the rest of south Beirut from our balcony,” she said. “If anything is coming in our direction, we’ll know. There’s a parking garage downstairs and if something happens, I’ll go down there.”