Lebanon: Inside the emergency

On 2 March, Israel's aerial bombing and military activities in Lebanon intensified once again, 15 months after a ceasefire was signed.

Staggeringly, around a quarter of Lebanon's population is now under evacuation orders. Our medical teams and their patients are witnessing—and experiencing—the impact as hundreds of thousands of people flee relentless airstrikes.

In an empty room in an abandoned building, MSF teams set up a mobile clinic to support displaced communities. With no electricity and using the light of his phone, a doctor provides a medical consultation while a nurse takes a man’s vital signs.

This clinic is part of the nationwide emergency response launched by MSF in Lebanon. Mobile clinics have been deployed to provide essential healthcare across the country, alongside large-scale distributions of relief items and support to hospitals and primary health care centres.

Shelters, schools, mosques, and abandoned buildings are overwhelmed and ill-equipped to accommodate people. 

Families like Khadija's are forced to go to extreme lengths to find something resembling appropriate accommodation. She fled her home in Ebba, in south Lebanon, with her husband and two children. What should have been a short route to safety turned into hours on dark, car-choked roads surrounded by the thuds of airstrikes. 

When they finally arrived at their destination further north, the reality of the shelter in a school was overwhelming: three families sharing a single room. Khadija couldn't imagine her children sleeping there, living there, trying to be children there.

They left. That night, they found a makeshift alternative: a repurposed metal container, acting as a shed inside a plant nursery.

Life inside the container is a constant negotiation with scarcity. They carry water into the room in jugs to wash and clean. At night, they rely on a small battery light or candles. The simplest routines—bathing, cooking, sleeping—take more effort than they ever used to.

Ali, 12, is restless—full of energy with nowhere for it to go. Khadija calls him “hyperactive,” but what she sees most is a boy who used to have structure, friends, and a normal day, and now has only waiting.

Sanaa, 8, speaks about school like it is a place that still exists somewhere, untouched. She misses PE the most: running, moving, laughing. Her favourite sport is basketball.

Khadija is trying to hold everyone together while she is also running out of strength. Her husband is diabetic. She herself takes medication for a chronic nervous condition that began after two years of stress—stress that started with the war and only deepened with displacement.

Their larger family is scattered across the country: relatives displaced in Saida, Barja, Beirut. Everyone is somewhere else, and no one is truly safe. Khadija says it feels like Lebanon has become a map of temporary stops.

Hajje Zaynab, 80, is from Yater, a beautiful mountainous town in the far south of Lebanon.

Her journey to seek safety in Anout was also a struggle. Like so many others, she spent hours on the road, sleeping upright in the car in short, restless fits.

Now, there are 23 people living in a single classroom in a school being used as a collective shelter.

Her home in Yater was struck by Israel. The loss is enormous, but Hajje Zaynab speaks about return with unshakeable resolve.

In the clinic, that same resolve shows itself in small moments. The doctor asks her to stay for a second blood-pressure reading because the first was too high.

Hajje Zaynab lifts her head, eyes bright with defiance, and says firmly, “Diabetes tried and couldn’t take me down. Neither will hypertension.”

Every evening, 11-year-old Mohammad used to watch the sun sink into the Mediterranean from his home near the coast of Lebanon. Now he is sheltering with his mother, Sara, in the mountains, facing a cold his body hasn’t yet acclimatised to.

Small details, like well-kept clothes and Sara's jewellery, hint at the more comfortable life they had before. But here, like everyone else, they are learning what it means to live with less: less privacy, less warmth, less certainty.

Mohammad and Sara are staying in a monastery that has opened its doors as a shelter. The humidity of the air is aggravating Mohammad’s allergies. In the rush to leave Ghazieh as the sky lit up with Israeli strikes, they didn’t bring his medication.

They don’t have their car, so when Sara heard MSF teams were running a mobile clinic, she and Mohammad caught a ride and came. They wait quietly for their turn - patient, composed, and watchful in that way people get when they feel out of place.

Fatima Khalil is part of MSF’s Chouf mobile clinic team. She is a nursing team supervisor, working in an emergency response for the second time since joining MSF in October 2024. She says:

“Every day, I leave my three-year-old daughter behind, carrying both my fear and my sense of duty. I walk toward the sound of airstrikes while my heart stays with her.

It is never easy to close the door and go, knowing the risks, but I do it for the patients who need us in their most critical moments.

Between being a mother and a nurse, I live a constant balance of love, worry, and responsibility holding on to hope and strength with every step I take.”

Dr Hassan Harissi is also part of the Chouf mobile clinic, and paediatrician with MSF in the Nabatiyeh project.

"I started working with MSF in January 2026, providing care to those affected by the last and ongoing escalation of war.

Like many of my patients, I, too, am displaced. I was forced to leave my home in southern Lebanon in September 2025, and again recently in March, as airstrikes came dangerously close to where my family was staying. My children were terrified, and we had no choice but to move once more.

Every day, I leave my children behind to join my team and support others who are going through the same fear, loss, and uncertainty.

In these difficult times, being both a doctor and a displaced person is not easy—but it reminds me why this work matters."