Emilie Madi photography

24/07/2026

The first Israeli withdrawal under the pilot zone program took place this week in Lebanon. People stand outside Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh village as they wait to get permission to enter. Lebanese army began deploying troops there, but asked residents to delay their return until the town was cleared of unexploded ordnance.

09/04/2026

Ambulances arriving at a Beirut hospital on Thursday bypassed the emergency room and drove straight to the morgue, where exhausted medics unloaded a succession of bags of body parts for relatives to identify before burial.

Among them were the brother and teenage nephew of 54-year-old Kheir Hamiyeh. They were both killed in a strike on Hay el-Sellum, a densely populated district of Beirut. The strike had destroyed their home and wounded his young niece Khadija, who stood next to him with bandages across her face.
“Her father was killed. Her brother was killed. She has one brother left. What are we supposed to do?” Hamiyeh said.
Khadija’s mother, Zeinab, told Reuters between bouts of crying that she had to carry the bodies of her husband and 13-year-old son to the ground floor on her own.

Abdelrahman Mohammed, a 24-year-old Syrian man living in Beirut since war erupted in his home country in 2011, said he lost five members of his family.“I came back and didn’t find the building. I didn’t find my sister, and I didn’t find my family. Any of them,” he told Reuters.

“The numbers are high, the situation is disastrous and painful,” hospital director Dr. Mohammad al-Zaatari told reporters.

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Thursday that the toll from Israel’s strikes the previous day across Lebanon had risen to 303 killed. It said the toll was not final and was expected to rise further as rescue teams were still removing bodies from under the rubble.
The ministry added that the total toll since March 2 was 1,888 dead and more than 6,000 wounded.

08/04/2026

A total of 254 people were killed across Lebanon and over 1,100 wounded, the country’s civil defense service said. The highest toll was in Beirut, where 91 people were killed. The health ministry had earlier given a toll of 112 dead across the country and said it was not a final figure.

It was the deadliest day of the war that erupted on March 2, when Hezbollah fired into Israel in support of Tehran after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran two days earlier. Israel launched a fully-fledged air and ground campaign in response.

Reuters reporters saw civil defense workers guiding an older woman onto a crane to evacuate her from a building in a western part of Beirut. Half of the building had been sheared off in an Israeli strike, leaving residents on the upper floors trapped.

04/04/2026

Christian Lebanese gather on Good Friday and prayed for peace and an end to the war with Israel.

“stop the violence, destruction, and devastation, so that the whole world may speak one language, the language of peace and forgiveness.”

“We have been here since 1975, born in war, and we don’t know what the end will be. No one knows. But we live only with hope, aiming for peace to come.”

“It is not our war, yet we are paying the price.”

01/04/2026

A mobile clinic run by LAU (Lebanese American university) visits a school converted into a temporary shelter for displaced people with a 20-member team including, nutritionists, psychiatrists and physiatrists.
“We can see more depression, It’s all fear. It’s all anxiety. It’s all distress. It’s all pressure”

More than one million people have fled their homes and another 1,200 have been killed since March 2

‘Either this is our end, or I don’t know if a new life will come, but I don’t think so. You can feel the end, I mean, there’s nothing. It’s all destroyed houses, I mean, every morning you wake up to news of martyrs and death of young people, all of them are either relatives of yours, or you know them, it’s heartbreaking. These days are all heartbreak upon heartbreak… God willing, you’ll be spared from it.’

29/03/2026

When Israeli strikes rained down on southern Lebanon in early March, Hawraa Houmani, 29, ‌and almost nine months pregnant, fled her village near Nabatieh to a shelter in a school in Beirut. She no longer had access to the doctor that had cared for her throughout her pregnancy.
“I had prepared myself physically and mentally for that doctor, for her to be ​the one delivering,”
‘Honestly, I was maybe more comfortable at the hospital. I was in a room…Here, how am I going to breastfeed? How am I going to do baths, the washing and all that, you know? Because I gave birth naturally, so I need to go to the bathroom - how is cleanliness going to be? How will sterilisation be? How will that work? How am I going to get up and sit down when I have two children’
She gave birth to her son, Ali, on March ⁠11 in a hospital in Beirut. They are among over a million people who have been displaced in Lebanon since a new war ​between Israel and Hezbollah erupted on March 2.

There are 13,500 displaced pregnant women in Lebanon, according to the UN Population Fund UNFPA, the world body’s reproductive health agency. As many as 1,500 women are expected to give birth in the next 30 days.

Grandmother Sabah Marji, cradled both her newborn grandchildren: ‘Right now, I feel great about them, but the joy is incomplete… It’s not the same as when a person is living in their own home with everything around them…as a grandmother, but I’m afraid for them.’

Sarah Shahla, 31, five months pregnant with a baby girl. She too fled from Nabatieh with her husband and two sons.
“Everything is different. I mean, during these days I had imagined that you’d be sitting at home getting ready for the baby, preparing everything that a baby needs, that you’d be psychologically at ease, so that you can bring a baby into the world feeling at ease too. But now everything is different. Now you’re just sitting there waiting for relief, as they say?”

“Of course, I hope that she comes into a life better than this one, that she comes into a ​life with stability, safety, a family atmosphere, a sense of home, all of these things.”

24/03/2026

Meet Salam Issa Rida, her husband Ahmad, and her sister in law Zeinab -

Salam had barely set the table at home for iftar when the Israeli military published an evacuation order for all of Beirut’s southern suburbs - the first time it had ordered a mass displacement from the area.

Salam:
“We didn’t know where exactly (they would strike) anymore. That’s it, you just have to leave,”

“The wind was so strong - I started to cry. I started to cry from my despair over the kids. My cousin’ daughter, a child, what did she do to deserve us running with her like this? And my son.”

Salam still goes to her home in Dahiyeh to pick some of her and her families belongings:
“I wake up in the morning, I get there, they say there’s a warning. A warning, what do I do? I need to finish getting my things. Those with me, I tell them to leave. And then I finish and leave.”
“No one’s unafraid - we all get scared. But when my kids aren’t with me and I’m not slowed down by anyone, I still go.”

Ahmad:
We’re strangers in our own country. That’s worse than war.”

Zeinab:
“If someone got sick, you could go visit them and check on them. Now, whether someone dies or lives, you don’t even know.”

Watch the full video / Read the full report on Reuters
- Wider Image -

17/03/2026

Mariam Hassan Rida, 73, fled her hometown of Hannawiyah in southern Lebanon last week. She described how she left in the middle of the night, quickly gathering her neighbours to flee as fast as she could.
Rida said she spent one night in a hotel but could not afford to stay longer there, so had to sleep on the street for several days before eventually reaching a shelter.

Rida is alone, with no husband or children. She said she repaired it as best she could after the war in 2024, but after fleeing again, she does not know whether it was still standing.She is now sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a school-turned-shelter hallway, with no pillow nor relatives beside her.

“I am afraid, yes. I want to go back to my hometown. I’m afraid, I’m scared for myself. There are strikes here and there are strikes there, I’m confused about where to go. You tell me… humiliation and hunger.” she said in tears.

“I still have 200,000 Lebanese Lira ($ 2.23), nothing else. If I had money, I would go on the cable car to Harissa…To sit there by the church, I like it.”

“This time is not like last time (referring to the 2024 war). Last time was two months, but this time, it will last long - three, four months, seven months, a year. We may not return. Because they want to fight us on the ground, they want to invade and take over until the Litani river.”

The strike comes amid intensifying Israeli attacks across Lebanon, which have killed more than 880 people and displaced more than 1 million, according to Lebanese authorities.

Watch full report on

11/03/2026

“The sound was indescribable, the fear is indescribable. Enough is enough, enough. This is a nightmare, when will it end?”
said Bassima Ramadan, a resident of the building across the street who was woken up by the strike around 5:30 a.m, local time.

Footage showed heavy damage to two floors of the apartment block in Beirut’s Aicha Bakkar neighborhood, and smoke rising from the building. Four people were wounded in the strike, the Lebanese health ministry said.

11/03/2026