On a street in downtown Bay Route. There's a five story building, an old derelict hotel. It was empty for eight years until recently when hundreds of displaced people started living there.
People here ends up building. Some of them don't have a LASiS to l anywhere on it.
It's not like it's not their story of fleeing southern Bay Route to find safety in the city's busy neighborhoods is being repeated across Lebanon right now. As Israel's bombardments continue. There's been a massive effort to help shelter the one million displace Lebanese. But in this building and in many others, they aren't welcome. With religious divides from the Civil War still palpable decades on.
The police have just shown up, so of course they were into the entrance of the apartment building where all of the women have been standing looking.
Standing from Schwartz Media.
I'm Jones.
This is seven am today journalist Haidi pet on the old Wounds being reopened in Lebanon right now. It's Friday, November one, So Hardie, you're in their route right now, and I believe you flew there right around the time that things were escalating and many people were trying to leave. So what was the journey like?
Yeah, it was.
One of the strangest flights I think I've taken. So I flew in from Paris. There were nine of us on the plane and we're all sort of seated, spaced apart. So it was myself, a journalist, a priest, and a doctor for FSF, which really felt like the beginnings were bad, you know, like the three horsemen of the apocalypse, something something terrible has happened in your country. If all of the flights out are full, all of the flights there are empty save for journalists, doctors and priests. So you
fly into the airport in Beirroot. There's only one airport and it's on the coastal strip just south of Beairut, and so it's directly next to what is called the Dahir Beirut Southern suburbs, which has been the focus of a lot of the air campaign. And so my flight I didn't actually see any bombing as I came in. People have and there have been flights landing within sort of ten or fifteen minutes of large explosions quite close
to the airport. So you get in and as soon as the airport doors opened into the night, the first thing I heard was a surveillance drone and the first thing I smelled was smoke from strikes that had hit the southern suburbs just an hour or so before.
And so for the past year, in a general sense, Israel has been a war with Hesbola. Tell me a bit about what has been happening in Lebanon on the ground for the past twelve months.
Yeah, so after the seventh of October when Hamas in Gaza launched that assault on Israel, immediately afterwards, Hezbollah, which is a militant group but also a political party here in Lebanon, they opened what they call a solidarity front, the idea being to harass Israel, meaning that they couldn't deploy all of their troops to Gaza. They had to keep troops on the northern border for fear that that crosswater rocket fire might escalate into a ground invasion or
something more serious. And so about sixty thousand people have been evacuated from villages in the north of Israel, and roughly double that number have also been evacuated from Lebanon.
So we'd seen this kind of controlled.
Tit for tat where it seemed like there were rules of engagement. Neither Israel nor Hisbila was necessarily looking to esca. Late there were a couple of assassinations of Hesbela figures over the summer, but everything changed in September.
The unprecedented attack in the Middle East. Thousands of pagers belonged to members of Hesbela exploded across the country, injuring thousands of people.
Your Times is reporting Israel hid explosives in those pages and then triggered the explosion simultaneously.
And that indicated a real escalation, a real step change. Ten days after that, Israel assassinated the leader of Hesbela Sun Australia, who had an underground bunker in the south of Bairut.
Tremendous devastation as the Israeli forces hunted down one man, the leader of Hezbola, who'd be meeting deep underground. Parts of Dahir in the Bay southern suburbs have been reduced to ashes.
And then shortly after that, Israeli troops launched ground operation and crossed the border into southern Lembdon and I'd engaging directly with Hespala fighters.
On the ground.
More than twenty six hundred Libanies have been killed since October the seventh last year, but most of those have been in the last month. A quarter of the country is under evacuation orders and about the quarter of the population a million people has been displaced.
And so once you touch down in they route in this almost empty airplane. What did you do and where did you go? Yeah, so I headed into downtown. I walked along the Corniche, which is this beautiful waterfront promenade that heads out into the Mediterranean Sea on the western
edge of Beirut. And just inland from the Corniche or all of these displaced people are sheltering, is a neighborhood called Hamra, where you've got hotels, its densely populated apartment buildings, its banks, its businesses, and it is absolutely hacked.
At the moment. There are cars double parked.
On every street, either people sleeping in their cars or they're sleeping on the streets. There are also a number of abandoned or empty apartment buildings, and one of them was this empty hotel called the hammers Star, which is on the main drag through Hamra. It was clear that
displaced people had taken up residents in there. You could see from the street that there was washing hung on the balconies and belonging kind of piled there, and there were always a number of people in the street outside. Volunteers had started coming and delivering hundreds of meals every day for people I.
Know, I'd say it, who know, I understand.
So tell me a bit.
I got talking to a few people, and the first people I are went too into were two young siblings. I meet with my sister, she's sixty and my family
is not together. A girl named Farah, she's sixteen, and her brother, whatddy, it's nice to you, it's really Their family is originally from Bulbeck, which is in the east of Lebanon, but they had grown up in Dahia and lived their entire lives, and Dahia is, of course one of the main targets of the bombing campaign that we've seen broken Four's home in Daha hasn't been destroyed yet, but areas really close by have been bombed. She said,
you know, she could hear it in the night. The house would shake and it was terrifying.
We listened, Tom, it's so scary, and.
So yeah, her and her brother and her grandmother decided that, you know, it was only a matter of time and they needed to leave. How much notice did you have? Was it a big rush?
It's so sad that we'll see that here bomb being destroyed, not building. We miss our our life, our life and people, and that here are so simple, so good, so funny.
You know, they were doing their very best to kind of hold onto some semblance of normality. Pharah had obviously taken the time. Every morning she'd done you know, she had this like perfect winged eyeliner that she'd put on.
What did you.
Bring with you when you came here?
Clauses?
Of course, the important thing brushing tears our makeup.
I got talking to a number of people and they explained that, you know, they had nowhere else to go. And so they entered the building about a month previously, and they'd had some contact with the owners. So the owner is a local judge. Her family owns the building. The brother had been down and they'd had a discussion.
They'd arranged for a generator, they'd arranged for water deliveries, and they'd pulled their money together, all of these displaced families in order to pay for the water deliveries and somewhaticome of electricity and things like that, and so I think they felt that they would have been allowed to stay. For whatever reason, the owners of the building changed their mind, and so they came down and said, in forty eight hours you will have to leave.
The police will be.
Coming on a Monday morning in order to enforce the eviction notice. So the police came down the road about an hour later, a massive police with riot shields, and things got pretty hairy pretty quickly. So they pushed all of these women and children out from the entrance to the apartment building. I saw people hit in the face with riot shields. And then what actually happened is the police then shut the doors of the building and locked themselves inside.
Has heaving gas sin he think people sidan, there are women women, they're not men inside.
There are women.
They got done they want to.
You know. There was rocks thrown, people were throwing things down from the upper floors of the building. Things got quite violent very quickly, and I was horrified to see through the view find her of my camera being carried out by her brother, like bleeding profusely from the head. Her brother put her on the back of a motorbike and rushed her down to the American Hospital here in Berry, where.
She had to be stitched up.
Coming up after the break, the sectarian divides further splintering Lebanon. Had he being evicted from an abandoned building in your own country during a time of war, that seems unexpectedly harsh. Do we know why the landlord changed their mind? Why they decided that these people could not stay?
Yeah, So I've reached out to the landlord and she hasn't responded to my attempts to contact her. But I asked a number of people what changed. The people who were staying there told me that they'd offered to pay rent and they'd been refused. And I asked one man, Wahid, who it was clear he was a bit of a community leader. I asked him, why do you think that she changed her mind? Why are you being evicted? And he just looked at me and he said, because was
she are? Why did she why would she not accept your money?
Let me tell you, Because we are a Shia.
That's all right. And Hezbola is a sheer organization.
Yeah, it's a military group, it's a political organization, but it is largely Shea and its support base, again is largely Sheer. So far, She's from an area in the south of Beirut called the Dahia. It's a ten or fifteen minute drive from where I am, and it's often described as a as a Hezbola stronghold, but it's a civilian neighborhood where hundreds of thousands of people live and work,
and it's largely Shea. But it's not exclusively Sheer. But the idea behind the Israeli military attacking Daha is not new. There is actually an official Israeli military strategy called the Dahia doctrine, which we first saw during the two thousand and six war what's known as you know the Seconds of Lebanese Israeli War, and it explicitly involved disproportionate attacks on civilian areas through strikes on What Israel will say is, you know, is hesbela military infrastructure.
I say to you, the people of Lebanon, free your country from Kusbala so that this war can end. Free your country from Kusbala.
But what has happened in the last month is quite explicit. So the Israeli Prime Minister of Benjamin Attanyahu has said that essentially the Lebanese people need to rise up against Hesbela or Lebanon will face destruction like Gaza.
You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.
And so now the idea is to put so much pressure on Shia and on civilian supporters of Hesbela through air strikes and through these military operations, that that support Hesbla among those people would falter.
And does it seem like that strategy is working, that support for Hezbola is diminishing.
I mean, I think only time will tell. It's only been a month.
There's been.
Concerns about rising sectarian tensions here in Lebanon since the war escalated.
There's obviously a long history of that.
There was a civil war for fifteen years in this country between different sects, and so what has happened is that when Shia from the south of Lebanon or from the Dahir, from Beirut southern suburbs have fled those areas when it has become intolerable or unsafe for them to be there. Sometimes those air strikes have followed them. So a couple of weeks ago, a number of displaced people had moved to a village called Aitu, which is in the mountains here in Beirut.
It's a predominantly Christian village, and so those.
People moved there because they thought that they would be safe there. And there was a massive air strike on a building that a number of displaced families had taken
shelter in. And so there's concern among all different people in Lebanon here that if you take in sheer families and you don't know who they are, or what their political affiliations are, whether they have any contact with Hesbella's political or military wing, whether your home, you're building, your property, your village, your community will also become a target.
And I imagine that is really only stoking these kind of long standing divisions that already exist within Lebanese society.
Yeah, exactly. You will always find people within Lebanon who hate Hesbela, who have always hated Hesbla. You know, I ran into somebody in the street actually down on the corniche, and he said to me, you know, every time I hear the bombing at night, and Dahir I say thank
you for cleaning up our country. But what I've also seen is incredible solidarity of grassroots organizations, volunteers, groups of friends who have mobilized to fill the gaps left by the Lebanese state and who are caring for displaced people of Sunni or Christian communities, and volunteers who are cooking hundreds and hundreds of meals per day and bringing it to these formal and informal shelters.
So what will happen to Fara and the other people who were evicted from the hotel building? Where will they go now?
So they have now been scattered across beir Roots. Some of them went back to the streets, others have joined other informal shelters. The police did make an attempt to register everyone and say that they would find places for everyone, But the.
Problem is that a lot of these shelters they're just full.
Sofara and Rudich are with their grandmother. They're now in a hotel in downtown Hamra. They're paying twenty five dollars a night, which is way more than they can afford. They're not sure how many more days they can keep that uptally, but I'm grateful that they didn't go back to Dahia, which is what Fara initially said that they would do.
So where will you go now?
I would go to Dahir And.
For now they're safe, but they're not sure how much longer they can keep that up or how long this war will go on for.
Well, how doi thank you so much for your time today.
Who's nice to talk to you.
Also in the news today, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has taken legal action against Optus, alleging it sold phone products to hundreds of vulnerable customers. The ah Triple See alleges that customers often did not want or need the services, and that Optis then pursued them for debts heated with those sales. Many of the customers were living
with disability, diminished cognitive capacity or learning difficulties. And as more politicians come under scrutiny for their perks in the job, Opposition leader Peter Dutton has admitted to using Gina Ryanhart's private jet to travel to a Barley bombing memorial. Speaking at a press conference in Perth, Dutton said his office requested the ride between Rockhampton, Sidney and Mackay in November
twenty twenty two. Earlier in the week, when asked if he had ever personally requested flights from Gina Reinhart, Dutton responded no. When asked about this discrepancy, he clarified that it was his office who asked for the flight and not him personally. Seven Am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper. It's made by Atticus Basto, Shane Anderson, Chris Enngate, Daniel James, Eric Jensen, me Ruby Jones, Sarah mcvee, Travis Evans and Sultanfetcho. Thanks for listening, Sa