Merfat Hassoun’s relatives and friends strolled in and out of the cramped living room in Baddawi camp for Palestinian refugees, near Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli. Some carried in suitcases, while others offered greetings and their blessings that Merfat and her family had arrived safely.
Amid the commotion, 59-year-old Merfat, her sister, her daughter, and her granddaughter gathered closely together, sharing lahm bi ajeen (Arabic flatbread with meat) after the long journey that followed their escape from the el-Buss refugee camp near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre.
On Sept. 23 — when Israel began intensive bombardments across Lebanon — el-Buss camp and its surrounding areas also came under fire.
Merfat said they withstood the attacks for almost a week, initially unwilling to leave their homes, but an Israeli airstrike overnight on Sept. 27 struck next door The next morning, the family packed their bags and rushed out.
After a four-hour drive, they arrived at their relative’s home in Baddawi camp, about 170 kilometers (around 106 miles) north of el-Buss. Lebanon is home to 12 refugee camps for Palestinians, who have spent the last 75 years stateless and suffering one period of mass displacement after another.
Echoes of the Past
Merfat’s parents fled to Lebanon from Haifa, now in modern-day northern Israel, in 1948, when Zionist forces took control of the city and within a week violently expelled around 50,000 of its Palestinian residents.
That same year — which became remembered as the “Nakba” (catastrophe in Arabic) — Zionist forces raided homes and decimated hundreds of villages in Palestine, killing around 15,000 people and displacing roughly hundreds of thousands across the map of the Middle East.

Merfet feels that now in Lebanon she is reliving her parents’ horror stories from 1948. “My parents and my grandparents lived through this,” she said, “What happened to them — during the massacre and the genocide in ‘48 — now we’re experiencing the same, or more.”
“We Saw the Missiles”
Merfat’s daughter, 22-year-old Jinan Muhammad Dakwar, stood near her mother, bouncing her own daughter, just one-year-old, on her hip. “The strike was beside us, in front of us, we saw the missiles,” Jinan said, recounting the Israeli airstrike the night before.
Jinan said her daughter now shakes and cries when she hears Israeli bombardments — or any loud noises. “Even if it’s just a chair moving, she begins to cry,” she said.
According to estimates, the fighting has displaced more than 1.2 million people. Lebanese authorities say it may be the “largest displacement movement” the country has ever experienced. Since Israel began its airstrikes on Lebanon on Oct. 8, 2023, have killed 2,483 people and injured 11,628 people, the Lebanese health ministry announced on Oct. 21.

According to the Lebanese outlet Megaphone News, at least 75,00 Palestinians refugees, like Merfat, live in Tyre alone, most of whom have fled the camps under threat from Israel.
It’s not the first war Merfat has lived through, nor is it the first time Israeli forces have uprooted her from her home. Born and raised in the el-Buss camp, she was just 13 years old when Israel carried out Operation Litani in 1978, when some 25,000 Israeli troops entered southern Lebanon to fight members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), who had killed 35 civilians in northern Israel.
During that Israeli operation, the violence killed about 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, and el-Buss camp suffered extensive damage.
“I’ve Seen Every War”
When Merfat was 17 years old, in 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon and occupied the area for 18 years, operating largely south of the Awali River. On Sept. 30, 2024, Israel, once again, began a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, and troops have since been fighting with Hezbollah operatives in the area.