As Israel pounds Lebanon, Gazans empathize, yet feel forgotten

Evacuation leaflets. Bombs. Displacement camps. Destroyed buildings and dead civilians.

As Israel pursues its military offensive in Lebanon, including strikes in Beirut, the parallels in Gaza are everywhere, generating an outpouring of solidarity from Palestinian residents of the besieged enclave.

From family to friends to places of birth, the ties binding Gazans to Lebanon are strong. Now they’re even more so, in a war in which Gaza residents see Israel repeating the tactics it used on the strip – targeting villages and densely populated neighborhoods – as it aims to uproot Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia.

The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar late last week reverberated across the region and raised hopes in some quarters that an obstacle to an Israel-Hamas cease-fire had been lifted. But Israel has only stepped up a fierce ground and air assault on northern Gaza, and, with the region still anticipating an Israeli retaliatory strike against Iran, cease-fire talks remain moribund.

That has amplified Gaza Palestinians’ worries that the war in Lebanon and the prospect of a wider Israel-Iran conflict is pushing the plight of Gaza out of the headlines and out of mind for policymakers.

The war in Lebanon is personal for Osama Harb, who was born and raised in the Shatila refugee camp in southern Beirut. His brother, two sisters, nieces, and nephews still live in the country.

Mr. Harb has called Gaza home since Israel exiled him from Lebanon to the strip in the 1980s, following the 1982 war.

He and many here who have lived in Lebanese refugee camps have family both in the strip and in Lebanon, and are following war updates from relatives in Lebanon while navigating missile strikes and Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza.

“We have a WhatsApp group where everyone updates each other on their status,” Mr. Harb says from a rented shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

His brother, Mustapha, who lives in the Beddawi refugee camp in northern Lebanon, told him, “We have lived for a few minutes what you have been experiencing for a year.”

“No one can truly understand what it’s like to live under bombardment except for someone who has experienced it firsthand,” notes Mr. Harb.

Another similarity between the conflict zones: the dropping of leaflets by the Israeli army ordering residents to evacuate or face bombing.

According to the United Nations, more than one-fourth of Lebanon’s population has been placed under Israeli military evacuation orders and more than 750,000 Lebanese have been displaced by the fighting. One year into the Israel-Hamas war, the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents has been displaced multiple times.

“I remember when they first dropped leaflets over Gaza asking people to evacuate,” says Mr. Harb. “Whenever we hear about an evacuation, we pack our bags and flee to safer locations, just as the Lebanese are doing now.”

“It is the same as here”

For the few Gazans able to leave the Israel-besieged strip prior to the war, Lebanon was an oasis, and a hub of academic and cultural activity.

Heba Alsaidi, a displaced researcher and translator sheltering in Deir al-Balah, had completed an undergraduate degree in English literature studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut through a U.S. State Department-funded leadership program. She, like many Palestinians in Gaza, called Lebanon home.

“Israel destroyed Gaza. Why must Israel destroy my second home?” Ms. Alsaidi says.

After a year of receiving messages of support and sympathetic ears from friends in Lebanon throughout the war in Gaza, Ms. Alsaidi is now providing support to them. She spends her days texting with 15 close friends back in Beirut as they navigate missile strikes that have already claimed the lives of 2,300 people.

“It is the same as here,” she says. “The same method: Evacuations. Relentless bombing. Uncertainty. It is war.”

Ms. Alsaidi can’t escape the parallel images of evacuee tents in Beirut’s Instagrammable coastline spots and the tent cities that have grown along “our once beautiful beaches” on Gaza’s coast, like in the Mawasi region.

But there is one crucial difference between Israel’s wars in Gaza and in Lebanon that is not lost on Palestinians here: Lebanese have the option to escape.

Even residents of Gaza with thousands of dollars of cash on hand, who previously could exit through Rafah in a complicated and costly Egyptian-permit process, no longer have that option since Israel’s military offensive and takeover of the Rafah crossing in May.

“The silver lining in Lebanon is that people have the chance to evacuate to other countries without paying exorbitant fees or bribes. The borders remain open,” Ms. Alsaidi says. “While the situation is similar, the circumstances look different.”

Gazans forgotten?

The dropoff in media attention in Gaza “deepens our sense of isolation,” says Aya al-Wakeel, a lawyer and human rights advocate who left Gaza for Egypt to seek medical attention for family members prior to Israel’s closing of Rafah.

“The lack of attention reiterates how alone we truly are in this struggle, amplifying our feelings of despair and helplessness,” says Ms. Wakeel. “There’s little action from the international community. It’s as if we are on a different planet.”

It comes as Israel intensifies its strikes and siege on northern Gaza, where international aid groups say some 400,000 people are trapped, and continues deadly strikes across the strip.

In northern Gaza, aid and food deliveries have been severely limited since Oct. 2, and Israel has stopped permission for the Jordan-led, United States-supported aid drops, deepening starvation. Last week the United Nations’ undersecretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs raised the alarm of “dwindling” food stocks, noting that there was “barely any food left to distribute.”

And strikes continue, with the U.N. reporting more than 400 Palestinians in Gaza killed in multiple mass casualty Israeli airstrikes in the last week alone. Gaza health authorities say 87 people were killed in a single strike in Beit Lahia on Saturday.

In one graphic strike last week on an evacuee center near Deir al-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Hospital, 20 people were killed, including civilians and patients who were burned alive as other evacuees and neighbors were helpless and unable to save them.

Yet such stories, Gaza residents note, are barely being heard or seen beyond their social media feeds.

Ms. Alsaidi, the translator, notes that “News from Lebanon is overshadowing the stories from Gaza.”

“Now we are truly forgotten because all the news has shifted its focus on Lebanon,” Kenda al-Atawai, a student studying to become a speech therapist, says from her family’s tent in a displacement encampment in Deir al-Balah. “They’ve completely overlooked us. This is a problem in and of itself.”

“We’ve been living in hell for so long, and now it feels like we are invisible. Nobody even mentions us.”

Her sister, Aseel, agrees.

“When I watch the news, I see networks divide their screen into six panels of correspondents, and none of them are talking about Gaza,” she says.

“It is heartbreaking.”