SAN MARCOS (KGTV) — Almost a million Lebanese people have had their lives upended in just one month. They are leaving their homes behind to move away from the southern border with Israel and into relatively safer suburbs of Beirut—some with nowhere to sleep except on the streets.
"We want peace; we don't want this going on anymore," Nessrine said.
Nessrine lives in San Marcos but has family in southern Lebanon.
I called her cousin, Mohammad Ramadan; he spoke ABC 10News Perla Shaheen in Arabic about his experience.
"They destroyed everything around our home and the south of Lebanon," Ramadan said. "They didn’t spare anything."
Ramadan ran a grocery store in the South. He says he saved up for 10 years to open his own business, but it was bombed in August and demolished into large piles of rubble.
"I loved my shop. It felt like my home," Ramadan said. "If anything bothered me, I would come to the shop, and it would remind me that things would be okay. I was providing for my family this way. Now everything is gone; I lost everything.
The United Nations says Israeli evacuation orders cover a quarter of Lebanon as the conflict between Israel and the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah continues to expand. Ramadan says it took 18 hours in traffic to get to Beirut; he's now staying there with his wife, two sons, and parents.
"I can't describe how disheartening the situation is, especially when you see the condition the kids are in," Ramadan said."It's so hard to see displaced children and their mothers needing to sleep on the streets."
Although he's lost so much, Ramadan has shifted his focus to helping those around him. His cousin Nessrine helped set up a GoFundMe to raise money for displaced families.
"I can't just sit here and do nothing," Nessrine said. "There's a lot of people who need tents now; winter's coming, they need blankets."
The family working together to support those caught in a war they didn't start.If you'd like to donate, this is the link to their GoFundMe.
