Hezbollah’s central headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs were struck multiple times Sept. 27 by Israeli missiles, shaking the Lebanese capital. The next day Iran-backed Hezbollah confirmed the military organization’s leader Hassan Nasrallah died in the strike.
Jesuit Father Daniel Corrou, regional director of Jesuit Refugee Service in the Middle East and North Africa based in Beirut, told OSV News that he felt powerful blasts and heard sonic booms overhead at the start of the phone conversation Sept. 27.
It was unclear at the time what the target was, but immediately the incident drew the ire of Iran — the country’s embassy in Beirut said on X the strike “represents a dangerous escalation that changes the rules of the game,” and said to “bring its perpetrator an appropriate punishment.”
The bombing introduces additional challenges as Catholic and other international humanitarian organizations say they are quickly trying to provide basic aid to desperate people in Lebanon fleeing Israeli bombardments, which have intensified this week.
The Israeli military and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militia continue to trade fire in powerful aerial attacks despite appeals by the United States and France for a temporary ceasefire.
“The situation is catastrophic,” the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Lebanon, Imran Riza, told reporters in the Lebanese capital on Sept. 27. “We are witnessing the deadliest period in Lebanon in a generation, and many express their fear that this is just the beginning,” he said.
Although Israeli bombing has targeted mainly members of the Hezbollah militia, ordinary Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian refugees as well as migrant workers from Asia and Africa are also being swept up in the attacks, aid workers said.
Ministering to the displaced, Father Corrou said JRS began distribution this week of mattresses, food, hygiene and dignity kits in official shelters located in Bourj Hammoud, a northeastern suburb of Beirut, and in Bar Elias in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley for those escaping aerial assaults.
Father Corrou said that JRS teams that provide assistance to internally displaced people told him that “in one case a Lebanese grandmother who was in her house, doing no one any harm,” suddenly experienced the house next door collapsing.
“When suddenly the house next door implodes and falls down, fear takes hold,” Father Corrou told OSV News by phone. He said the family took her and tried to “escape the horror for safety.”
“Even some of our staff from the south were in cars stranded on the road for 24 to 38 hours because of the traffic getting into Beirut,” he explained. “People told us, ‘Even if my house was OK, I’m not sure I would go back, because the images of body parts strewn across the street are just too difficult,” Father Corrou said, adding that what JRS focuses on now “is an immediate response to trauma.”
The U.N. reported that almost 120,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon this week alone.
“The impact is reaching deeper into Lebanon and is pushing the humanitarian crisis to alarming levels,” said Maureen Philippon, country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council in Lebanon, in a statement made available to OSV News.
“Some 111,000 people in Lebanon and 68,000 in northern Israel have been displaced since October. We need a ceasefire now before more lives are shattered,” she said.
Father Carrou said JRS has also aided migrant workers from Sudan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan escaping explosions in Beirut’s southern Dahiyeh area, a Hezbollah stronghold and in the country’s south.
“These people who were not accepted into the normal shelters just started coming to us. We formed a shelter in Beirut,” Father Carrou said of its location in the St. Joseph Jesuit church in the capital’s Achrafieh district.
“It is now the largest shelter for migrant workers in Lebanon,” he explained.
The Jesuits have had a long-standing ministry to migrant workers in Lebanon before the current crisis.
Filippo Grandi, head of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, warned this week that such a mass displacement posed “yet another ordeal for families” who had fled years of civil war in Syria “only now to be bombed in the country where they sought shelter.”
“The Middle East cannot afford a new displacement crisis. Let us not create one by forcing more people to abandon their homes,” he said.
Father Carrou said that JRS is meeting the initial immediate needs of the displaced with basic shelter and food, providing sports activities for the children to be followed up with community- based mental health and psycho-social support for the many now experiencing trauma.
On Sept. 28, the U.S. State Department ordered certain employees and their family members to depart Lebanon as the conflict threatens to deepen.
President Joe Biden said the death of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah is a “measure of justice for his many victims,” including Americans, while calling for de-escalation in conflicts across the Middle East.
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