Loubna El Amine
London Review of Books / March 10, 2026
On Wednesday, 4 March, the Israel Defence Forces issued an evacuation order for the southern part of Lebanon – the entire area, around eight hundred square kilometres, south of the Litani river. On Thursday, 5 March, the IDF issued an evacuation order for almost the whole of the Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut – home to nearly a million people, more than the city itself.
Southern Lebanon has long been predominantly Shia. In 1920, at the beginning of the French Mandate, a rebellion in the south was crushed. It was around that time that people started relocating to the capital. Where the southern suburbs are now there were villages then, some Christian, some Shia. After independence in 1943, as the country modernised, most of the people moving from the countryside to the city were Shia. The complaint then, as since, was that they had been forgotten by the state. Their numbers also increased when Israel invaded the south of Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982. This was when Hizbullah emerged as both a resistance movement and one of two national parties representing Shia interests.
My paternal grandfather came from one of the southernmost villages. Before 1948 he worked in Palestine. He later travelled to work in Kuwait and his family moved to Ghobeiry in the Dahieh. Until 2000, when the south was liberated by Hizbullah, we only visited my grandparents in their Beirut apartment, on the fifth floor of an old building on a small side road off a busy street. The apartment was decorated with modernist posters that my youngest uncle had brought from his student days in Paris, as well as my grandmother’s patchwork quilts, white crochet covers for water jugs and bright wool holders for double tea kettles.
My maternal grandparents lived in an area called Shiyyah, in a third-floor apartment on another crowded street. They moved back to the south, to their village north of the Litani, after my grandfather retired from his job in the port of Beirut. We spent a lot of time in the village, and took refuge there during the civil war. My uncle and his family moved into my grandparents’ old Beirut apartment and family gatherings continued there. My cousins and I would sit on the balcony and imagine love stories with boys on the balconies across the street.
When another uncle and aunt got married they moved to Haret Hreik (the area where Hizbullah’s headquarters were bombed by Israel in September 2024, killing Hassan Nasrallah and dozens of others). Political discussions on their balcony over arak became more heated during the 2000s as family members disagreed over Hizbullah’s continuing role. Despite the Israeli attacks of 2006, many of my relations continued to move to different parts of the Dahieh, which was quickly rebuilt. I discovered new parts of the expanding suburban maze every time a cousin got married and moved to a new house. The Dahieh grew with my extended family. The south of the country grew for me too after its liberation from Israeli occupation, when it became possible to travel freely south of the Litani. My parents built a house in my father’s village.
Since the Israeli attacks in the winter of 2024, I have been to that house only once, last summer, for my aunt’s funeral. The village’s husayniyya had been destroyed, so we said goodbye to her in a makeshift hall. Much of the Dahieh was destroyed too. Several of my cousins relocated north, west and further east. Only an aunt and an uncle were there when the bombs started falling last week.
The Israeli evacuation orders signal a desire to make this whole world disappear: to displace a fifth of the country’s population, to unravel a dense urban fabric and to erase a history of struggle and dislocation. Even if the targeted areas are not completely destroyed, the aim of the threats is erasure: to unmake a community’s slow formation, with the same violence that contributed to forming it in the first place.
Loubna El Amine teaches political theory at King’s College London; Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation was published by Princeton in 2015
