Rihab Faur ran away from home. Then it ran away again. Then a third time. Then the fourth. And by the fourth time, a year after the first, she had been running from Israeli bombs for so long that she did not feel safe anywhere in Lebanon.
Her journey began in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. This prompted Hezbollah, a Lebanese political and militant group, to fire rockets at Israel, and Israel responded by bombing southern Lebanon.
Israeli bombs fell close enough to Rihab’s village that the 33-year-old and her husband Said, an employee of the municipal water company, gathered their eight-year-old daughters Tiya and six-year-old Naya and fled to Rihab’s parents’ home in Dahiya. , a suburb of the capital Beirut.
For a while, life went on almost as normal in Dahia, except that Naya and Tia missed their friends, their own beds, their toys, and all the clothes they had to leave behind.
What they missed most was school, which has been replaced by online learning. They were excited when, back in August, Rihab enrolled them in a new school in Beirut and took them to buy new school uniforms.
