Najib al Amil, a 72-year-old priest in the Lebanese town of Rmeish, on the border with Israel, raced to harvest his olive trees as the sound of shelling rumbled in the distance. Soon, his olive groves could be a battlefield, he worried, and there would be no trees left to harvest.
“We put our faith in God,” he said.
Only a short distance from his home, clashes have been intensifying between Israel and Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militant group that dominates the surrounding countryside.
The skirmishes have raised fears of a wider conflict that could further devastate Lebanon after years of crisis and that could push Israel to fight on another front even as it prepares for an anticipated ground war in the Gaza Strip. Israel has already evacuated more than 152,000 people near the border, while more than 20,000 people have so far been displaced in Lebanon, according to the U.N. migration agency.
Rmeish, a Maronite Christian town that, two weeks ago, was home to 10,000 people, has become a ghost town. More than three-quarters of its population has fled. Schools are closed. Shops are empty. And the only medical facility that remains open is a field hospital staffed by a skeleton crew of volunteer doctors and nurses.
Even before the fighting, the town was surviving on just a few hours of state-provided electricity per day. Now, residents are running out of fuel for their generators, too.
“The village needs help,” Milad al Alam, the town’s mayor, said over the phone. “The government is just not available for us,” he said, adding that they were also running out of lifesaving medication.
Lebanon, which endured years of civil war and has fought multiple conflicts with Israel, has struggled further since a financial meltdown in 2019 precipitated by years of corruption and mismanagement sunk the country into one of the world’s worst economic crises in 150 years.
