Rihab Faour ran away from home. Then she ran away again. Then a third. Then the fourth. And for the fourth time, a year after the first, she could not feel safe anywhere in Lebanon, having fled for so long from Israeli bombs.
Her journey began in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. This led Hezbollah, a Lebanese political and military group, to fire rockets at Israel and bomb southern Lebanon.
The Israeli bombs fell so close to Rihab’s village that her 33-year-old husband Said, an employee at the city’s water company, gathered their daughters Tia, 8, and Naya, 6, and took refuge at Rihab’s parents’ home in Dahi’eh. , a suburb of the capital Beirut.
In Dahieh, life went on almost normally for a while, except that Naya and Tia missed their friends, their bed, their toys, and all the clothes they had to leave behind.
Most of all, they missed going to school, which had been replaced by online learning. They were thrilled last August when Rihab enrolled them in a new school in Beirut and took them to buy new uniforms.
