Speaker 1: On a street in downtown Bay Route. There's a five
Speaker 1: story building, an old derelict hotel. It was empty for
Speaker 1: eight years until recently when hundreds of displaced people started
Speaker 1: living there.
Speaker 2: People here ends up building. Some of them don't have
Speaker 2: a LASiS to l anywhere on it.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not their story of fleeing southern
Speaker 1: Bay Route to find safety in the city's busy neighborhoods
Speaker 1: is being repeated across Lebanon right now. As Israel's bombardments continue.
Speaker 1: There's been a massive effort to help shelter the one
Speaker 1: million displace Lebanese. But in this building and in many others,
Speaker 1: they aren't welcome. With religious divides from the Civil War
Speaker 1: still palpable decades on.
Speaker 3: The police have just shown up, so of course they
Speaker 3: were into the entrance of the apartment building where all
Speaker 3: of the women have been standing looking.
Speaker 1: Standing from Schwartz Media.
Speaker 4: I'm Jones.
Speaker 1: This is seven am today journalist Haidi pet on the
Speaker 1: old Wounds being reopened in Lebanon right now. It's Friday,
Speaker 1: November one, So Hardie, you're in their route right now,
Speaker 1: and I believe you flew there right around the time
Speaker 1: that things were escalating and many people were trying to leave.
Speaker 1: So what was the journey like?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3: One of the strangest flights I think I've taken. So
Speaker 3: I flew in from Paris. There were nine of us
Speaker 3: on the plane and we're all sort of seated, spaced apart.
Speaker 3: So it was myself, a journalist, a priest, and a
Speaker 3: doctor for FSF, which really felt like the beginnings were bad,
Speaker 3: you know, like the three horsemen of the apocalypse, something
Speaker 3: something terrible has happened in your country. If all of
Speaker 3: the flights out are full, all of the flights there
Speaker 3: are empty save for journalists, doctors and priests. So you
Speaker 3: fly into the airport in Beirroot. There's only one airport
Speaker 3: and it's on the coastal strip just south of Beairut,
Speaker 3: and so it's directly next to what is called the
Speaker 3: Dahir Beirut Southern suburbs, which has been the focus of
Speaker 3: a lot of the air campaign. And so my flight
Speaker 3: I didn't actually see any bombing as I came in.
Speaker 3: People have and there have been flights landing within sort
Speaker 3: of ten or fifteen minutes of large explosions quite close
Speaker 3: to the airport. So you get in and as soon
Speaker 3: as the airport doors opened into the night, the first
Speaker 3: thing I heard was a surveillance drone and the first
Speaker 3: thing I smelled was smoke from strikes that had hit
Speaker 3: the southern suburbs just an hour or so before.
Speaker 1: And so for the past year, in a general sense,
Speaker 1: Israel has been a war with Hesbola. Tell me a
Speaker 1: bit about what has been happening in Lebanon on the
Speaker 1: ground for the past twelve months.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so after the seventh of October when Hamas in
Speaker 3: Gaza launched that assault on Israel, immediately afterwards, Hezbollah, which
Speaker 3: is a militant group but also a political party here
Speaker 3: in Lebanon, they opened what they call a solidarity front,
Speaker 3: the idea being to harass Israel, meaning that they couldn't
Speaker 3: deploy all of their troops to Gaza. They had to
Speaker 3: keep troops on the northern border for fear that that
Speaker 3: crosswater rocket fire might escalate into a ground invasion or
Speaker 3: something more serious. And so about sixty thousand people have
Speaker 3: been evacuated from villages in the north of Israel, and
Speaker 3: roughly double that number have also been evacuated from Lebanon.
Speaker 4: So we'd seen this kind of controlled.
Speaker 3: Tit for tat where it seemed like there were rules
Speaker 3: of engagement. Neither Israel nor Hisbila was necessarily looking to esca.
Speaker 3: Late there were a couple of assassinations of Hesbela figures
Speaker 3: over the summer, but everything changed in September.
Speaker 4: The unprecedented attack in the Middle East. Thousands of pagers
Speaker 4: belonged to members of Hesbela exploded across the country, injuring
Speaker 4: thousands of people.
Speaker 5: Your Times is reporting Israel hid explosives in those pages
Speaker 5: and then triggered the explosion simultaneously.
Speaker 3: And that indicated a real escalation, a real step change.
Speaker 3: Ten days after that, Israel assassinated the leader of Hesbela
Speaker 3: Sun Australia, who had an underground bunker in the south
Speaker 3: of Bairut.
Speaker 6: Tremendous devastation as the Israeli forces hunted down one man,
Speaker 6: the leader of Hezbola, who'd be meeting deep underground. Parts
Speaker 6: of Dahir in the Bay southern suburbs have been reduced
Speaker 6: to ashes.
Speaker 3: And then shortly after that, Israeli troops launched ground operation
Speaker 3: and crossed the border into southern Lembdon and I'd engaging
Speaker 3: directly with Hespala fighters.
Speaker 4: On the ground.
Speaker 3: More than twenty six hundred Libanies have been killed since
Speaker 3: October the seventh last year, but most of those have
Speaker 3: been in the last month. A quarter of the country
Speaker 3: is under evacuation orders and about the quarter of the
Speaker 3: population a million people has been displaced.
Speaker 1: And so once you touch down in they route in
Speaker 1: this almost empty airplane. What did you do and where
Speaker 1: did you go? Yeah, so I headed into downtown. I
Speaker 1: walked along the Corniche, which is this beautiful waterfront promenade
Speaker 1: that heads out into the Mediterranean Sea on the western
Speaker 1: edge of Beirut. And just inland from the Corniche or
Speaker 1: all of these displaced people are sheltering, is a neighborhood
Speaker 1: called Hamra, where you've got hotels, its densely populated apartment buildings,
Speaker 1: its banks, its businesses, and it is absolutely hacked.
Speaker 4: At the moment. There are cars double parked.
Speaker 3: On every street, either people sleeping in their cars or
Speaker 3: they're sleeping on the streets. There are also a number
Speaker 3: of abandoned or empty apartment buildings, and one of them
Speaker 3: was this empty hotel called the hammers Star, which is
Speaker 3: on the main drag through Hamra. It was clear that
Speaker 3: displaced people had taken up residents in there. You could
Speaker 3: see from the street that there was washing hung on
Speaker 3: the balconies and belonging kind of piled there, and there
Speaker 3: were always a number of people in the street outside.
Speaker 3: Volunteers had started coming and delivering hundreds of meals every
Speaker 3: day for people I.
Speaker 4: Know, I'd say it, who know, I understand.
Speaker 2: So tell me a bit.
Speaker 3: I got talking to a few people, and the first
Speaker 3: people I are went too into were two young siblings.
Speaker 3: I meet with my sister, she's sixty and my family
Speaker 3: is not together. A girl named Farah, she's sixteen, and
Speaker 3: her brother, whatddy, it's nice to you, it's really Their
Speaker 3: family is originally from Bulbeck, which is in the east
Speaker 3: of Lebanon, but they had grown up in Dahia and
Speaker 3: lived their entire lives, and Dahia is, of course one
Speaker 3: of the main targets of the bombing campaign that we've
Speaker 3: seen broken Four's home in Daha hasn't been destroyed yet,
Speaker 3: but areas really close by have been bombed. She said,
Speaker 3: you know, she could hear it in the night. The
Speaker 3: house would shake and it was terrifying.
Speaker 2: We listened, Tom, it's so scary, and.
Speaker 3: So yeah, her and her brother and her grandmother decided that,
Speaker 3: you know, it was only a matter of time and
Speaker 3: they needed to leave. How much notice did you have?
Speaker 3: Was it a big rush?
Speaker 2: It's so sad that we'll see that here bomb being destroyed,
Speaker 2: not building. We miss our our life, our life and people,
Speaker 2: and that here are so simple, so good, so funny.
Speaker 3: You know, they were doing their very best to kind
Speaker 3: of hold onto some semblance of normality. Pharah had obviously
Speaker 3: taken the time. Every morning she'd done you know, she
Speaker 3: had this like perfect winged eyeliner that she'd put on.
Speaker 4: What did you.
Speaker 3: Bring with you when you came here?
Speaker 6: Clauses?
Speaker 2: Of course, the important thing brushing tears our makeup.
Speaker 3: I got talking to a number of people and they
Speaker 3: explained that, you know, they had nowhere else to go.
Speaker 3: And so they entered the building about a month previously,
Speaker 3: and they'd had some contact with the owners. So the
Speaker 3: owner is a local judge. Her family owns the building.
Speaker 3: The brother had been down and they'd had a discussion.
Speaker 3: They'd arranged for a generator, they'd arranged for water deliveries,
Speaker 3: and they'd pulled their money together, all of these displaced
Speaker 3: families in order to pay for the water deliveries and
Speaker 3: somewhaticome of electricity and things like that, and so I
Speaker 3: think they felt that they would have been allowed to stay.
Speaker 3: For whatever reason, the owners of the building changed their mind,
Speaker 3: and so they came down and said, in forty eight
Speaker 3: hours you will have to leave.
Speaker 4: The police will be.
Speaker 3: Coming on a Monday morning in order to enforce the
Speaker 3: eviction notice. So the police came down the road about
Speaker 3: an hour later, a massive police with riot shields, and
Speaker 3: things got pretty hairy pretty quickly. So they pushed all
Speaker 3: of these women and children out from the entrance to
Speaker 3: the apartment building. I saw people hit in the face
Speaker 3: with riot shields. And then what actually happened is the
Speaker 3: police then shut the doors of the building and locked
Speaker 3: themselves inside.
Speaker 7: Has heaving gas sin he think people sidan, there are
Speaker 7: women women, they're not men inside.
Speaker 6: There are women.
Speaker 2: They got done they want to.
Speaker 3: You know. There was rocks thrown, people were throwing things
Speaker 3: down from the upper floors of the building. Things got
Speaker 3: quite violent very quickly, and I was horrified to see
Speaker 3: through the view find her of my camera being carried
Speaker 3: out by her brother, like bleeding profusely from the head.
Speaker 3: Her brother put her on the back of a motorbike
Speaker 3: and rushed her down to the American Hospital here in Berry, where.
Speaker 4: She had to be stitched up.
Speaker 1: Coming up after the break, the sectarian divides further splintering Lebanon.
Speaker 1: Had he being evicted from an abandoned building in your
Speaker 1: own country during a time of war, that seems unexpectedly harsh.
Speaker 1: Do we know why the landlord changed their mind? Why
Speaker 1: they decided that these people could not stay?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I've reached out to the landlord and she
Speaker 3: hasn't responded to my attempts to contact her. But I
Speaker 3: asked a number of people what changed. The people who
Speaker 3: were staying there told me that they'd offered to pay
Speaker 3: rent and they'd been refused. And I asked one man, Wahid,
Speaker 3: who it was clear he was a bit of a
Speaker 3: community leader. I asked him, why do you think that
Speaker 3: she changed her mind? Why are you being evicted? And
Speaker 3: he just looked at me and he said, because was
Speaker 3: she are? Why did she why would she not accept
Speaker 3: your money?
Speaker 2: Let me tell you, Because we are a Shia.
Speaker 1: That's all right. And Hezbola is a sheer organization.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a military group, it's a political organization, but
Speaker 3: it is largely Shea and its support base, again is
Speaker 3: largely Sheer. So far, She's from an area in the
Speaker 3: south of Beirut called the Dahia. It's a ten or
Speaker 3: fifteen minute drive from where I am, and it's often
Speaker 3: described as a as a Hezbola stronghold, but it's a
Speaker 3: civilian neighborhood where hundreds of thousands of people live and work,
Speaker 3: and it's largely Shea. But it's not exclusively Sheer. But
Speaker 3: the idea behind the Israeli military attacking Daha is not new.
Speaker 3: There is actually an official Israeli military strategy called the
Speaker 3: Dahia doctrine, which we first saw during the two thousand
Speaker 3: and six war what's known as you know the Seconds
Speaker 3: of Lebanese Israeli War, and it explicitly involved disproportionate attacks
Speaker 3: on civilian areas through strikes on What Israel will say is,
Speaker 3: you know, is hesbela military infrastructure.
Speaker 5: I say to you, the people of Lebanon, free your
Speaker 5: country from Kusbala so that this war can end. Free
Speaker 5: your country from Kusbala.
Speaker 3: But what has happened in the last month is quite explicit.
Speaker 3: So the Israeli Prime Minister of Benjamin Attanyahu has said
Speaker 3: that essentially the Lebanese people need to rise up against
Speaker 3: Hesbela or Lebanon will face destruction like Gaza.
Speaker 5: You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls
Speaker 5: into the abyss of a long war that will lead
Speaker 5: to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.
Speaker 3: And so now the idea is to put so much
Speaker 3: pressure on Shia and on civilian supporters of Hesbela through
Speaker 3: air strikes and through these military operations, that that support
Speaker 3: Hesbla among those people would falter.
Speaker 1: And does it seem like that strategy is working, that
Speaker 1: support for Hezbola is diminishing.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think only time will tell. It's only
Speaker 3: been a month.
Speaker 4: There's been.
Speaker 3: Concerns about rising sectarian tensions here in Lebanon since the
Speaker 3: war escalated.
Speaker 4: There's obviously a long history of that.
Speaker 3: There was a civil war for fifteen years in this
Speaker 3: country between different sects, and so what has happened is
Speaker 3: that when Shia from the south of Lebanon or from
Speaker 3: the Dahir, from Beirut southern suburbs have fled those areas
Speaker 3: when it has become intolerable or unsafe for them to
Speaker 3: be there. Sometimes those air strikes have followed them. So
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks ago, a number of displaced people
Speaker 3: had moved to a village called Aitu, which is in
Speaker 3: the mountains here in Beirut.
Speaker 4: It's a predominantly Christian village, and so those.
Speaker 3: People moved there because they thought that they would be
Speaker 3: safe there. And there was a massive air strike on
Speaker 3: a building that a number of displaced families had taken
Speaker 3: shelter in. And so there's concern among all different people
Speaker 3: in Lebanon here that if you take in sheer families
Speaker 3: and you don't know who they are, or what their
Speaker 3: political affiliations are, whether they have any contact with Hesbella's
Speaker 3: political or military wing, whether your home, you're building, your property,
Speaker 3: your village, your community will also become a target.
Speaker 1: And I imagine that is really only stoking these kind
Speaker 1: of long standing divisions that already exist within Lebanese society.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. You will always find people within Lebanon who
Speaker 3: hate Hesbela, who have always hated Hesbla. You know, I
Speaker 3: ran into somebody in the street actually down on the corniche,
Speaker 3: and he said to me, you know, every time I
Speaker 3: hear the bombing at night, and Dahir I say thank
Speaker 3: you for cleaning up our country. But what I've also
Speaker 3: seen is incredible solidarity of grassroots organizations, volunteers, groups of
Speaker 3: friends who have mobilized to fill the gaps left by
Speaker 3: the Lebanese state and who are caring for displaced people
Speaker 3: of Sunni or Christian communities, and volunteers who are cooking
Speaker 3: hundreds and hundreds of meals per day and bringing it
Speaker 3: to these formal and informal shelters.
Speaker 1: So what will happen to Fara and the other people
Speaker 1: who were evicted from the hotel building? Where will they
Speaker 1: go now?
Speaker 3: So they have now been scattered across beir Roots. Some
Speaker 3: of them went back to the streets, others have joined
Speaker 3: other informal shelters. The police did make an attempt to
Speaker 3: register everyone and say that they would find places for everyone,
Speaker 3: But the.
Speaker 4: Problem is that a lot of these shelters they're just full.
Speaker 3: Sofara and Rudich are with their grandmother. They're now in
Speaker 3: a hotel in downtown Hamra. They're paying twenty five dollars
Speaker 3: a night, which is way more than they can afford.
Speaker 3: They're not sure how many more days they can keep
Speaker 3: that uptally, but I'm grateful that they didn't go back
Speaker 3: to Dahia, which is what Fara initially said that they
Speaker 3: would do.
Speaker 7: So where will you go now?
Speaker 2: I would go to Dahir And.
Speaker 3: For now they're safe, but they're not sure how much
Speaker 3: longer they can keep that up or how long this
Speaker 3: war will go on for.
Speaker 1: Well, how doi thank you so much for your time today.
Speaker 4: Who's nice to talk to you.
Speaker 1: Also in the news today, the Australian Competition and Consumer
Speaker 1: Commission has taken legal action against Optus, alleging it sold
Speaker 1: phone products to hundreds of vulnerable customers. The ah Triple
Speaker 1: See alleges that customers often did not want or need
Speaker 1: the services, and that Optis then pursued them for debts
Speaker 1: heated with those sales. Many of the customers were living
Speaker 1: with disability, diminished cognitive capacity or learning difficulties. And as
Speaker 1: more politicians come under scrutiny for their perks in the job,
Speaker 1: Opposition leader Peter Dutton has admitted to using Gina Ryanhart's
Speaker 1: private jet to travel to a Barley bombing memorial. Speaking
Speaker 1: at a press conference in Perth, Dutton said his office
Speaker 1: requested the ride between Rockhampton, Sidney and Mackay in November
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. Earlier in the week, when asked if
Speaker 1: he had ever personally requested flights from Gina Reinhart, Dutton
Speaker 1: responded no. When asked about this discrepancy, he clarified that
Speaker 1: it was his office who asked for the flight and
Speaker 1: not him personally. Seven Am is a daily show from
Speaker 1: Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper. It's made by Atticus Basto,
Speaker 1: Shane Anderson, Chris Enngate, Daniel James, Eric Jensen, me Ruby Jones,
Speaker 1: Sarah mcvee, Travis Evans and Sultanfetcho. Thanks for listening, Sa