Beirut blast tragedy continues
Beirut – As Syrian refugees, Moayad Obeid and his family had it hard even before the massive explosion that tore through Beirut in August last year, killing his 26-year-old brother Ayman.
In the six months since, life has become all but impossible.
As well as supporting his own family Obeid, who makes the equivalent of about $100 (about R1 500) a month working odd jobs in Beirut, now sends money to his brother’s widow and baby daughter, who returned to Syria after the blast.
Six months on, he has still received no aid.
“Everyone’s story is harder than the other, Lebanese or Syrian, we are all suffering,” Obeid told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “But I will do anything, even sit on the street and beg, if it means I can feed my brother’s daughter.”
Syrian refugees were among those worst hit by the 4 August port explosion that killed 200 people, injured 6 000 and left 300 000 homeless.
They made up a significant proportion of those killed, with 41 confirmed dead and two still missing, says Kayan Tlais, who represents the victims’ families.
Most received little aid and struggled to afford food and shelter even before the blast. Now, with many Lebanese families also having lost everything, aid agencies say what little help was available is having to stretch even further.
Fadi Hallisso is the director of Basmeh and Zeitooneh, an organisation that has helped 4 000 families, most of them Syrian, after the blast.
Since the explosion, he said, his organisation had been getting hundreds of new calls every day from people desperate for food, rent and medical aid.
“The situation is dire,” he said. “We’re witnessing a new phenomenon of Syrian and Lebanese men abandoning their families because they can’t provide for them anymore. There’s a lot more cases of women telling us their husbands have disappeared.”
Many Lebanese were hit by a financial crisis that began in 2019 and has sent prices soaring. And some have become less tolerant of the Syrians, who have boosted the population by about 1.5 million to some six million.
About a quarter of the country’s Syrian refugee population lives in the capital, a city that has suffered the triple whammy of economic crisis, a major explosion and a pandemic.
A nationwide Covid-19 lockdown with a round-the-clock curfew has made things more difficult for those trying to help, while further squeezing those in need.
“It’s looking very grim,” Hallisso said. “By the end of February, we will spend every last penny we have and there is nothing on the horizon, so I’m not sure if we’ll be able to continue.”