Cash-strapped Lebanese stock up on food as country plunges deeper into war

For the past year, the Lebanese people have been bracing themselves for war. Hezbollah militants have been trading fire with Israeli forces at the border, and the group's leaders and Israeli politicians have been trading threats of escalation.

Now, Israeli boots have made their way onto Lebanese soil.

Capitalising on a string of blows to Hezbollah in recent weeks, including the assassination of top leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli troops have begun inching towards Lebanon's southern borders, warning residents to evacuate their villages, and clashing with Hezbollah militants who are thwarting Israeli ground advances.

The Lebanese people, no strangers to living on the brink of war, are now in a state of total panic.

Since September 23, when Israeli airstrikes showered the southern regions, parts of the capital, as well as other villages elsewhere in the country, the numbers of those internally-displaced has rocketed from roughly 120,000 people to around a million, according to Lebanese officials.

With more than 1,000 Lebanese people killed in less than two weeks, families rushed north to get as far away from the fighting as possible. Meanwhile on Tuesday, Iranian missiles hit Tel Aviv, furthering fears of a full-scale war.

Fleeing with nothing

For many Lebanese, evacuating has meant leaving everything behind.

Heba Farahat, a 36-year-old mother of three including a newborn baby, fled her home in Nabatieh last week to Sidon, where she now shares a house with nine other people.

She said the 20-kilometre journey took her roughly 10 hours because of the traffic jam caused by the exodus of displaced people.

"I didn't have a penny on me. I left our home in which I had stocked boxes of canned food and piles of dried food to brace ourselves for what's to come. But as an invasion became a matter of time, it made no sense to stay," she told TRT World.

Farahat explained how her family had to live on "bites of bread" for days until they received aid, having fled their homes with nothing but the clothes on their back "and with the few dimes we had in our bank accounts given that it was the end of the month."

The deteriorating security situation is crushing a population already scrambling to make ends meet. The local currency had been unable to recover from an economic slump that began in 2019, and was compounded by the impact of Covid-19 and a massive port explosion in 2020, followed by years of political divisions and bickering.

In the past five years, the Lebanese lira has lost over 90 percent of its value, making life difficult for people who are now struggling further to keep afloat amidst a war.

Fear of targeting roads

For the past 10 days, grocery stores have experienced “panic” purchasing of food items throughout Lebanon, as main roads witnessed a constant stream of vehicles loaded with people heading from south to north.

Meanwhile, the sapped government is trying to reassure the population of six million people that their needs of flour and legumes will be covered for up to five months, and that medical aid is coming in from European and Arab countries, according to statements by Lebanon's caretaker minister of economy Amin Salam.

He, and heads of syndicates managing bread and other food supplies, urged the masses not to hoard goods.

But many Lebanese families continue to hoard, driven as much by fear as by a lack of trust in the government, as well as due to previous experience with Israel. The country's former "brief incursions" in Lebanon have often led to far more lengthy aggressions.

In 1996 and 2006, Israeli air forces targeted road networks to cut off all supply routes linking Lebanon's north and south, according to Saeed Quzah, a former army general, who spoke to TRT World.

"In the case of a ground invasion, and to isolate the battlefield of southern Lebanon, Israel resorts to bombing bridges, especially vital ones like that crossing the Litani River, which cuts through Lebanon," he said.

Twenty-nine year old Ayah Zareen said price inflation of goods by "opportunistic merchants" amidst a surge in demand, along with fear that the roads would be once again targeted by Israeli airstrikes, have driven her to stockpile as many food items as she can.

"I've purchased a lot of legumes and beans, flour, sugar, cleaning products, water and sanitation pads, which are already running short in the supermarkets," said the resident of the mountainous Aley region, who is also expecting to receive family members fleeing other parts of the country.

"I wasn't going to wait for the roads to get cut off by attacks," she added.

Pressure of displacement

As schools and other refugee centres fill up with displaced people in regions deemed "safer" and farther away from the violence, consumption has spiked in these areas, with stores running low on goods.

But this is not indicative of short supplies, head of the Supermarket Owners Syndicate Nabil Fahad told TRT World.

"Pressure on food did surge in some areas, but the stock is sufficient for several months and all goods are regularly secured and the supply within Lebanese territory is proceeding smoothly," he said, adding that the syndicate is working to keep prices in check.

In recent media statements, Economy Minister Amin Salam said that as long as marine movement is uninterrupted in Beirut and Tripoli ports, there is no need to worry.

"The real fear is of threats of a marine blockade (on Lebanon), which would scare exporters and shipping companies from docking in Lebanese ports. This would be one of the catastrophes," Salam said in a televised interview with Al-Aarabiya.

For now, Lebanese people are taking Salam and other officials' comments with a grain of salt.

Nour Ghreezi, a 33-year-old in Aley, has experienced firsthand the dearth of supplies in the market. "I'm unable to find enough water, bread or canned food. And the little I found is doubled in price because of the internally displaced people," she said.

According to official figures, nearly 60,000 displaced people arrived in Mount Lebanon's six districts which includes Aley, a city with a population of roughly 70,000 people.

"I don't know how I'm going to prepare for this war we're living through," Ghreezi said anxiously.

This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.