{"id":17293,"date":"2026-08-31T09:56:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T09:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/displacement-centers-blazing-hotspots-summer\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T09:56:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T09:56:45","slug":"displacement-centers-blazing-hotspots-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/displacement-centers-blazing-hotspots-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"How Did Displacement Centers Become Blazing Hotspots in Summer?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Sports City as a Case in Point<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the heat grew more punishing, reaching 33 degrees Celsius, with humidity levels rising until they nearly choked the breath, Maryam (a pseudonym), a woman in her forties, sits inside her tent at the displacement shelter in the Sports City in the capital, Beirut. The signs of the intense heat and exhaustion show on her face. She says: “We are worn out by this weather. Two months ago a new suffering began for us, one we never accounted for.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She adds: “We have no fans or any means of ventilation or cooling. We asked the people in charge, the Red Cross and the Ministry of Social Affairs, to provide us with fans, but they didn’t bring any \u2014 maybe because our numbers were large just as the heat started to rise. And I can’t afford to buy a fan at a time like this; it would have to be paid off in installments, too.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Electricity is absent from the place, as the woman in her forties says: “State electricity is always cut off. They run the generator for us for a few hours at night, from 8 in the evening until midnight. During that time I charge my phone and the power bank to charge my phone, but in the shared areas and the bathrooms there is solar power.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The woman had been displaced from her home in Mays al-Jabal (Bint Jbeil district), and stayed for a few days in Beirut’s southern suburb, before securing a tent for herself in the Sports City; the shelter that opened last 7 March under the supervision of the Ministry of Social Affairs, after the assault on Lebanon began on 2 March, which drove tens of thousands of families to flee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During our conversation, she recounts how she left her house at midnight: “We left in the clothes we were wearing, and the worst part is that we don’t know when we’ll return, because our village is currently occupied, so we’re trying to get through these days; right now there are many things we lack.” She still lives in her tent, some 5 months on.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A photo from the shelter in the Sports City showing a festive atmosphere <\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In her blue tent, the woman lays out mattresses and covers she had received as aid, along with a few other necessities: a small gas burner, a pot, plates, a table, a chair, some cleaning supplies and food items, and clothes placed in bags in the corner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She says she refuses to stay inside the tent, for the heat in it is extremely high, mainly because it is made of nylon and has something like a window that lets no air through: “We can’t sleep at night. We go out and sit in the courtyard where there’s air and the situation is a little more bearable; sometimes we sit in front of the tent. These tents aren’t made for people to live in \u2014 maybe they’d barely be acceptable for camping for two days, no more. The moment we step into it, we turn to water from the high humidity.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"These tents aren't made for people to live in \u2014 maybe they'd barely be acceptable for camping for two days, no more. The moment we step into it, we turn to water from the high humidity\"<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
What helps them at present is the abundance of utility water for use at the center, as displaced families have no choice but to bathe many times during the day, sit in the shade outside the tents, and shed extra clothing: “Thank God, water is available. For drinking, after the Red Cross installed a drinking-water purification unit, and for personal use, I bathe 3 or 4 times a day. We can’t do anything else to lower our body temperature, especially since there are many bathrooms available and they are clean.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bathing several times a day is one of the coping tools resorted to by the displaced who came from several southern border villages and towns adjacent to occupied Palestine, among them: Houla, Adaisseh, Markaba, Mays al-Jabal, and the villages and towns of Nabatieh, as well as swapping blankets for summer sheets. They now do without hot water when bathing: “When we first arrived we used to heat water on the gas to bathe; now there’s no need, the water is very hot from the weather.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for food, it spoils by the end of the day, since there is no refrigerator to preserve it, so she cooks only a little, no more, especially after the distribution of food inside the center came to be limited to providing a single meal a day. She says: “Every day someone goes and buys the goods from the shop. We don’t buy more than we can manage, so it doesn’t go bad. Sometimes we throw out the bundle of bread at the end of the day because of the heat.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The woman tells me how she built a useful relationship with the neighborhood shops. She contacts them via the WhatsApp application so they set aside large water bottles for her and her displaced neighbors, to freeze them a few hours before taking them, in order to keep them cold for as long as possible. Then she says: “We were forced to adapt to all of this. We were living a normal life in our home, in our freedom. I and my three children were forced to live like this, after we used to read and hear about people who lived through similar conditions and say, ‘May God help them, how do they bear it’ \u2014 we lived it and found it very hard.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite that, she considers that living “in the [Sports] City is better than staying in the schools. But we currently have no aid, especially after many people moved out to the [southern] suburb and the South,” and she comments: “But once I’m able to, I’ll look for a small house at a cheap price. This war destroyed us, and no one is helping us right now. And I am separated from my husband, with two daughters at university and a young man looking for work to support us.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
A view of the displaced people’s tents in the Sports City<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
There, where she has lived for months, her neighbor Souad Abbas (a pseudonym) suffers heat exhaustion because of her blood pressure, which sometimes rises. She says she “suffocates from the heat and can’t sleep the whole night. The heat has killed us,” while the young woman Maryam Hammoud (a pseudonym), who was nearby, says: “As hot as you can imagine \u2014 we have no fan, and the weather is fire. Instead of one tent we have two placed on top of each other, and today they’re going to put down pesticide for the mosquitoes.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At present, around 150 people are at the Sports City shelter, as the numbers of the displaced at the shelter inside the City dropped after many families returned to their towns and villages, according to the Director General of Sports Facilities, Dr. Naji Hammoud, who adds to “Silat Wassel”: “The numbers have dropped a great deal, and we still provide the same services and support as we did at peak time, when this center housed 1,900 people from displaced families.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sports City shelter is but one of many centers that still open their doors to the displaced who have not yet been able to return to their villages. According to the media officer of the Disaster and Crisis Management Room in the Beirut Governorate, Fadi Baghdadi: “There are still 51 shelters for the displaced in the capital, Beirut,” adding to “Silat Wassel”: “About 10,000 people currently live in these centers.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"We were forced to adapt to all of this. We were living a normal life in our home, in our freedom... after we used to read and hear about people who lived through similar conditions and say, 'May God help them, how do they bear it' \u2014 we lived it and found it very hard\"<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The majority of the displaced endure an extremely difficult reality in the shelters because of the continuous power cuts and the lack of cooling devices, at a time when temperatures rise with the summer, as the heat wave usually intensifies in the month of August, which further compounds the crisis of the displaced and makes them live daily challenges of another kind, especially in the shelters along the coastline because of the high heat and humidity, while the displaced are affected less in areas with tolerable temperatures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Tyre, the suffering appears similar to that of the displaced in the capital, Beirut. Abu Ali, who currently lives in the Hassan Fran school in the city, which received violent Israeli strikes throughout the last war, says: “We suffer from the heat, and the worst is that we also have no water \u2014 it keeps getting cut off, and we stand in the bathing queue for a long time,” adding to “Silat Wassel”: “In the school there are 50 rooms, each with two fans, and the solar power can’t handle it, so the electricity cuts off; sometimes the generator runs and sometimes it doesn’t, when there’s no diesel,” and he comments: “As long as the generator is off, we sit in the playing field to be able to catch our breath.” And like the rest of the centers, people complain about the food-meal situation: “It would be more useful for them to give us money and we cook.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He continues: “We are a family of 6. My sister and I had partitioned it with a sheet like a curtain, but now I’ve moved to a room of its own, since people have gone back to their villages,” and he concludes: “The Israeli cannot be trusted, but if a window opens for a lull I’ll go straight back to my village and won’t bring a single straw. I’ll accept going to sleep on the dirt with nothing at all.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the announcement of the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon and its entry into force last 20 June, and the return of a large portion of the displaced to their areas, there are still 352,793 people displaced inside Lebanon as of 6 August, while 834,651 have returned to their areas, and 22,800 internally displaced people remained (more than 53 percent of them women and girls) in 232 shelters distributed across different regions of the country, according to a report<\/a> by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued on 10 August of this year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"The Israeli cannot be trusted, but if a window opens for a lull I'll go straight back to my village and won't bring a single straw. I'll accept going to sleep on the dirt with nothing at all\"<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
For his part, the researcher at Information International, Mohammad Shams al-Din, says to “Silat Wassel”: “Around 120,000 people have not been able to return to their villages yet, most of them from the occupied areas,” and he adds: “The truth is that they are currently staying with their relatives or living in rented houses, while around 26,000 people are still inside the shelters in Beirut, Tyre, and Nabatieh \u2014 specifically the displaced of Yarin, Dhayra, Marwahin, and many other villages.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for the role of the concerned ministries, we contacted the Ministry of Social Affairs, which manages and coordinates the shelters file, but we received no answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indirectly, these numbers tell of the suffering of large numbers of the displaced, because of the high heat in this year’s hot season. But summer will end soon \u2014 this is what the displaced await, yet their fear is of having an appointment with a new crisis of another kind, as long as the security situation remains as it is, and no one knows when things will settle, and no signs of relief appear on the horizon, which means that most of them will remain in the tents of displacement, facing difficulties every day, adapting, and trying to find alternatives, until the time comes to return home.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Sports City as a Case in Point As the heat grew more punishing, reaching 33 degrees Celsius, with humidity levels rising until they nearly choked the breath, Maryam (a pseudonym), a woman in her forties, sits inside her tent at the displacement shelter in the Sports City in the capital, Beirut. The signs of the intense heat and exhaustion show on her face. She says: “We are worn out by this weather. Two months ago a new suffering began for us, one we never accounted for.” She adds: “We have no fans or any means of ventilation or cooling. We asked the people in charge, the Red Cross and the Ministry of Social Affairs, to provide us with fans, but they didn’t bring any \u2014 maybe because our numbers were large just as the heat started to rise. And I can’t afford to buy a fan at a time like this; it would have to be paid off in installments, too.”  Electricity is absent from the place, as the woman in her forties says: “State electricity is always cut off. They run the generator for us for a few hours at night, from 8 in the evening until midnight. During that time I charge my phone and the power bank to charge my phone, but in the shared areas and the bathrooms there is solar power.”  The woman had been displaced from her home in Mays al-Jabal (Bint Jbeil district), and stayed for a few days in Beirut’s southern suburb, before securing a tent for herself in the Sports City; the shelter that opened last 7 March under the supervision of the Ministry of Social Affairs, after the assault on Lebanon began on 2 March, which drove tens of thousands of families to flee.  During our conversation, she recounts how she left her house at midnight: “We left in the clothes we were wearing, and the worst part is that we don’t know when we’ll return, because our village is currently occupied, so we’re trying to get through these days; right now there are many things we lack.” She still lives in her tent, some 5 months on.  In her blue tent, the woman lays out mattresses and covers she had received as aid, along with a few other necessities: a small gas burner, a pot, plates, a table, a chair, some cleaning supplies and food items, and clothes placed in bags in the corner.  She says she refuses to stay inside the tent, for the heat in it is extremely high, mainly because it is made of nylon and has something like a window that lets no air through: “We can’t sleep at night. We go out and sit in the courtyard where there’s air and the situation is a little more bearable; sometimes we sit in front of the tent. These tents aren’t made for people to live in \u2014 maybe they’d barely be acceptable for camping for two days, no more. The moment we step into it, we turn to water from the high humidity.” “These tents aren’t made for people to live in \u2014 maybe they’d barely be acceptable for camping for two days, no more. The moment we step into it, we turn to water from the high humidity” What helps them at present is the abundance of utility water for use at the center, as displaced families have no choice but to bathe many times during the day, sit in the shade outside the tents, and shed extra clothing: “Thank God, water is available. For drinking, after the Red Cross installed a drinking-water purification unit, and for personal use, I bathe 3 or 4 times a day. We can’t do anything else to lower our body temperature, especially since there are many bathrooms available and they are clean.”  Bathing several times a day is one of the coping tools resorted to by the displaced who came from several southern border villages and towns adjacent to occupied Palestine, among them: Houla, Adaisseh, Markaba, Mays al-Jabal, and the villages and towns of Nabatieh, as well as swapping blankets for summer sheets. They now do without hot water when bathing: “When we first arrived we used to heat water on the gas to bathe; now there’s no need, the water is very hot from the weather.”  As for food, it spoils by the end of the day, since there is no refrigerator to preserve it, so she cooks only a little, no more, especially after the distribution of food inside the center came to be limited to providing a single meal a day. She says: “Every day someone goes and buys the goods from the shop. We don’t buy more than we can manage, so it doesn’t go bad. Sometimes we throw out the bundle of bread at the end of the day because of the heat.”  The woman tells me how she built a useful relationship with the neighborhood shops. She contacts them via the WhatsApp application so they set aside large water bottles for her and her displaced neighbors, to freeze them a few hours before taking them, in order to keep them cold for as long as possible. Then she says: “We were forced to adapt to all of this. We were living a normal life in our home, in our freedom. I and my three children were forced to live like this, after we used to read and hear about people who lived through similar conditions and say, ‘May God help them, how do they bear it’ \u2014 we lived it and found it very hard.”  Despite that, she considers that living “in the [Sports] City is better than staying in the schools. But we currently have no aid, especially after many people moved out to the [southern] suburb and the South,” and she comments: “But once I’m able to, I’ll look for a small house at a cheap price. This war destroyed us, and no one is helping us right<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":17289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[416,354,415],"tags":[347,359,422,357],"class_list":["post-17293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human","category-municipalities","category-rights-are-not-given-they-are-taken","tag-lebanon-en","tag-reconstruction","tag-silat_wassel-en","tag-war-en"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":7}},"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3.jpg",1366,768,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3.jpg",1366,768,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3.jpg",1366,768,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3-300x169.jpg",300,169,true],"large":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3-1024x576.jpg",1024,576,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3.jpg",1366,768,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-3.jpg",1366,768,false]},"rttpg_author":{"display_name":"\u062d\u0646\u0627\u0646 \u062d\u0645\u062f\u0627\u0646","author_link":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/author\/hanan-hamdan\/"},"rttpg_comment":0,"rttpg_category":"Human<\/a> Municipalities<\/a> Rights Are Not Given\u2026 They Are Taken<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"The Sports City as a Case in Point As the heat grew more punishing, reaching 33 degrees Celsius, with humidity levels rising until they nearly choked the breath, Maryam (a pseudonym), a woman in her forties, sits inside her tent at the displacement shelter in the Sports City in the capital, Beirut. The signs of…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silatwassel.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}