‘I wasn’t able to bring many toys with me, only one. I just wish for the war to end’

Around 400,000 children have been displaced in Lebanon due to Israel’s bombardment and invasion. They show the few precious toys they were able to save, and share their dreams of one day returning home. Alex Croft reports

- Alex Croft

Clutching a pack of Uno cards and a Little Mermaid colouring book, eight-year-old Nour* was forced to leave her home in southern Lebanon as Israeli forces bombarded the region.

Clothes were the only other item she carried as her family fled their town and joined more than one million internally displaced people fleeing Israeli attacks, which have razed villages to the ground.

These treasured possessions, Nour says, were gifts from her mum and dad. ‘‘They mean so much to me,’’ she says from a collective shelter in Beirut where she now lives with her sister Tala* and mother Sarah*.

It is a story all too common in Lebanon’s 632 collective shelters for refugees, where nearly 130,000 people are residing as they seek safety from ongoing shelling near their homes, which has continued despite a ceasefire agreement being extended for another 45 days.

‘‘My children always say, ‘We want to go home. When are we going back home and back to school?’ They tell me they just want to play in the garden again,’’ says Sarah, 31, Nour’s mother.

‘‘Sometimes my children do not express how they feel in words, but I can notice that they are scared. My daughter puts a pillow over her head when she sleeps, and she asks me to go with her to the toilet.

‘‘They still remember the sound of the warplanes.’’

Since the conflict erupted on 2 March, when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in response to the launch of the US-Israeli war on Iran, at least 3,020 people have been killed in Lebanon, with another 8,824 wounded, according to the Lebanese health ministry. A total of 211 children have died.