Seven Women and a Child, in Fear

I was the only one they allowed in. They refused help from others, wary of the world outside their fragile circle. Seven women and a girl child, displaced from their home in the Bekaa, now hidden away in a remote part of Keserwan.

An untraveled road led to their dwelling. A one-room house up on a hill. 

Fear clung to them like a second skin. The fear of being without a male protector, the fear of trusting the wrong person, the fear of never returning home.

Fatima1 was the anchor of the family. She arrived with her daughter, who in turn arrived with her own daughter—a girl no older than four, wide-eyed and too young to understand the weight of their displacement. Fatima's sons had stayed behind, risking their lives to guard what little they had left from looters and thieves. The war had not only brought destruction, but it had also brought lawlessness.

With Fatima was her mother, and her mother’s mother. Four generations of women, all carrying burdens they never chose. The youngest among them, the child, could not well grasp the extent of this catastrophe her family is living. But the oldest, the grandmother, whom I came to call, like everyone else, “Teta”, carried the memory of too many wars. Her wrinkled hands shook when she spoke, but her voice remained steady as if she had seen this all before.

“There is no safe place for women like us,” Fatima told me one night when the others were asleep. 

• 1

   Fatima is not her real name. It has been changed to protect her identity and for confidentiality.

They had fled silently, without calling for help or looking back. They did not mourn what they had left behind—at least not in front of each other. But I could see it in their eyes, in the way they clung to their routine, in the way they rationed food even when there was plenty. It was as if they were preparing for another escape, another loss.

“Teta” rarely spoke, but when she did, her words carried a weight none of us could ignore. One evening, as the wind howled outside, she whispered, 

Fatima would not cry in front of me, but her hands trembled when she poured tea. Her daughter sat silently, stroking her child’s hair as if trying to convince herself that she could keep her safe. And the child, oblivious to the weight of the world, played with a piece of string, giggling at her small games.

War does not just destroy homes. It uproots people, fractures families, plants fear where certainty used to be. And for this family—seven women and a child-the fear of the unknown was just as heavy as the war itself

It was not just displacement they carried. It was the burden of generations, a cycle that seemed to have no end. The women before them had also fled, feared, also endured. It was as if fate kept striking them, again and again, as if history, even when it repeated itself, never spared them. Their suffering was passed down, not as stories but as lived experience, a reminder that war does not age, it simply finds new victims.

Their story is one among thousands. And yet, it is theirs alone.

Lebanese-Israeli War 2024.

War is often told through headlines, casualty counts, and sweeping narratives of national loss. Within these generalized accounts, the individual, and especially the woman, usually folds into a collective experience that overlooks her personal suffering, resilience, and survival. This project seeks to break that silence by documenting the voices of displaced women, whose lives were irrevocably changed by war but whose stories rarely find space in public memory.

Through a series of deeply personal testimonies gathered from women in shelters and displacement homes in Lebanon’s underprivileged urban peripheries, particularly in regions like the Bekaa and Baalback, we aim to highlight the layered and often invisible impact of conflict on women. These areas receive minimal attention from the government, and many are underdeveloped, with weak infrastructure making it more difficult to live a dignified life.

The testimonies collected in this project are not just about displacement; they are about motherhood under fire, generational trauma, loss without closure, and strength in the face of abandonment. They reflect how women carry war in their bodies, silences, and quiet acts of endurance. By centering their voices, we challenge the dominant, family-centered narratives of war and bring forward a gendered lens that reveals the intimate and often overlooked dimensions of conflict.

This project is both an act of documentation and of recognition. It insists that women’s experiences during war are not secondary; instead, they are central. Their voices deserve to be heard not as background noise to the chaos, but as the heartbeat of survival itself.