Beirut’s Dahieh Resists Urbicide

Marwa* is a 31-year-old woman raised in Chiyah, one of Dahieh’s neighborhoods. Her grandparents and great-grandparents were from there as well. “I had a sweet childhood, the way I remember it”, she says. “I was aware that Dahieh was different from other places in Beirut.” During the 33-day war in 2006, she was 11-years old. “That war was one of the defining moments for me that shaped my political awareness. It cemented the idea already long taught in our community, that Israel is the enemy we have to fight against”. Although she grew up in a secular household and around friends whose families had non-religious backgrounds, there was always the acknowledgment that resistance against Israel is the highest honor. “It is a form of love for one’s people. I was very aware of this”, she says.

Marwa* works with migrant communities in Lebanon, many of whom live in Dahieh. The suburb is a residentially dense and diverse area, inhabited by migrants and refugees, along with Lebanese people from all sects. During the 66-day war in 2024, and the March 2026 Israeli aggression, she continued her work with migrant women workers, whose lives were turned upside down as Israel razed Dahieh and south Lebanon with airstrikes.

Dahieh has a particular socio-political and economic character that serves as a starting point in understanding the magnitude of Israel’s attacks on it, and why they are considered as repeated acts of urbicide that ripple across Lebanon.

Israel follows the principle of disproportionate force and the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure as collective punishment. This military strategy was termed “The Dahieh Doctrine” by former Israeli Chief of Northern Command Gadi Eisenkot in 2008. The pattern of evacuation warnings and airstrikes that targeted the residentially dense area in 2024 shows that Israel attempted the intentional destruction of symbolic and material forms of urban life in the suburb. More than 469 buildings were bombed since 2 January 2024 with the first attack on Dahieh since the 2006 war. With the ongoing Israeli bombing campaign, these numbers continue to grow.

The history of Dahieh echoes across decades, marked by Israel's recurrent attacks and the country’s internal political violence. Displacement from south Lebanon started in the 1950s, trade with Lebanon was severed, impacting the livelihoods and safety of the residents of the south, who then fled to Beirut’s peripheries, Dahieh being one of them. Prior to this wave of displacement, Dahieh was a large rural land, composed of villages that are now urbanised neighborhoods. “My grandparents and great grandparents witnessed Dahieh’s transformation into a city. I could always sense their grief as they lived through their village’s slow disappearance”, Marwa* says, “but Dahieh always had a rural feel to it. Everyone knew everyone”.

Another wave of displacement took place in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli military reached Beirut, clashing with organised resistance factions and coalitions. During the 15-year Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Beirut and its suburbs lived through Israeli occupation and internal fighting. Almost two decades of occupation until they year 2000 had forced many displaced southern families to establish lives in Dahieh, and they are there until this day.

With Israel’s second escalation in Lebanon in March 2026, its strategy for the destruction of Dahieh takes a different shape that shows various layers of urbicide. On 5 March, the IDF issued a large-scale evacuation warning displacing around 700,000 residents across 19 square kilometers, an area larger than the entire city of Beirut. With this, the Israeli forces intensified their war on the suburb through mass displacement, the paralysis of social and economic life, psychological warfare, and continuous attempts to incite internal sectarian tension across Christian, Sunni and Shia sects.

Dahieh is the home of 1.2 to 1.4 million residents who live, work, and study in it. It connects together the north, south, the Bekaa, and central Beirut, through 37,000 businesses, 500 factories, and 300,000 warehouses, establishing itself as a commercial and economic hub essential to Lebanon’s economy. This means that when Dahieh incurs a violent loss, the impact spills over across the country’s social, economic and political fabric.

Youssef Wahid, born in the 1960s, spent his life selling men’s clothes across Beirut. “If you know how to shop, you know how to sell”, says the seasoned business owner and salesman, who is the President of the Merchants Committee of Souk Moawad, a renowned street market in Dahieh. It is at the center, connecting all of its neighborhoods and offering an entrance to the area.

Souk Moawad is Dahieh’s first commercial neighborhood, established in 1992, two years after the end of the Lebanese Civil War. “I’ve been here since 2004. My siblings and I now have shops all over the area”, says Wahid. His family’s business history is haunted by war. His father had a shop in Souk Sursock in Downtown Beirut which was destroyed during the civil war. “We then opened shops in other neighborhoods all over Beirut, and started importing clothes”. Wahid’s brother built a warehouse in Haret Hreik, a prominent neighborhood in Dahieh, that was also damaged in the 2006 war. “We lost everything back then. The warehouse was our business’ headquarters”, he explains. As a means of survival and strategic business planning, the five siblings rebuilt businesses in several areas, “that way if one is struck, we don’t all lose everything all at once.”

As a representative of the Souk’s merchants, Wahid worked to improve its conditions and advocate for merchants’ needs with municipalities and ministries. As of 2026, the Souk included around 190 commercial businesses and liberal professions.

The Souk had years of prosperity since its founding. “It was established as the country was being rebuilt, and Dahieh thrived with it. The late Rafik Hariri supported us”, Wahid says, “but the situation started deteriorating in 2005, and worsened after the 33-day war in 2006”. Following the internationally-backed National Reconciliation Accord or “Taif Agreement” that ended the civil war in 1989, late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005, led the reconstruction of the war-torn country. Some 15 years later, Wahid and his siblings lost their life’s earnings following the 2019 financial and economic collapse. The same reconstruction-focused economic policies implemented following the civil wars that aimed to resuscitate Lebanon, inevitably harmed its economy due to aggressive financialisation and heavy reliance on foreign capital to support public sectors through public-private partnerships. Wahid is one of thousands whose bank deposits were frozen and drastically devalued as inflation rapidly increased.

He lived through wars and crises and attests that merchants and business owners did not yield. “We immediately got to work”. He notes that on one occasion, prior to Eid, a Muslim religious holiday that coincided with the end of the 2006 war, former Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, assassinated in September 2024, supported the merchants’ committee by lighting the Souk in celebration. “If the Souk sleeps, so do the residents”, Wahid describes, highlighting the significance of the Souk in Dahieh’s mundane life. Neighborhood Souks are Dahieh’s backbone. They prosper through community solidarity and steadfastness following wars and throughout crises. “We rely on each other, shoulder to shoulder”, he proudly says.

Wahid now reflects on the 2024 Israeli escalation that caused heavy destruction in the suburb. Like many salesmen in Dahieh, Wahid opened his shop every day. Israeli evacuation warnings were different back then, and allowed a semblance of ordinary life to continue. Specific buildings were marked as targets, and people would evacuate and then return after the strike. “Where would people go? Their life’s work is here. We would see a partially destroyed building with a renovated shop at the ground floor, surrounded by flattened buildings in the same street.” However, the Souk is now in ruins,  due to the ongoing manic and unpredictable pattern of Israeli strikes, as Wahid said, describing that the third of Souk Moawad has been damaged.

Notably, Dahieh is particular in its geographic and socio-political position in Lebanon, as well as its rich economy and demography. Along southern Lebanon, it hosts anti-colonial resistance as a practice, ideology and infrastructure that organises public life. Both materially and socially constructed borders separate it from the rest of the country, maintained by sect-based, partisan and class identities, that create a perceived difference from the rest of Lebanon’s major cities and regions. One pillar of these differences is the omnipresence of Hezbollah’s armed resistance and the majority of the population belonging to the Muslim Shia sect.

However, what is overlooked is that decades of displacement, war, and the country’s political and economic configuration have created many “Dahiehs” across Lebanon, cities or urban landscapes built on forms of sovereignty at the community-level, with and without the direction of a political party. In other words, community-level sovereignty rooted in socio-political and economic self-preservation and security maintenance is not unique to Dahieh nor to Hezbollah. Lebanon is a previously colonised country with varied foreign influence with a largely weak government and dysfunctional, bankrupt state. In such a context, non-state actors take on the role of government, with localised service provision, governance, security and political identity. In that sense, Dahieh is an urban landscape with local small-scale sovereignty in a country that lacks it. It is a state within a weak state, adjacent to Lebanon’s multi-party, sect-based and regionally divided system.

This arrangement puts the concept of Lebanon’s sovereignty over its entire territory into question, especially when discussed in contrast to Hezbollah’s arms. The discourse of sovereignty is often propagated by foreign powers, namely the United States, as it pushes for the weakening of Hezbollah and its military infrastructure, in the name of supporting the Lebanese government’s sovereignty and self-determination. However, Lebanon is shaped by competing foreign powers like the United States and Iran, and by definition, has little political sovereignty. A history of colonialism, occupation, civil war and economic crisis, by default creates a disorganised political present where public policy, society and economy are dysfunctional because they depend on regional dynamics.

The existence of urban sovereignties therefore becomes a necessity,  in a country with multiple sects and political parties. What differentiates the suburb is that its main governing body, Hezbollah, is armed for the purpose of fighting Israel, recognised in the Lebanese Institution as an “enemy state” according to the 1955 Anti-Israeli Boycott Law, that continues to attack Lebanon’s territory despite truce and ceasefire resolution 1701.

In March 2026, Wahid and his family left their home in Dahieh and are sheltering in their mountain house, while hosting two displaced families. “There is one thing that Israel doesn’t understand and will never understand: we will always preserve our dignity. They will never rob us of it”, Wahid says, “You talk to a mother whose sons were martyred and she would tell you that she is staying here and she is steadfast. The Israelis will never comprehend this”.

Dahieh changes after every war, and for Marwa*, it is impossible to not see the magnitude of violence it has survived. She used to look outside of her bedroom window and see her neighbors go about their day. Now, the only standing building has a large banner with portraits of people killed by Israeli strikes. “Pictures of babies, this is what I would see from my bedroom window, knowing that our neighbors died in this horrifying way”, Marwa* says. People’s attachment to the suburb is founded on resistance, steadfastness and dignity, reflected in socio-economic relations, political affiliation and politicized reality. The suburb comes out of every war counting damaged residential buildings, souks, restaurants and martyrs, but it resists and rebuilds, reviving them and honoring their sacrifice.

*name has been changed to preserve anonymity

Reporting Lebanon is a collaborative storytelling project that brings together independent Lebanese journalists to document everyday life in a country shaped by war, displacement, and prolonged instability. Through in-depth reportages and narrative-driven features, the project focuses on the human, social, and psychological realities that have unfolded in the aftermath of the 2023–2024 escalation – at a time when violence has formally subsided in parts of the country, yet insecurity and uncertainty persist. Rather than offering situational reports, Reporting Lebanon prioritizes long-form journalism that stays close to its protagonists. The project seeks to capture how people experience, remember, and endure war – and how its consequences continue to shape daily life long after the headlines fade. Reporting Lebanon is a cooperation between the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and zenith.