Inside Beirut’s National Theater, displaced families shelter from war

Inside Beirut’s National Theater, families displaced by war have turned a space built for performance into a collective shelter after Israel sharply intensified airstrikes on Sept. 23, 2024.

UNHCR estimated the escalation displaced nearly 120,000 people in less than a week and drove the wider crisis to an estimated 1.2 million people across Lebanon. By Oct. 20, UN agencies were tracking 809,000 internally displaced people, while Lebanese authorities put the number affected inside the country at 1.2 million. Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health put the death toll by late October 2024 at more than 2,083 killed and 9,869 injured since Oct. 8, 2023.

UNHCR counted displaced families in 900 temporary shelters set up in schools and other public buildings. In an October flash update, UN OCHA put 180,700 people seeking refuge in 978 shelters, with 775 of those sites already at full capacity. Families moved into ad hoc refuges, including hotels, schools and cultural venues like the National Theater.

The theater’s transformation is tied to a broader effort led by Kassem Istanbouli, the actor and director who founded the Lebanese National Theater and the Tiro Association for Arts. The same network has turned theater spaces in Beirut, Tyre and Tripoli into temporary havens for people forced from their homes. In Tyre, the shelter held Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and other families, while children took part in puppetry and storytelling workshops.

Le Colisée, a famed cinema that had been closed for more than two decades, was rehabilitated earlier in 2024 and then repurposed as refuge as displacement surged. UNHCR counted more than 440,000 people crossing from Lebanon into Syria after the escalation, including about 71 percent Syrians and 29 percent Lebanese nationals.