Chicago Lebanese Americans Mourn as 1 Million Displaced

Rodolph Saliba has lost three friends in Lebanon to rocket fire over the past several weeks. The 19-year-old Oak Lawn resident says even more of the people he grew up with are sleeping in tents or going hungry.

“They do not deserve this,” said Saliba, who moved to Oak Lawn from Lebanon eight months ago. “There are a lot of innocent people who don’t deserve this. I just hope this war stops.”

Saliba is among roughly 15,000 Lebanese Americans in Illinois watching their home country absorb punishing strikes as the broader U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran continues to destabilize the region. Illinois carries the sixth-largest Arab American population in the country, according to Arab American Institute estimates and Census data.

The numbers behind the crisis are staggering. Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,000 people in Lebanon and at least 1,500 in Iran since fighting escalated in late February. Iranian strikes have killed at least 15 in Israel. More than a million people in Lebanon have been displaced by Israeli fire, roughly 20 percent of the country’s entire population. That displacement comes just over a year after the previous conflict uprooted a similar number of Lebanese from their homes.

Lebanon’s government has been able to shelter only about 120,000 of those displaced people, scrambling to open facilities as the need multiplies faster than resources allow, according to the Associated Press.

The current escalation traces back to Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel carried out joint strikes that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with dozens of other Iranian government and military leaders. President Donald Trump framed the operation as a bid to destroy Iran’s naval and missile capabilities and block the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Days later, Hezbollah resumed rocket fire on Israel, breaking a ceasefire agreement that had held for roughly 15 months following the last round of fighting between the Lebanese militant group and Israel.

For Chicago-area Lebanese Americans, the conflict has transformed daily life into a cycle of anxious check-ins and helpless waiting.

Muhammad Sankari, a Southwest Side resident and organizer with the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, has spent weeks trying to reach family and friends across Lebanon. He was last in the country in 2012. He had hoped to return soon.

“It’s a country full of some of the best memories of my childhood,” Sankari said. “It’s difficult to be so far removed when your loved ones are experiencing these horrors.”

Saliba had also been planning a trip back this summer, war or no war, he said. Both men now wrestle with uncertainty about whether that return is possible at all.

The weight of distance compounds the grief. Lebanese Americans here can wire money, make calls, and post to social media, but they cannot stand in the rubble with the people they love. Community organizations across the Chicago area have been working to coordinate relief efforts and provide information about sending aid, but the scale of the crisis stretches well beyond what local networks can absorb.

Lebanon has endured this kind of devastation before, and recently. The displacement of more than a million people last year left communities still rebuilding when this new round of strikes began. The compounding effect of back-to-back conflicts strips away any cushion of recovery, leaving infrastructure, institutions, and families less capable of absorbing each new blow than the last.

For Saliba, the abstraction of geopolitics collapses quickly into something immediate and personal. Three friends are dead. Others are hungry. He came to Oak Lawn eight months ago and built a life here, but the place he came from is burning.

He still plans to go back.

“War or no war,” he said.

Chicago’s Lebanese American community is not asking for much right now. They are asking for the shooting to stop, for the shelters to fill, and for the people they love to survive until they can find a way home, or until home finds a way back to them.