14 May 2024

Jounieh/Kouba, Lebanon – “We’re not happy here. The government and the people hate us,” 35-year-old Basil Hussein al-Batoush told Syria Direct at his apartment in Lebanon’s coastal city of Jounieh. The walls of his small sitting room were cracked, the paint peeling. It is too small for his family of eight, and three of his children sleep on the kitchen floor, he said.

Still, the apartment was the best housing option al-Batoush could find after municipal police evicted him and his family from their home of four years. As the Lebanese government cracks down on Syrians, municipalities across the country have evicted more than a thousand Syrians like al-Batoush from their homes.

Al-Batoush fled to Lebanon in 2016 from Syria’s northwestern Idlib province. At first, he lived with wife and children in Zahle, a city in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa governorate, before moving to an apartment complex in Jounieh.

On April 4, Jounieh’s police issued a final eviction warning for Syrian residents of al-Batoush’s family’s apartment building to vacate the premises within 48 hours, saying they did not have legal residency papers, according to the Access Center for Human Rights (ACHR), a human rights organization based in Beirut and Paris. Even those with legal residency were ultimately evicted “with no exceptions,” it said. 

Al-Batoush is among the minority of Lebanon’s 1.5 million Syrian refugees who hold valid residency papers. The vast majority, around 83 percent, do not. He obtained residency through his boss, who sponsored him to work as a delivery driver for a restaurant in Jounieh. 

Still, when the police returned on April 10, al-Batoush’s family left alongside about 60 other Syrian families living in the complex’s buildings, he said. Police officers told him there was no choice because the building where he lived was “not registered” and everyone had to leave.

Of the two buildings in al-Batoush’s apartment complex, one housed only Syrians while the other housed both Syrian and Lebanese families. When Syria Direct visited the complex this month, one building appeared not to have been fully vacated. Al-Batoush believes some of his Lebanese neighbors likely stayed. 

Twenty-nine men were deported to Syria after residents of al-Batoush’s building were evicted on April 10, and some had not been heard from weeks later, the Associated Press reported on May 3. Al-Batoush was not personally aware of the deportations.

So far in 2024, Lebanon has deported 433 Syrian refugees and arbitrarily arrested 685 refugees, according to figures ACHR provided to Syria Direct. The rights organization noted that these were only the documented cases. It estimates more than 1,000 Syrians have been deported so far this year. 

Lebanon has also resumed a campaign promoting the “voluntary return” of Syrian refugees. On Tuesday, more than 300 refugees crossed the border back into Syria in the first “voluntary return” convoy organized since 2022.

Only two families evicted from al-Batoush’s apartment complex stayed in Jounieh, he said. Moving would have meant finding a new job and re-enrolling his children in another school. So, despite now paying more than three times what he used to pay in rent for a shabby apartment, he plans to stay. He is barely scraping by, struggling to afford food, medicine and clothing for his six children.