Chicago-area Lebanese Americans mourn dead, try to help loved ones as 1 million displaced by Israeli strikes
Three of Rodolph Saliba’s friends in Lebanon have been killed by rockets in recent weeks, the 19-year-old Oak Lawn resident said. Even more are sleeping in tents or going hungry.
Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,500 people in Iran and more than 1,000 in Lebanon after the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah fired on Israel, while Iranian strikes have killed at least 15 in Israel, according to officials in those countries. Israeli fire has displaced more than a million people in Lebanon, or roughly 20% of the population just over a year since the last conflict uprooted a million Lebanese residents from their homes.
Thousands of Lebanese Americans — about 15,000 in Illinois, the state with the sixth-largest Arab population, according to Arab American Institute estimates and Census data — are watching their home country come under fire as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran continues to ignite the region.
“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.”
Conflict has been raging since the U.S. and Israel assassinated Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint strikes that also wiped out dozens of other leaders Feb. 28. President Donald Trump said the aim was to destroy Iran’s naval and missile capabilities, and to prevent the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Hezbollah resumed rocket fire on Israel days later, about 15 months after the group and Israel signed a ceasefire agreement ending months of conflict.
Like Saliba and others, Muhammad Sankari, a Southwest Side resident, has spent weeks checking in on family and friends. The government has only been able to accommodate roughly 120,000 displaced people as it scrambles to open shelters, the Associated Press reported.
Sankari, an organizer with the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, was last in Lebanon in 2012, and hopes to return soon. Saliba was also planning to go this summer, “war or no war." Both now worry about returning.
“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… Even if the bombs stop tomorrow, there's a huge economic and humanitarian impact.”
For Saliba, the bombardment feels all too familiar.
He was born in the last days of the 2006 July War, which lasted a month after Hezbollah fighters ambushed an Israeli patrol at the border and took two Israeli soldiers hostage. It ended in a ceasefire, but Israeli attacks wrought destruction in southern Lebanon.
So when an overnight Israeli strike killed at least eight people and wounded more than 30 in Beirut’s Ramlet el-Bayda neighborhood last week, he "wasn't shocked." He remembered being accustomed to the violence. Among other tragedies, he says he had witnessed a young boy and his father mutilated by Israeli pager bombs in 2024 that killed more than a dozen and wounded thousands.
“I was born in 2006,” he said. “They blew the hospital up [where I was born]… I have seen missiles drop 15 meters away from me. You’ll see an F-45 over you and the restaurants and mechanics are still open. They have to make a living.”
Karl El Sokhn, an Albany Park resident, was 12 at the time of the July War, and remembers seeing those explosions in the distance. While his family has largely been spared over the years due to living near the U.S. embassy, he said his parents' friends now sleep in their car after being displaced.
Like Saliba, the now 32-year-old moved to the U.S. from Lebanon as a teen. Leaving home was expected for Lebanese youth due to the frequent wars with Israel, he said, and made more painful given "there’s been foreign influence."
“The idea of having to leave your home is kind of impossible to explain,” El Sokhn said. “[And yet] it’s just normal for the youth to grow up and become a diaspora.”
In December, El Sokhn, a multi-instrumentalist, played in a tribute show at Chop Shop in Wicker Park for the late Ziad Rahbini, a Lebanese musician who wrote about, among other topics, Israel’s 1982 invasion. It was his way of trying to fight Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment in the U.S.
“You preserve your culture and share it with people, you’re re-humanizing because we’re all being dehumanized,” El Sokhn said.
Now, more Israeli ground troops have been sent into Lebanon. Israel's military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, said it's “determined to deepen the operation until all of our objectives are achieved,” the Associated Press reported. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has called on President Donald Trump to hold talks with Israel for an immediate ceasefire, noting that more than 500 Hezbollah military positions and weapons depots have been dismantled, CNN reported.
“Lebanon did not choose this war,” Salam said, criticizing Hezbollah’s rocket fire into Israel. “There is no justification in holding an entire nation hostage.”
Saliba only expects Lebanon to be spared when Hezbollah lays down its arms or is wiped out by Israel — so "this is never going to stop.” Meanwhile, he has been sending money and doing what he can from afar to help arrange shelter for friends.
Sankari said Americans had a responsibility to stop the "war machine" through economic and political pressure because “war is big business.”
“Our duty is to dig in and fight here domestically to stop [the United States'] complicity and role in the death of innocents,” Sankari said. “Billions have been spent killing people in this short period of time, in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, and continues to be spent while people here are suffering greatly.”
Contributing: Araceli Gómez-Aldana, WBEZ