Mazen, 41, is a senior programme manager with Save the Children in Lebanon. As a Shelter and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene specialist, Mazen works to give families safe homes and access to clean water and sanitation.
Recently however, Mazen too has been displaced, He was forced to flee his home in March 2026 when the conflict escalated in Lebanon with his pregnant wife and 11-year-old daughter.
In the lead-up to Father’s Day on Sunday 21 June, Mazen reflects on the challenges facing his family while displaced, and what it’s like being a parent in a war:
“When the shelling intensified in Beqaa governorate (south Lebanon) the destruction around us expanded.
Hospitals became overcrowded, and services became almost non-existent. Displacement, while frightening, clearly became the most suitable option for us, especially given my wife’s health condition - she was in the first months of pregnancy - and for the sake of my daughter’s safety.
“I had already compressed our life into one bag – with money, a photo album, university certificates, passports – long before war reached our home. And now, with destruction all around, we carried this bag of life’s essentials with us out of Beqaa, to seek safety in Beirut.
“When we held the house keys and bid farewell to our home before leaving, what crossed my mind was: Is it possible that this will be the last time I visit this home? Could it be bombed, or could it become impossible for us to return here?
Could it become only a memory?
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The search for a temporary home in Beirut was exhausting.
Obviously, my daughter had lost the wide and safe spaces of our village in the Beqaa compared with the new situation in Beirut, and this had a significant impact on her mental state.
Her mother and I know that she is suffering from a form of depression and sadness. We are trying to help her as much as we can, and we will seek specialist support soon.
I may have managed to find my family a safe place, but I cannot isolate them from the reality of the ongoing war.
As a father, I understand what my daughter is suffering. She lived through the terror of the moments of shelling and was deprived of going to school and of her daily activities.
She constantly watches the war on television. She asks when we will return home. She misses her friends in the village, while also having to live with the news of losing our loved ones and neighbors who were killed by Israeli forces shelling.
Debris litters a street following an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Maamoura neighbourhood in Beirut's southern suburbs on March 4, 2026. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images) Photo by AFP via Getty Images
Days after settling in Beirut, the house next to mine in Beqaa was bombed. It belonged to my friend. My daughter had spent long hours every day in that house because my friend had a child the same age as my daughter; they were constant playmates.
In that bombing, my friend, his wife, and their youngest son were killed, while the oldest child Saaed*, my daughter’s playmate, survived. I could not tell her the news directly.
It took me many days before I was able to tell her and reassure her about her friend. Since then, she has been sharing everything with him. She speaks with him constantly on the phone, draws paintings, buys him sweets, and prepares for the moment she will meet him again — a moment that will not come unless the war stops.
It is difficult for me to answer my daughter’s questions when she asks why Saeed* and his family were in their home during the shelling. I do not know how to tell her that he had two choices: either to sleep in the street with his children, or to stay at home until morning and then leave to search for a place that would take them in.
In this war, the luckiest child in Lebanon is the one who lives with the news of war without being displaced, or who is displaced without being wounded or killed.
My wife shares the burdens of displacement with me. She is pregnant, works in teaching, and takes care of my daughter when the pressure of work becomes heavy, which makes me feel constantly helpless. At this stage, based on what I see around me and on my personal experience, the definition of the ideal father has been reduced to the ability to provide food, water, and shelter for the family.
The burdens on families are enormous, to the point that they feel like a huge rock on the shoulders of parents, who are trying to walk with it toward a better future for their children.
I want this war to end. I want to return home. I want my new child to be born in our home in the village, among family and beside his sister, and to place his first photo in the photo album.
And I want to put that album in the closet, not in a bag.
