LONDON: When Sabah thinks about Lebanon’s turmoil and what lies ahead, she finds herself filled with rage and despair. While much of the world carries on uninterrupted, the lives of tens of thousands of young men and women in the country remain in limbo.
“The world moves on while many here have been left with nothing but fragments of memory, and others have lost even that,” the 25-year-old organizational psychologist from Sidon, an ancient city on Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast, told Arab News.
“Hundreds of thousands here have been deprived of the most basic needs,” she added. “They can’t access essential resources, their homes have been destroyed, their memories erased, their past lives vanished.”
Her despair reflects a wider reality. Lebanon stands on the brink of losing an entire generation to conflict, poverty and social and economic disintegration. Years of political turmoil, weak governance and economic meltdown were compounded by the latest war between Israel and Hezbollah.
A UN-backed report released in July 2024 said the conflict left nearly half of Lebanon’s young workforce without jobs matching their skills and disrupted schooling for 500,000 students. Between September and late November, 69 percent of children were forced out of classrooms.
