Rapid mass displacement can transform active conflict into a broader public health emergency by compressing shelter demand and continuity-of-care needs into a narrow time frame. The March 2026 escalation in Lebanon provides a timely case to examine these dynamics within a health system already operating under severe constraints. This paper analyzes the early response phase, focusing on how displacement reshaped shelter operations, access to primary care, continuity of medications, and referral pathways. Much of the resulting health risk emerges from treatment interruption and weakened linkage to essential services. Beyond being a humanitarian outcome, displacement should be understood as a health systems event that can amplify secondary morbidity. In fragile settings, preparedness must prioritize health-protective sheltering, continuity of care, and coordinated referral mechanisms under conditions of disruption.

On 4 December 2023, trichinellosis cases were notified in Jahliyeh, Mount Lebanon. We investigated to determine the source, magnitude, and control measures. We defined a suspected case as a Jahliyeh resident with ≥1 compatible symptom diagnosed by a physician after 1 October 2023; a probable case as having ≥3 typical symptoms (fever, myalgia, edema, or eosinophilia); and a confirmed case as a suspected or probable case with laboratory confirmation by muscle biopsy or serology. We surveyed reachable households (252/561) to identify cases and assess meat consumption practices, inspected local butcheries, and tested meat samples. We identified 290 cases: 268 (92%) suspected, 21 (7.2%) probable, and 1 (0.3%) confirmed. Median age was 35 years (range 2–85); 34% required hospitalization. Illness was associated with Butchery A meat (risk ratio [RR] = 8.2; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 5.6–12.1) and uncooked meat (RR = 1.9; 95% CI: 1.4–2.6), while freezing and cooking were protective. Food inspection revealed major hygiene breaches at Butchery A and Trichinella larvae in minced beef and sausage. This outbreak was epidemiologically confirmed despite limited laboratory confirmation in humans. We recommend strengthening food safety inspections, intersectoral One Health collaboration, laboratory capacity, and public awareness of safe meat preparation.

This ethnography explores the temporalizing practices of workers at the Litani River powerplant—a key site of national infrastructural development in Lebanon. Departing from dominant narratives of crisis or collapse, it argues that workers inhabit a distinct spatial and temporal mode described as tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, an ambivalent alliance of convenience with the Litani river, its infrastructure, and the state. Rather than viewing their experience through paradigms of progress or decline, workers cultivate a modular relation to time, and to the seemingly isolated powerplant, marked by endurance. Tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, the article suggests, is a mode of exercising and reproducing power at the intersection of material structures and embodied experience. Like a Möbius strip, its fraught political relations and dynamics of social reproduction continuously weave the space they constitute. It illustrates power’s reach through time while also revealing workers’ subtle ways of challenging it, beyond binaries of submission or resistance.

On April 8, 2026, a series of large-scale airstrikes struck Lebanon, killing at least 254 people and injuring 1,165 others. The Lebanese American University Medical Center–Rizk Hospital, located in central Beirut, received 2 distinct waves of casualties totaling 42 patients: 28 red, 9 green, and 5 deceased. This report describes the hospital’s emergency preparedness plan (EPP) response and examines challenges encountered across 3 sequential mass casualty incidents at the same institution: the Beirut Port Explosion (2020), the Pager Explosion (2024), and the April 2026 airstrikes. Each prior activation was formally debriefed, and its lessons incorporated into successive EPP revisions. The April 8 response exposed persistent and newly identified vulnerabilities: unassigned trainees accumulating in the red zone, premature code deactivation prior to a second casualty wave, surgical resident resource constraints, and the absence of a regional interfacility transfer network. Iterative debriefing and plan revision can produce an evolving EPP.

During the colonial period, Lebanese migrants in Dakar played a significant role in the local economy, benefiting from a historical and evolving French imperial framework in the Levant. From the 1930s onwards, their presence was increasingly perceived as a threat by white settlers, culminating in the post-1945 period when Maurice Voisin articulated a rhetoric of “Frenchness” to exclude them from Senegalese colonial society. This rhetoric, invoking economic, cultural, and political arguments, sought to defend a supposed imperial community uniting French settlers and African subjects. Yet archival evidence reveals that Voisin’s vision was increasingly disconnected from French imperial strategic interests, which recognized the Lebanese as clients and valuable intermediaries. Drawing on colonial administrative archives and press sources, this article examines how Lebanese migrants navigated these challenges, asserting their agency and negotiating their position both within Dakar’s society and the broader imperial order. By highlighting the clash between settler rhetoric, imperial policy, and migrant strategies, the study contributes to a nuanced understanding of Lebanese identification in French West Africa and the complex dynamics of colonial power, belonging, and transnational ties in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Fear of happiness represents the negative feelings that emerge as one apprehends or experiences the positive emotion of happiness. This experience is intrinsically related to intolerance of uncertainty, the apprehension of the unknown, and symptoms of anxiety. While all of these factors are common among the Lebanese population, especially given the hardships it has been through for the past few years, no research has yet studied all three of them in Lebanon. Therefore, this paper tackles the role of fear of happiness as a mediator between intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety among Lebanese adults. The present study is a cross-sectional investigation that recruited 905 Lebanese adults, of which 60% were women, with a mean age of 29.90 years. Fear of happiness partially mediated the association between prospective and inhibitory anxiety and anxiety; higher prospective/inhibitory anxiety was significantly associated with higher fear of happiness and directly associated with higher anxiety. Finally, fear of happiness was significantly and directly associated with higher anxiety. Interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy and educational programs that tackle these factors may be beneficial to these individuals to relieve symptoms of anxiety and to tackle other negative thought patterns.

This article reconstructs the religious and political activities of the Lebanese Shi‘i scholar Mohamad Jawad Chirri, who founded the first purpose-built Shi‘i mosque in the United States in 1963. It uses Chirri’s biography to explain the institutional, ideological, and political concerns structuring the global Shi‘i revival of the mid-twentieth century, as well as the strategies adopted by Islamic revivalist figures to achieve their institutional ambitions in a competitive and increasingly globalized religious marketplace. A hypermobile activist who lived and travelled between southern Lebanon, southern Iraq, Michigan, and West Africa, Chirri’s institutional initiatives and public activism took place outside the purview of the centres of Shi‘i religious authority in southern Iraq and Iran. The article argues that Chirri’s work, thought, and legacy complicate diffusionist understandings of Islamic revivalist activity as an ideologically coherent project of politicization or radicalization in the years surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The ‘global’ Shi‘i revival should instead be understood as an entanglement of institutional projects linked by transnational familial, professional, and financial networks emerging in the 1950s.

Scholars frame local participation as a continuum of tools, processes, and values, with outcomes primarily serving implementers or beneficiaries. Donors have adopted participation in their policies and are asking local partners in the Global South to implement participation in their work on the ground. Development management practitioners in the Global South have unique understanding and practice of local participation. This article analyzes the status of local participation in Lebanon using recent empirical data. We address Lebanese DM practitioners’ perceptions of participation. They relate that participation is used in a limited way, as a tool at best. We also identify some of the underlying conditions: weak readiness and understanding; lack of coordinated efforts; and rhetorical use of the participation paradigm. The form of participation changes as these conditions change. We recommend modest expectations of citizen participation, investing efforts to develop organizational readiness, enhance cross-sector coordination, and secure more serious donor engagement.

Civil society organizations in Lebanon have a long history, pre-dating even the existence of the Lebanese state itself, which has directly shaped their major phases of development since its creation. Based on the social origins theory and using the framework developed by Marchetti and Tocci (Peace Secur Former Pac Rev Peace Secur Glob Chang 21:201–217, 2009), this paper analyses the relationships that have developed between the state and civil society organizations in Lebanon. The main argument presented in this paper is that the scope of work of civil society organizations, in addition to their freedom of action, is directly linked to the social, political and economic development of the state. The main conclusion of this paper is that a new social contract should be forged between associations and the state in Lebanon, one that would allow them to carry out their functions properly.

A novel type of mass casualty incident (MCI) occurred in Lebanon in September 2024, involving the detonation of weaponized communication devices “pagers and 2-way radios.” The explosions resulted in 2931 injuries and 37 fatalities. This article explores the unique challenges posed by this event. It also highlights lessons learned to improve disaster preparedness and response strategies, emphasizing the importance of flexible triage, resilient communication systems, and comprehensive surge capacity.

This paper explores the theoretical and analytic possibilities of the concept of gharīb to offer a new understanding of regional displacement in what we know as the modern Middle East. The concept of gharīb (pl. ghurabāʾ) has accrued a wide range of meanings across time and space, including stranger, outcast, and exile, as well as pauper. By occupying the space between estrangement and poverty, the gharīb allows for an intersectional understanding of inequality, experienced by a growing number of marginalized and displaced communities in the Middle East. This paper honors the gharīb while making an analytic shift away from the category of the “refugee,” which has long been the dominant framework for personhood in the study of displacement. Combining genealogical analysis of the word gharīb with ethnographic accounts of displaced and impoverished communities in post-2011 Lebanon, I argue that legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, and internal versus external displacement, have been further blurred against the backdrop of ongoing and interlocking forms of structural violence, inequality, and lack of protection for marginalized groups. The right to belong, therefore, is less about citizenry and more about a mode of social and economic poverty. This is particularly the case in the margins, where the repercussions of the ongoing crises are first and foremost felt. The gharīb, in contrast to such legal binaries, can be an analytic tool that allows us to delve deeper into the complexities of belonging, futurity, and rights without falling into the traps of methodological nationalism and top-down regional demarcations.

The 2024 war in Lebanon has created an urgent humanitarian crisis, significantly exacerbating the already existing challenges in the health care sector. With a high number of casualties reported, hospitals are overwhelmed and struggling due to the prolonged economic downturn and deteriorating infrastructure. Many health care facilities face the threat of closure from bombings and critical supply shortages, while health care workers are increasingly at risk, leading to a troubling exodus of medical professionals from the country. This alarming situation complicates the treatment of war-related injuries, particularly as essential medications and medical supplies become increasingly scarce. Moreover, the lack of adequate resources limits the ability to effectively respond to the growing medical needs of the population. Immediate international assistance, focusing on providing essential medical supplies, supporting health care workers through safety measures and incentives, and reinforcing hospital infrastructure to prevent closures, is crucial for mitigating the ongoing conflict’s devastating impact on public health. Addressing these challenges by securing resources for both immediate medical treatment and long-term health care infrastructure resilience is vital for restoring a functional health care system amid the ongoing violence.