Early next month, The Lebanon Displacement Diaries – a participatory journalism project we produced together at The New Humanitarian – will head to the stage in Beirut, where actors will voice the stories of people forced to flee their homes during Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon last year, and the audience will be able to share their own stories too.

It’s an exciting new move for the project, which was first published six months after the November 2024 Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire and shares the stories of 10 of the approximately one million people in Lebanon who were displaced over a year of war.

But it also feels like the natural next step in a journalistic practice that was designed to be a collaboration with Lebanese communities, and to acknowledge that when a war technically ends – or when a piece of reporting is published – the story isn’t over.

From the outset, our thinking about this project was coloured by the fact that Zainab’s (Chamoun, co-ordinator, right) family had to flee their south Lebanon home in September 2024, and the two of us were in near-constant contact during bombings, as she slept in overcrowded rooms and longed to return home and retrieve her beloved cat, despite the danger.

She wrote about that time in a piece for The New Humanitarian, and about the fact that displacement is more than just a technical term or a statistic, even when the numbers are startling: Some 82,000 people in Lebanon still can’t go home. The truth is that displacement is an all-encompassing emotional and physical event that impacts every part of a person’s life, and understanding that – which can really only come through lived........

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