BEIRUT, March 17 (Xinhua) -- The road from the southern city of Nabatieh to the capital of Beirut is usually a 90-minute drive. But for Zeinab Awada and her four children, it felt like a lifetime.

As Israeli airstrikes intensified across southern Lebanon and Beirut's southern suburbs, Awada and her husband packed their children into the car and joined a desperate convoy of families fleeing north. Above them, the sky hummed with drones; below, the road was clogged with fear.

Then a blast struck close.

"The explosion was very near," Awada recalled. "The children started screaming. For a moment, we thought we were going to die."

Her husband kept driving through the chaos. They didn't stop until they reached Beirut.

Now the Awada family lives in a classroom at the Makassed school in the Bachoura district, one of dozens of schools across the capital that have been repurposed as emergency shelters.

The blackboards are still there, but instead of lessons, they now bear witness to lives interrupted. Thin mattresses line the floors. Bags and blankets fill the corners. Children wander the hallways -- some playing quietly, others clinging to their parents as if the ground might disappear again beneath their feet.

"The children keep asking when we will go back home," Awada said, her eyes fixed somewhere distant. "I don't know what to tell them."

In another classroom, Moussa Hamdan, 48, recounts a journey of double displacement. He first fled his hometown of Mays al-Jabal for Beirut's southern suburbs, only to be uprooted again when Israeli airstrikes began pounding the area.

"They started bombing suddenly," Hamdan said. "I woke up and immediately put my children in the car. We left without taking any clothes."

The trip out was agonizing. Families sat trapped in traffic for more than three hours, the open road becoming a corridor of terror.

"We kept imagining that Israel might bomb the cars," the father said. "It felt like hell."

Now sharing a single room with relatives, Hamdan says displacement has stripped life down to its barest bones.

"There are 10 of us in one room," he said. "Sometimes we only have rice for iftar. The children are tired of eating the same thing."

Nearby, Abou Abbas Jouni, 60, fled Beirut's southern suburbs with his wife, children, and grandchildren after strikes closed in.

"We were scared to death," Jouni said. "We looked at the children crying and knew we had to leave everything behind."

The grandpa and his eight family members now occupy a single classroom. Even in Beirut, safety remains an illusion. An airstrike struck just 400 meters from the school.

"We do not know when they might strike again," he said helplessly.

Their stories are not isolated. They are the human face of a national catastrophe.

According to official figures released on Sunday, 831,002 people had been registered as internally displaced in Lebanon, nearly one in seven residents. Over 130,000 of them, or 33,901 families, now live in 620 collective shelters, many of them hastily converted schools like this one.

The crisis has affected about 1.3 million people, most displaced within Lebanon and the rest having crossed into neighboring Syria, according to Imran Riza, the UN's deputy special coordinator and humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon.

Lebanese Social Affairs Minister Haneen Sayed said that children account for nearly half of those affected, while women and girls make up more than half of the impacted population.

Standing alongside UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the Grand Serail, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam warned that Lebanon is "on the brink of a humanitarian abyss," cautioning that the consequences could worsen rapidly without swift international support.

He called on the international community to move beyond words and deliver urgent aid: food, medical supplies, shelter, and fuel.

Guterres announced a Flash Humanitarian Appeal for 308.3 million U.S. dollars to support those affected over the next three months.

The Lebanese government activated its emergency response within hours of the escalation that began on March 2, coordinating relief efforts with UN agencies and humanitarian partners. Nationwide, public institutions have mobilized 2,600 teachers, 600 social workers, 6,800 civil defense personnel, and municipal teams across 24 districts.

But inside the Makassed school, statistics dissolve into the quiet anguish of daily survival. Parents lie awake at night, ears tuned to the distant hum of aircraft. Children eat rice for multiple days in a row.

For Jouni, the future has collapsed into the present.

"I no longer think about the future," he said quietly. "We live minute by minute."

Outside, the war continues. Inside these walls, life has become a waiting room -- for news, for aid, for the chance to return to homes that may no longer exist.

The children keep asking when they can go back. The parents keep searching for answers they don't have.

And the school, once a place of chalkboards and morning bells, now holds the weight of a nation's unraveling -- one family, one classroom, one whispered prayer at a time. ■