I did not expect to spend the night of my arrival in Beirut in the detainees’ hall at Beirut Airport, after being denied entry following an interrogation by General Security regarding my visit to Palestine in July 2023: the reason for my visit, its declared and alleged objectives, the cities I visited and why, and the people I know there.
I was moved, or rather transferred, from one room to another. Between each room, the officer escorting me, like someone leading an untamed animal, would promise that within minutes I would be released and allowed to enter Beirut safely, victorious over the interrogation. When I reached the final room and His Excellency, the officer in charge of transfers, knocked on the door, he pointed to the officer who opened it and said to me, “This officer can help you.” And indeed, he helped me by escorting me to the final room.
The shock was intense, especially since I had entered Lebanon in November 2025 without any issues.
The smell of heavy smoke and the coughing of smokers reached me before I even saw the “magical” room. A crumbling ceiling and seats like those used by travelers waiting for their flights, seats I immediately realized would also serve as the beds on which we detainees would sleep that night.
The new officer now responsible for me made it clear that anyone who reaches this area, the only assistance they can receive is to leave Lebanon at the earliest opportunity. Departure would only be to the place they came from, wherever that may be, and only with the same airline they arrived on, with no exceptions.
I was on my way to Damascus via Beirut and was forced to return to Paris, from where I would have to find another way to reach Damascus, despite being very close to it. I also had to purchase the deportation ticket myself.
I remained in the deportation room for twenty-four hours with ten other people, including two women, one Syrian and one Sudanese. There was one man from Yemen, and the rest were Syrians. No one among the detainees, except me, knew the reason for their detention. The answer was always, “I don’t know, they didn’t tell me,” often followed by a comment directed at me: “Your case is extremely complicated.”
The Sudanese woman was visiting Lebanon for the first time. She had obtained a visa and booked a hotel in Beirut for a week. An immigration officer stopped her and took her to a General Security room, where she was asked whether she knew anyone in Beirut. She was traveling for a medical appointment and carried documents proving this. Nevertheless, she was detained and later deported back to the airport she came from, after buying her own ticket. She spent the entire time crying, repeatedly asking why she was detained and why she was not entitled to know the reason. After twenty hours of detention, she left in tears, perhaps angry.
The Yemeni detainee had also come for a simple medical procedure, yet he was detained for three days because flights to Aden are rare, and he was required to travel to Aden even though he had arrived from another country. After three days spent on filthy seats, a security officer realized that he held residency in a Gulf country and that he had repeatedly tried to explain this to the authorities, but they “did not bother to listen to him.” “I tried speaking to them in a Levantine accent after realizing they don’t understand my Yemeni dialect,” he would tell us repeatedly, smiling in the gentle way so many Yemenis do. I left and left him behind, still waiting for a chance to find a way to deport him.
A Syrian woman who shared the detention room with us lives in a European country. She had previously been banned from entering Lebanon for five years, from 2015 to 2020. She arrived six years after the ban had ended and did not know why she was detained. When she told the officer that the ban had ended in 2020, he replied, “Then it starts now.” Her family, whom she had not seen for eleven years, was waiting for her outside the airport, but she was sent back the next morning to the country she came from, while her family continued waiting for that long-anticipated reunion.
As for the others, except one detainee, they all live in Europe and had come to visit Syria for the first time since leaving it. Their dream ended in the detention room. Some waited up to four days on those seats, dreaming of a magic lamp that would allow them to enter Lebanon and then cross into Syria. One of them had not seen his wife and children, who live in Lebanon, for three years, as he is still waiting for family reunification in Germany.
Another Syrian arrived from Iraq after his residency there expired. He was not allowed to return to Iraq because he needed a visa, nor was he allowed to enter Lebanon and transit through it to Syria. After three days, the airline he traveled with agreed to take him back to Iraq, where he would be detained again and likely sent back to Beirut. He might end up spending the winter on those seats, watching the rain fall over Beirut, observing a grounded Middle East Airlines plane in a corner of the airport near the detention room, or counting the clouds he encounters on each flight between Beirut and Baghdad through cycles of deportation and reverse deportation. The only positive aspect of his presence was that he had an internet line that we all relied on, as there was no internet access at all. On one occasion only, during a rare moment of goodwill, the officer in charge granted us six minutes of internet from his personal phone so we could reassure our families.
There was a clear absence of the right to information and to know the reasons for detention and deportation. Access to food and water was also limited and dependent on the mood of the officer, who would sometimes allow one or two detainees to buy food and water for the others from a café outside the detention room. There was no internet access whatsoever, except by chance if one detainee happened to have a Lebanese or international line to share. Some officers showed no hesitation in exercising authority and shouting at detainees with or without cause, while others showed no hesitation in being exceptionally kind and compassionate.
One officer informed us that a law allowing Syrians to transit through Lebanon to Syria had been revoked. Previously, Syrians would receive a deportation document allowing them to remain in Lebanon for twenty-four hours to travel on to Syria. The justification for revoking the law was fear that Syrians would remain in Lebanon. Yet the overwhelming majority of Syrians transiting through Beirut Airport to visit Syria hold residency permits in Europe. Why would they want to stay in Lebanon? When I asked the officer this question, he replied with a single sentence: “I don’t know.”
The detention room was an absurd stage for arbitrary detention, targeting people whom some officials believe they can bar from entering Lebanon outside any legal framework. The number of detainees continued to grow, and treatment by officers was often arbitrary, shaped by mood or by the officer’s sectarian, political, or ideological background.
As for my own case, the treatment depended on names that signal particular backgrounds. The officer who openly insulted me when I asked about the reason for my detention had a name suggesting he was an officer “protective” of Palestine. Another officer I encountered later at night simply said, “It saddens me to see you here.”
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