Lebanon’s Missing: The Women Who Won’t Let History Erase Them
Half a century after Lebanon’s civil war erupted, the country is still haunted by the fate of more than 17,000 people who vanished during the 15-year conflict. As Taylor Thomas reports for The Media Line, the search for answers has been driven for decades by women—wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters—who refuse to let the missing be forgotten.
Their struggle faces a monumental obstacle: a sweeping amnesty law passed at war’s end that shields all parties from prosecution. Even legislative progress has stumbled. Lebanon’s 2018 Law 105 granted families the right to know what happened to their loved ones and led to the creation of the National Commission on the Disappeared and Forcibly Disappeared. But when the commission’s mandate expired this July, it had little to show—hamstrung by scarce resources and a tiny budget.
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Some families thought Syria’s fall of Bashar Assad might open prison doors; a few found relatives after 40 years, but those cases were rare. The women’s newest initiative is a book of personal testimonies—an act of preservation in a country where official history books stop in the 1940s. As Nawal Badawi, whose husband was taken during the war, put it: “A half-century has passed; we don’t want their children and grandchildren to grow up still waiting.”
Lebanon’s new leadership—President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam—has offered fresh words of acknowledgment, but families say real action is missing. For them, the war never truly ended, and their decades-long march for answers continues.
Thomas’s reporting captures not only a political struggle but a deeply human one—stories of grief, resilience, and unrelenting hope. Read her full article to understand why these women will not stop until the missing come home.
