After the first Israeli attack on the southern suburbs of Beirut about a month ago, Mansour Omar thought he should try and find somewhere else to stay.

"I've been worried ever since that attack because I was living close to where the first raids took place," says Omar, a Syrian refugee who's been living in the Lebanese capital for nine years, after he was driven out of his home by civil war. "This week, after the attacks started, I searched in the suburbs."

But the rents being asked were "terrifying," he says. "It's exploitation." So his family didn't move.

Then this week, Israel conducted a wave of air raids on neighboring Lebanon, saying they were preempting attacks by the military wing of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah group. The Israeli raids have killed over 700 people, including women and children, in under five days and displaced around half a million in Lebanon.

That's why Omar left his job and moved with his family to a more remote village in Lebanon. "Whoever is able to, has sent his family back to Syria," the 32-year-old Syrian told DW. "But I cannot cross into Syria. The regime will kill me if I do."

Even though Omar didn't fight against Syrian government forces during the civil war there, he participated in anti-government demonstrations. As it is, anybody who fled the country during the war is viewed with suspicion, seen as a traitor to the Syrian regime headed by dictator Bashar Assad.This is why Syrian men who return may be detained, tortured, forcibly conscripted into the Syrian army, or killed, say human rights organisations, who regularly document such cases.

That has not stopped........

© Deutsche Welle