'We did not want to go back to Syria'Lebanon flight risks border arrests

For two weeks, Umm Hadi has been living a nightmare on repeat.

- Ali Haj Suleiman

It has been 12 years since she last saw her elder son, who was detained by Syrian soldiers at a border crossing between Lebanon and Syria.

Now it has happened again. She says her younger son Hadi was at the al-Dabbousyia crossing on 7 October, attempting to flee Israeli airstrikes and cross back into Syria to try to reunite with his family when he was arrested and taken away by government forces.

Sitting in a refugee camp in an opposition-controlled area of north-west Syria, Umm Hadi is distraught. "We are just sitting here, waiting to hear his fate," she says, adding that when the Israeli bombs began to fall, Hadi sent his family back to Syria but because he came from a village in Bashar al-Assad regime-controlled territory he had been too scared to return. Two weeks ago, after the airstrikes intensified, his fear of the regime was replaced by a greater fear that he would never see his children again, so he decided to make the crossing himself.

"He was not involved with anything," his mother says. "He was just a worker trying to feed his family. I am terrified I will also lose him to the regime like his brother."

Hadi and his family had been part of a 1.5 million-strong Syrian refugee population who sought shelter in Lebanon after the start of the civil war in 2011.

In the past month, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon have reversed this refugee flow, pushing an estimated 425,000 people - mostly women and children - back over overcrowded border crossings, according to the UN.