Mountains by the sea
Lebanon is one of the smallest countries in the Middle East, a narrow strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, between Syria and Israel. Four bands of land run from north to south: a thin coastal plain with the cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre; the high Mount Lebanon range, white with snow in winter; the wide Bekaa valley, where much of the country's food is grown; and a second range of mountains along the Syrian border. Unlike most of its neighbours, Lebanon has plenty of water.
The people and their past
The coast was home to the Phoenicians, famous sailors and traders whose cities of Byblos, Tyre and Sidon are still lived in today. Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Ottoman Turks followed. Over the centuries the steep mountains became a refuge for religious communities: Maronite Christians settled in the northern mountains from the 7th century, Shia Muslims in the south and the Bekaa, and the Druze, whose faith is closed to outsiders, in the southern mountains from the 11th century.
In 1920 France drew the borders of modern Lebanon, joining the largely Christian mountains to the largely Muslim coast, south and Bekaa. The country became independent in 1943. A civil war from 1975 to 1990 killed about 120,000 people, while Syria and Israel occupied parts of the country.
Almost everyone speaks Arabic, but in Lebanon people think of themselves first by their religious community; many Christians feel closer to the ancient Phoenicians than to the Arab world. Armenians, who came as survivors of the genocide after 1915, keep their own language and churches. Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, Bedouin and the Dom, a people with their own Domari language, form smaller communities, and some of their families still have no citizenship.
Newcomers
Palestinians arrived as refugees in 1948 and in later wars. About 250,000 still live in Lebanon, most of them in a dozen camps, and the law bars them from many professions and from owning property. From 2011 Syrians fled the war next door, 1.5 million at the peak; about a million remain, so roughly one person in five in Lebanon is Syrian. Hostility towards them has grown, with local curfews, evictions and deportations.
About 160,000 other migrants also live here, most of them workers from Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Sudan, Egypt and the Philippines, many of them employed in Lebanese homes. Domestic workers live under a sponsorship system known as kafala that leaves them outside the labour law, and many were abandoned by their employers during the crises of recent years.
Life today
About five and a half million people live in Lebanon, nearly nine in ten in towns and cities. The past few years have been very hard. In 2019 the banks collapsed, freezing people's savings, and the Lebanese pound lost more than 90% of its value. Poverty rose from about one person in eight in 2012 to more than four in ten in 2022. In 2020 a huge explosion at Beirut's port killed more than 200 people.
War followed. In 2024 fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, a Shia armed movement and political party, killed about 4,000 people and drove more than a million from their homes. Fighting returned in March 2026, Israel invaded the south again, and at the peak more than 1.2 million people were displaced. Hundreds of thousands are still displaced, many from southern villages that Israeli forces hold. One child in three had no access to school in 2025. Many young Lebanese leave to work abroad, and the money they send home keeps families going.
Faith
Lebanon officially recognises 18 religious communities. Roughly two thirds of citizens are Muslims, Sunni and Shia in about equal numbers, and about one in twenty is Druze. Christians are probably a little under a third, divided among Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Catholics of several traditions, Armenians, Syriac and Assyrian churches, Copts and Protestants.
Religion shapes politics. The president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim, and parliament's seats are split equally between Christians and Muslims. Marriage, divorce and inheritance are decided by each community's own courts, so a person's religion is also a legal identity. There is no civil marriage; couples who want one marry abroad.
The church and freedom of belief
Churches, Christian schools, television channels and Bible societies work openly, and Lebanon is a centre for Christian work in Arabic for the whole region. The constitution promises freedom of conscience, and changing one's registered religion is legally possible. In practice, Lebanese who leave Islam or the Druze faith can be shunned and threatened, and in some Shia and Druze areas they face violence from their own families and neighbours. Insulting religion in public is a crime.
