The last time a government official from Lebanon sat down to think carefully about national digital infrastructure, nobody expected another war with Israel. That’s how it has always gone.

“We were not ready for this,” says Kamal Shehadi, the Lebanese minister of technology and AI, and minister of the displaced. “I have to admit that we didn’t expect something of this magnitude to happen.”

On March 2, 2026, Israeli evacuation warnings began appearing on phones across southern Lebanon. Days later, similar alerts reached residents of Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs, urging them to leave as strikes were imminent.

Within minutes, families were moving. Within days, nearly 1.3 million people—nearly one in five residents of the country—were forcibly displaced. Schools-turned-shelters were filled past capacity. People slept in cars along the coast road north of Beirut. And somewhere in a government office, a small team started updating a database.