The forgotten of war: detainees, families and the right to a reply

An invisible population in an emergency saturated country

In times of war, public attention almost always focuses on the same images: bombing, destruction, displacement, political statements, international mediation and military clashes. This hierarchy of emotion and information seems natural. It is only in appearance. As war occupies all space, other categories of the population disappear from the collective gaze. In Lebanon, among the most invisible are detainees and their families.

The paradox is brutal. Even as the war disorganizes the entire country, it makes even less visible those who were already totally dependent on the state before the escalation. Detainees live in closed institutions, often overcrowded, fragile and dependent on high-stressed administrative and security channels. Their families find themselves in an even more precarious position. They must continue to seek news, follow procedures, understand judicial or administrative decisions, and sometimes move to a country where roads, regions and priorities change as a result of war. But this reality remains largely relegated to the background.

This silence does not mean that the subject is secondary. Rather, it means that it fails to compete with the dramatic intensity of the conflict. Yet the way in which a state treats the people it holds, as well as the families who live in wait and uncertainty, is one of the most precise markers of its moral and institutional strength. A war always reveals the real priorities of a system. It shows what it protects first, what it postpones, what it forgets, and what it believes it can leave behind without immediate political cost. In Lebanon, detainees are included in these categories, which are easily postponed.

This relegation is all the more serious as prison time never stops. A parliamentary session may be adjourned, a political debate may be moved, a budgetary priority may be postponed. Prison goes on. Deprivation of liberty continues. Uncertainty continues. Families keep waiting. The war does not suspend this reality. She’s getting heavy.

Prison as the death angle of the state in crisis

The prison system generally concentrates several structural weaknesses of a State. When a country goes through a deep crisis, prisons often become places where these fragility appear with even greater clarity. Lebanon does not escape this logic. In a context of institutional saturation, security pressure and emergency hierarchies redefined by war, the prison issue became an almost inevitable dead end.

This invisible character is misleading. A prison is not a separate space from the rest of society. It depends on the functioning of justice, the logistical capacity of the administration, the availability of security forces, medical monitoring, transfers, court decisions, family access and, more broadly, the minimum stability of institutions. As soon as one of these elements deteriorates, inmates immediately experience the effects. Yet in times of war, all these links are under tension at the same time.

This gives the prison a wider political reach than its administrative appearance. What is involved is not only the management of convicted or prosecuted persons. This concerns the relationship between the state and individuals who are entirely in its custody. A detainee cannot protect himself/herself, move alone, access services or guarantees alone. It is entirely dependent on the institution holding it. From there, any failure becomes more meaningful. It’s no longer just a malfunction. It becomes a sign of the real capacity of the State to assume the most basic obligations it imposes on itself.

This is essential in the current context. Lebanon speaks a lot about sovereignty, war, resistance, diplomacy and security. But sovereignty is not only measured at the border or at the military field. It is also measured in the manner in which the State takes charge of those deprived of their liberty. From this point of view, detainees are among the first silent tests of public credibility.

Families, the first victims of suspended time

We often talk about inmates. We talk a lot less about their loved ones. However, the family also undergoes a form of confinement, more diffuse but often very heavy. In a country where procedures are slow, information flows poorly and institutions are weakened, waiting becomes a living condition. Families expect judgment, decision, hearing, text, improvement, visit, transfer, response. In times of war, this expectation takes on additional fear. Ordinary circuits can block. Travel becomes more complicated. News is getting rarer. The sense of abandonment deepens.

This reality has something deeply political. The families of the detainees are not just asking for compassion. They demand readability. They demand that the State speak, slice, explain and do not leave them in a permanent in-between. It is precisely this legibility that is most often lacking when the war absorbs all public attention. Noise emergencies take precedence over silent emergencies. What screams loudest wins the hierarchy of decisions. What happens behind the walls, in the steps, in the waiting corridors, passes after.

For many families, the problem is not only legal. He’s existential. When a relative is detained, daily life is reorganized around uncertainty. Every postponement, every absence of decision, every vague promise prolongs a suspension of time. In a country at war, this suspension becomes even more painful, because it overlaps with other anxieties: security, housing, displacement, resources, the future. The family no longer expects only a judicial response. It awaits evidence that the state has not completely ceased to see those who are no longer visible in public space.

General amnesty, recurring dossier and always delayed response

The question of general amnesty summarizes much of this situation. It regularly returns to the public debate, often carried out by families, politicians or actors who believe that part of the dossiers should be reviewed or settled by an exceptional measure. But this case, despite its human and social burden, remains constantly suspended.

The problem is not only that of the content of a possible amnesty. It is also concerned with the importance of this topic in the order of national priorities. As soon as a major crisis arises, it recedes. As soon as a security emergency prevails, it disappears. As soon as a more central political battle is imposed, it is postponed. This repeated movement has a profound effect on families and on the perception of justice. He puts the idea that there are files that we talk about to contain anger or expectation, but that we never deal with completely.

In times of war, this logic becomes even harder. Power invokes the exception, the disorder of the moment, the difficulty of prioritizing emergencies. These arguments are not entirely false. But they leave a whole more disturbing question: why do some subjects always find a place on the agenda, while others are almost automatically sacrificed. When a system can quickly mobilize for its own balance, but slowly to meet the expectations of fragile categories, it ends up giving the image of a political order that selects its emergencies according to their usefulness for itself.

The general amnesty has thus become a broader symbol in Lebanon than its only object. It represents the gap between the political promise and the real effect. It also represents the State’s difficulty in dealing with ancient human cases without permanently subordinating them to its calculations of circumstances.

When war redefines the hierarchy of visible lives

War not only produces destruction. It also produces an implicit hierarchy of lives that we pay attention to. Some sufferings become central, photographed, documented, commented. Others are fading. Prisoners and their families fall into this second category. They suffer less in performance than in duration. Their drama doesn’t explode. It stretches. It is not imposed by a shock image. It is imposed by wear.

That is precisely why they easily become the forgotten of war. In a country where public space is saturated by military emergency, it is almost necessary to make a voluntary effort to keep their situation in the political arena. Without this effort, they disappear behind the dominant narrative of the conflict. Yet their fate sheds light on the same central question as the other crises: the concrete value of the state.

A society can accept that in wartime not everything is settled immediately. It was more difficult for some populations to be treated as if their situation could wait indefinitely. This is often what happens with inmates. Their condition is seen as less priority than other subjects, sometimes in the name of realism. But this realism has a moral price. It normalises the idea that an already deprived group may also be deprived of visibility, response and place in the order of emergencies.

This invisibilization is dangerous in the long term. It undermines the link between justice and public trust. It fosters the feeling that some lives only matter when they serve a broader balance of power or agenda. It also undermines the very idea of State responsibility. For a State that forgets those in its custody always sends a broader message to the whole of society: it shows what dependencies it really protects, and which it agrees to leave in the shadows.

The right to a reply, minimum State in a country under pressure

One simple point must be stressed: families and prisoners do not necessarily expect perfect or immediate solutions. In many cases, they expect an answer first. The right to a reply is perhaps the most basic requirement in a country under such pressure. Reply to a text. Response to a procedure. Answer on a calendar. Response to a specific situation. Answer, simply, instead of prolonged silence.

This right to a reply is not a humanitarian supplement. This is one of the minimum foundations of a rule of law. When it disappears, frustration does not remain confined to the families concerned. It spreads in the social body. It fosters the conviction that institutions operate with variable geometry, which they can act quickly when they have an interest in it, but that they become opaque when they are the most vulnerable. In this sense, the treatment of prisoners and their relatives is not limited to a particular category. It concerns the credibility of the public promise itself.

In Lebanon of 2026, this issue takes on an even stronger dimension. The country is caught between war, regional pressures, political tensions and crisis of confidence in institutions. In such a context, every space where the State can still prove its consistency counts. The prisoners’ file is one. Not because he would be the only one, but because he exposes a very direct relationship between power and vulnerability.

The forgotten of war as a mirror of the real country

Basically, the situation of prisoners and their families acts as a magnifying mirror of the real country. There are the same features as in other sectors: slow responses, shifting priorities, institutions under strain, difficulty in keeping public speech, uneven hierarchy of emergencies, tendency to manage the present without resolving the files. The difference is that all this here focuses on people whose dependence on the state is absolute.

This is why this issue deserves to be treated as a central and not a marginal subject. The forgotten of war are not outside the national crisis. They say something essential. They show that war does not only erase buildings or balances. It also erases certain categories from the visible field. And the way a country reacts to this invisibility reveals the kind of public order that it is still able to defend.

Lebanon will probably continue, in the coming days and weeks, to talk mainly about regional strikes, mediation, security and power relations. It’s inevitable. But as long as the detainees and their families remain relegated to the periphery of the debate, a significant part of the country’s truth will be lacking. For the state is not only judged by its ability to speak to the powers, to vote texts or to manage war. He also considers himself to be the way he responds to those who have no more recourse than he.