A safe life in Australia. A risky return to a war zone. Why?

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It's where she built her life and raised five children, watching them grow up with the safety, stability and opportunities she had always hoped to offer them.

Now, the 42-year-old has packed that life into boxes and taken her family back to her native Lebanon.

Not because Australia failed them; not because they have run out of options.

But because she believes there is something her children cannot inherit from Australia: a childhood lived within reach of their family, their culture and their roots.

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With her eldest now 14, Khalil feels the window to give her children that life is closing.

"We need that for our kids. We need them to learn the values. And we think it's either now or never."

Lebanon remains affected by ongoing hostilities , following Israel's ground invasion in the south of the country in March this year. The Australian government continues to advise Australians not to travel to Lebanon, warning the security situation remains unpredictable and there is a risk of further escalation.

She remembers schools calling parents to collect their children, families sheltering from bombs and nights spent by candlelight during other conflicts in the region.

And yet, when she looks at what her five children stand to gain — grandparents around the corner, aunts and cousins at the dinner table, a community that can catch them when they fall — she considers the risk worth taking.

For Khalil, the move is also about what gets passed from one generation to the next. She left Lebanon when she was 18 and spent the next seven years in the United States before meeting her husband and eventually moving to Australia.

Khalil hails from Jal El Dib, a coastal town north of Beirut, while her husband's family is from southern Lebanon. Cultivating connection to their roots has been a bonding experience for the pair and one they want to pass on to their children.

For many in the Lebanese diaspora, it's a connection that endures across generations, says Paul Tabar, an adjunct professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and the founding director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.