"They came at 2am and we heard the very loud explosions and bombs," Gerges said. "In the morning we saw the conditions were very, very bad and we left quickly."

With his brother and their parents, the Christian family made it to Lebanon. Gerges was there for more than a year before being granted a humanitarian visa to Australia.

The 35-year-old arrived in Melbourne last year, a couple of months before the federal government pledged to resettle an additional 12,000 people displaced by ongoing conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

Under a plan announced by the Andrews government on Wednesday morning, up to 120 refugees fleeing war-torn Syria will be housed in a retirement village in Melbourne's north-east.

St Vincent's Health Australia last year bought an Eltham aged-care home and spent $6 million upgrading 116 units on the property, including a derelict two-storey apartment block.

All 60 units in the refurbished building will be offered to refugees, with women and children given priority.

The accommodation slated for the refugees is located in a floodway, so St Vincent's recently requested the state government amend the local council's planning scheme.

Planning Minister Richard Wynne confirmed the application had been fast-tracked and approved, saying the building had been in place for many years.

"We're making sure that people who have fled war-torn countries have access to the services they need to settle in Victoria, because we have a responsibility to help people in desperate need of a safe and peaceful home," Mr Wynne said.

A St Vincent's Care Services spokeswoman said the planning approval meant the refugee housing project could now go ahead and would offer security to vulnerable families for the next two years.

"The project aims to help the recent arrivals adjust to their new home and build up their community links and rental history, so they are better able to move into the private rental market – as well as secure employment – in the years ahead," she said.

CatholicCare, which will pay the running costs of the program, will also provide a lead tenant, a full-time settlement support worker, and tenancy support worker to help the refugees. Deputy chief executive Sheree Limbrick said the first families would move in by mid-November.

There has been a groundswell of local support for the plan, with a "Welcome to Eltham" group registering 80 people as volunteer English tutors and a callout for furniture receiving more than 1000 pieces of donated goods. The group is also preparing a welcome book to give all new arrivals, which so far has 735 personal messages from people around the area.

But there has also been opposition to the project, with a petition calling for it to be dumped signed by more than 2000 people. About 60 people rallied outside federal Labor MP Jenny Macklin's Heidelberg office on Saturday to protest against the proposal, while a counter-demonstration in Eltham attracted about 110 people.

Opponents claim elderly residents would be turned away from the retirement home in favour of refugees, but government data shows there is an oversupply of 592 residential aged care places in the Nillumbik, Whittlesea and Banyule council areas. Both the government and St Vincent's said no aged-care residents had been displaced.

St Vincent's said at maximum of 120 residents would progressively move into the units and that the accommodation would become affordable housing for seniors after two years.

The spokeswoman said the units that will be used by refugees had fallen into disrepair and were vacant when St Vincent's bought the site.