Lebanon has been pushed to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe two months after Israel’s war on the country began, aid agencies have warned.
With villages flattened, more than one million people internally displaced and the Israeli military scaling up its offensive in the south, the demand for aid is outweighing what charities are able to provide.
At least 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon by the Israeli military since 2 March, according to the country’s health ministry. Thousands more have been injured and the scale of destruction is being compared by some to that seen in Gaza.
“If we continue like this, we will have a humanitarian catastrophe. We are at the edge of a catastrophe,” Aline Kamakian, a Beirut-based chef for the World Central Kitchen, tells The Independent.
“Today all the shelters are completely full, a lot of people are on the road. The situation is getting worse and worse. We don’t have any more shelters, we don’t have spaces any more. We don’t have basic needs for these people.”
“If the scenario gets worse,” Tommaso Della Longa, global spokesperson for the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) says, “we will see an immense humanitarian crisis, and a system that is already under pressure that could collapse at every level.
“If we are not able to bring answers to these communities, the situation will be horrific. I don’t even want to think about it.”
Israel says its actions across Lebanon are aimed at establishing security for its residents in northern Israel. On Wednesday, chief of staff Lt Gen Eyal Zamir said the military “will not tolerate attacks and fire on our communities, and we will not leave until long-term security for the northern communities is ensured”.
But the picture on the ground is grim. In southern Lebanon, many villages have been razed to the ground as part of a deliberate strategy by the Israeli military to, as defence minister Israel Katz said on 22 March, “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes in the border villages in order to thwart threats to the Israeli settlements – in accordance with the Beit Hanoun and Rafah model in Gaza”.
Despite agreeing to a ceasefire that came into place several weeks ago, both sides have accused the other of violations. The Israeli military has killed dozens in Lebanon since the truce began.
Israel this week scaled up its attacks on southern and eastern Lebanon, with the death toll passing 2,500 since the conflict began on 2 March, according to the country’s health ministry.
At least 17 people were killed in airstrikes on Thursday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, with aid workers and medics reportedly killed on the deadliest day since the ceasefire was agreed. Another 10 were killed on Friday, officials said.
The Israeli military is also occupying parts of southern Lebanon, a “buffer zone” of around five to 10 kilometres, which the military says is to provide an “additional layer of defence for the residents of northern Israel”. Three Israeli civilians and 16 soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah, Israeli authorities say.
The latest war began on 2 March, days after the US and Israel launched its war on Iran – a conflict which still has no resolution despite an ongoing ceasefire.
Since bilateral US-Iran talks collapsed last month, Pakistani mediators have sought to bring negotiators back to the table.
The Iranians are “trying to make a good deal [for them] and we’re not going to let that happen”, US president Donald Trump said on Friday. “They’ve got to make a bad deal. Maybe we’re better off not making a deal at all.”
The temporary US-Iran ceasefire does appear to be holding, even after an agreed truce in Lebanon appears close to collapse.
Millions of those displaced as a result of continued hostilities have spread to other parts of the country, with thousands living in tents with nearly 14 per cent of the country’s territory under evacuation warnings and displacement orders. Israel has continued to attack villages outside of the zone.
A UN Human Rights report last week said Israeli strikes have “hit, and in some cases levelled, multi-storey residential buildings, killing entire families”, and that Israel failed to give effective warnings before many of these attacks.
Throughout the population are concerns that full-scale fighting between Hezbollah and the Israeli military could resume.
“People are afraid. People are keeping their dollars for tomorrow,” says Ms Kamakian. “People are keeping food in their house. They don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. So you have this survival mode fear that is presenting every place.”
Among the myriad of difficulties faced by people in Lebanon, particularly in the country’s south, is accessing food and other basic needs.
Ms Kamakian said the WCK “doesn’t have enough food” and that they expect that around one fifth of the population is struggling to feed themselves. One in 10 people, she says, are living off less than US$1 per day, a living situation she describes as “impossible”.
Mr Della Longa says some families who remain in southern Lebanon are in critical situations.
He spoke to the relative of a family living in southern Lebanon near the coast: “She was telling me that relatives, her sister, mother and son, are completely surrounded. They don’t have access to food, they barely have access to health. This is absolutely concerning, because it’s not something that is sustainable in the long run,” he says.
The WCK says its crews on the ground are serving 25,000 hot meals every day to Lebanon’s most desperate, but Ms Kamakian says this barely touches the needs of the population.
“There is the World Food Programme, there are a lot of NGOs here, but all of us, we’re not able to feed everyone, all of us together. There is a huge need [but] the need is beyond us.”
She fears “a catastrophe, big catastrophe”, because, for two months “people don’t have work, so you have poverty that’s coming from one side, and displaced people coming from other side”.
But after direct talks between Lebanon and Israel – the first such negotiations in decades – have proved so far fruitless in terms of finding a long-term solution, concerns the conflict will continue to escalate are going nowhere.
