Over 1.2 million people affected by crisis in Lebanon: WFP

Matthew Hollingworth, Country Director of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) in Lebanon, announced today that more than 1.2 million people have been affected by the current crisis in Lebanon, with hundreds of thousands displaced from seven frontline areas in the country’s south bordering Israel, along with the southern suburbs of Beirut.

“It’s impossible to meet the needs of more than a million people who have been suddenly uprooted, displaced and dispossessed without additional resources coming in,” Hollingworth said in a statement.

Amid intense Israeli bombardment of Beirut and southern Lebanon linked to the war in Gaza, the seven districts in frontline areas south of the country bordering Israel and Beirut’s southern suburbs have emptied of “hundreds of thousands of people”, the veteran aid worker reported. “Many of these towns, villages and suburbs [are] now nothing more than rubble.”

More than 200,000 people now live in the 973 formal shelters located inside Beirut and the north of country, according to WFP. Some 773 of these “are absolutely choc-a-block full”, Hollingworth said, adding that people in the south had decided to move not only because their land and homes had been destroyed, but because they had lost “family and friends and communities and they are extraordinarily fearful of what comes next”.