Over 1 Million Flee 'Total Destruction' in Lebanon, With Cease-Fire Demanded

About 1.2 million people have been displaced as Israeli forces have surged into southern Lebanon and undertaken a bombing campaign in multiple parts of the country, including in and around Beirut, leaving many people out in the street, with shelters mostly full as of Friday.

Nasser Yassen, Lebanon's environment minister, announced the displacement figure Wednesday, saying that about 160,000 had landed in shelters. Roughly half the displacements occurred over just a few days earlier in the week—both before and after Israel ordered people in dozens of villages in southern Lebanon to evacuate—according to Save the Children.

Most of the country's 900 shelters are full, Rula Amin of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees said Friday at a press conference in Geneva, adding that some hotels and nightclubs were acting as makeshift shelters.

Mathieu Luciano of the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration said the situation was dire.

"Roads are jammed with traffic, people are sleeping in public parks, on the street, the beach," he said, according to Reuters.

Bachir Ayoub, Oxfam's Lebanon country director, said that the shelter system in Lebanon, whose entire population is roughly 5.5 million, couldn't handle the high numbers of refugees.

"The shelter system is set to collapse if there is no peace on the horizon," Ayoub said in a statement.

"There must be an end to this violence," he added. "All parties must stop fighting. We need safe space to get people the aid they need."

Israel and Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia and political party, have traded airstrikes and rocket fire for the last year, and the conflict has seen a major escalation in the last two weeks. Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week, reportedly using 2,000-pound "bunker buster" bombs manufactured in the U.S.; the attack flattened residential buildings and killed at least six others, in addition to Nasrallah.

This was one of series of airstrikes Israel has made on Beirut and its southern outskirts—a campaign that continued Friday, with the possible use of more "bunker buster" bombs.

The death toll over the last two weeks in Lebanon is over 2,000, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Israel launched a ground incursion in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, leading to close range fighting with Hezbollah and mass displacement of the residents there.

"People are coming to us traumatized," said Gheith Bittar, executive director of SHiFT Social Innovation Hub, a Beirut-based group that partners with Oxfam. "Most of them have lost their houses and relatives. Some of them were scared because of the scale of bombardment as they were fleeing, and many others because of their fear of the unknown coming to a new city."

The most vulnerable members of Lebanese society are at the most risk, experts say. For example, many women from low-income countries are domestic workers in Lebanon and have been abandoned by their employers; some don't seek shelter or aid for fear of being deported.

"They don't have papers... and as a result, they are reluctant to seek humanitarian assistance because they fear that they may be arrested and they may be deported," Luciano said.

The conflict has also led to the mass displacement of children, as Common Dreamsreported last week.

More than 300,000 people in Lebanon have fled to Syria in the last 10 days, according toAl Jazeera. The group likely includes Syrians who had previously fled war in their home country.

However, the main route to Syria became far more difficult to take on Friday: Israel bombed it, leaving a huge crater.

Lebanon's hospitals have been overwhelmed and at least 28 on-duty Lebanese medics were killed in just a 24-hour period this week, according to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.