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"The shelter system is set to collapse if there is no peace on the horizon."
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."
#Lebanon: People uprooted by Israeli airstrikes, including in central Beirut, describe being forced to flee “total destruction”, amid fresh reports of Hezbollah projectile attacks into Israelhttps://t.co/0mM7MowD0B
— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) October 3, 2024
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.
"People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale," the U.N. agency wrote on social media.
Following a series of evacuation orders this week, Israeli forces issued another on Friday for areas in central and southern Gaza, including "safe zones," leaving Palestinian families gripped with fear and with "nowhere to go," according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Israel's Arabic spokesperson announced on social media that people in six neighborhood blocks in various towns, several of which were part of a proclaimed humanitarian zone, must "immediately move," leading to a scramble of evacuations in those areas.
"Once again, fear spreads as families have nowhere to go," UNRWA wrote on social media. "People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale."
#Gaza: New evacuation orders have been issued by Israeli authorities, even inside the so-called “humanitarian zone”.
Once again, fear spreads as families have nowhere to go. People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale. pic.twitter.com/Myi6z6Ix87
— UNRWA (@UNRWA) August 16, 2024
Friday's evacuation orders were for areas in eastern Deir el-Balah, al-Qarara, al-Mawasi, al-Jalaa, Hamad City, and Nasser, Al Jazeerareported.
An Israeli military strike on al-Mawasi, previously a humanitarian zone though long the target of Israeli strikes, killed four Palestinians including three children, the news outlet reported on Friday.
The Israeli army said Hamas had used the areas to fire mortar and rocket attacks, and explained that it had issued warning flyers and text message alerts to reduce the impact on the Palestinian civilian population, according toReuters.
Bombings and evacuations have continued this week—at least 80 Palestinians were killed in a strike on a school-turned-shelter on Sunday—even as peace talks proceeded in Doha, Qatar. A two-day session of talks finished Friday, with the United States, Egypt, and Qatar saying progress was made and they hoped to seal a deal between Israel and Hamas next week. Hamas didn't directly participate in this week's talks because the militant Palestinian group said Israel had added new demands to a proposal it had already agreed to in principle.
The death toll of Palestinians during the 10-month war, based on figures from Gaza's health ministry, reached 40,000 this week—what the U.N. called a "dark milestone."
"Most of the dead are women and children," U.N. rights chief Volker Türk said in a statement. "This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war."
"On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months," he added, saying the "scale of the Israeli military's destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship [is] deeply shocking."
Türk said that both Israel and armed Palestinian groups including Hamas had committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. The armed Palestinian groups killed more than 1,100 Israelis in a shocking and horrifying massacre in southern Israel on October 7 in which they also took some 250 hostages.
Israel's sustained assault on Gaza over the last 10 months has not only killed a disproportionate number of children but also displaced most of those who've survived—and separated many from their families.
A report released Friday by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) documents the scale of the separation crisis and its psychological toll on unaccompanied children. UNICEF estimates that roughly 17,000 Gazan children are unaccompanied, but the IRC warns that the real figure may be much higher.
Unaccompanied youth are at risk of labor exploitation, starvation, and mental health problems that can plague them for the rest of their lives. Gazan children, shocked by the war, are "clinging to others during loud sounds, wetting the bed, having nightmares, and are wanting to sleep under the bed to feel secure," the report says.
The Associated Pressreported Tuesday that Israeli strikes were leaving "children without parents and parents without children," and has previously reported that the war has wiped out entire Palestinian extended families.
Israeli violence against Palestinians has not been restricted to Gaza. Israeli settlers attacked the West Bank town of Jit on Thursday night, setting fire to cars and houses, killing one Palestinian man and seriously injuring another. Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he was "appalled" by the attack and the perpetrators should be held accountable, but Israeli human rights group B'Tselem responded on social media by saying that the Israeli state and its leadership should be held accountable.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Wednesday reported that it had recorded about 1,250 settler attacks on Palestinians since October 7. The settlements are illegal under international law, according to the International Court of Justice.
The push for a peace deal is aimed not just at ending the carnage in Gaza and defusing West Bank tensions but also preventing a wider war in the Middle East. Israel is bracing for retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah after it conducted assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Tehran and Beirut in late July.
Both parties in Sudan's civil war are to blame for a looming mass famine, experts say, and the military's blocking of U.N. aid at a border crossing with Chad exacerbates the problem.
Sudan's military is blocking United Nations aid trucks from entering at a key border crossing, causing severe disruptions in aid in a country that experts fear may be on the brink of one of the worst famines the world has seen in decades, The New York Timesreported Friday.
The border city of Adré in eastern Chad is the main international crossing into the Darfur region of Sudan, but the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the state's official military, which is engaged in a civil war with a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has refused to issue permits for U.N. trucks to enter there, as it's an RSF-controlled area.
U.S. and international officials have issued increasingly alarmed calls for steady aid access to help feed the millions of severely malnourished people in Darfur and other areas of Sudan.
Last week, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., said that the SAF's obstruction of the border was "completely unacceptable."
Both warring parties in Sudan continue to perpetrate brazen atrocities, including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. This piece focuses on the SAF's ongoing obstruction of essential aid. The situation is catastrophic. The policy is criminal. https://t.co/FKhqQh3EI9.
— Tom Dannenbaum (@tomdannenbaum) July 26, 2024
The Sudanese who've made it out of the country and into Adré reported dire and unsafe conditions in their home country.
"We had nothing to eat," Bahja Muhakar, a Sudenese mother of three, told the Times after she crossed into Chad, following a harrowing six-day journey from Al-Fashir, a major city in Darfur. She said the family often had to live off of one shared pancake per day.
Another mother, Dahabaya Ibet, said that her 20-month-old boy had to bear witness to his grandfather being shot and killed in front of his eyes when the family home in Darfur was attacked by gunmen late last year.
Now the mothers and their families are refugees in Adré, where 200,000 Sudanese are living in an overcrowded, under-resourced transit camp.
In addition to those that have made it out of the country, there are 11 million people internally displaced within Sudan, most of whom have become displaced since the civil war began in April 2023.
An unnamed senior American official told the Times that the looming famine in Sudan could be as bad as the 2011 famine in Somalia or even the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
In April, Reutersreported that people in Sudan were eating soil and leaves to survive, and The Washington Postcalled it a nation in "chaos," reporting that World Food Program trucks had been "blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted, and detained."
In late June, a coalition of U.N. agencies, aid groups, and governments warned that 755,000 people in Sudan faced famine in the coming months.
The U.S. last week announced $203 million in additional aid to Sudan—part of a $2.1 billion pledge that world leaders made in April, which some countries have not yet delivered on.
Some officials including Thomas-Greenfield, who has dubbed the situation in Sudan "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world," have called for the U.N. Security Council to allow aid delivery into the country even in the absence of SAF approval; it's believed that Russia would veto such a measure.
Sudan's civil war has seen a great deal of international interference. Amnesty International on Thursday published an investigatory briefing showing that weapons from Russia, China, Serbia, Turkey, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been identified in the country. And The Guardian on Friday reported that the passports of Emirati citizens had been found among wreckage in Sudan, indicating the UAE may have troops or intelligence officers on the ground, though the UAE denied the accusation.
The International Service for Human Rights on Friday warned that both the SAF and RSF were engaged in wrongful killings and arrests, especially targeted at lawyers, doctors, and activists. The group called for an immediate cease-fire.
The SAF and Sudanese government figures have cast doubt on international experts' claims about famine in the country.