BEIRUT: The number of registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon has dropped to below one million for the first time since 2014, the United Nations told AFP on Tuesday.
As of the end of November, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) counted 997,905 Syrian refugees — a vast majority of them women and children — registered in Lebanon.
“The number reached one million in April 2014, and this is the first time it drops below that,” UNHCR spokeswoman Lisa Abou Khaled told AFP.
Numbers were decreasing, Abou Khaled said, as refugees had resettled in third countries, returned to their homes in Syria, or passed away.
From 2011 until September this year, nearly 49,000 Syrians left Lebanon as part of the United Nations’ resettlement program to third countries including the United States, Sweden, and France.
Others left on their own, making the dangerous sea journey to reach Europe.
“We cannot confirm how many returned to Syria. They don’t necessarily tell us, but we know it’s a few thousand in 2017,” Abou Khaled said.
She said the United Nations revised its numbers on a quarterly basis to assess who remained in Lebanon and what support they required.
In December 2016, the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon was 1,011,366.
In the first six months of 2017, it dropped by 10,315, then again by more than 3,000 between June and November 31.
More than five million Syrians have fled the country’s conflict since 2011 to neighboring Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, and even higher numbers are displaced internally.
The influx has tested Lebanon, a country of just four million that already struggled with overstretched resources.
More than half of registered Syrians in Lebanon live in extreme poverty, struggling to eke out a living while sheltering in informal tented settlements or unfinished buildings.
Lebanese politicians have increased their calls in recent months for refugees to return home, with large parts of the country under government control but left in ruins.
Syrian refugees in Lebanon drop below one million
Syrian refugees in Lebanon drop below one million
Lebanon says two dead in Israeli strike near Syria border
- An Israeli enemy strike in the Hermel district “killed two people,” the health ministry said
- A man wounded in an Israeli strike last week near Beirut had died of his injuries
BEIRUT: Lebanon said an Israeli strike near the border with Syria killed two people on Thursday, as a deadline nears for Lebanon’s army to disarm militant group Hezbollah in the country’s south.
Despite a November 2024 ceasefire that was supposed to end more than a year of hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, Israel has kept up strikes on Lebanon and has also maintained troops in five southern areas it deems strategic.
“An Israeli enemy strike today on a vehicle in the town of Hawsh Al-Sayyed Ali in the Hermel district killed two people,” the health ministry said, with the state-run National News Agency saying the raid targeted a van.
The NNA also reported that a man wounded in an Israeli strike last week near Beirut had died of his injuries.
It identified him as a member of Lebanon’s General Security agency and said “he happened to be passing at the time of the strike as he returned from service” in Beirut.
The health ministry had said that strike targeted a vehicle on the Shouf district’s Jadra-Siblin road, around 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the capital, killing one person and wounding five others, while an AFP photographer had seen a damaged goods truck.
On Tuesday, Lebanon’s army said a soldier was among those killed in an Israeli strike a day earlier and denied the Israeli military’s accusation that he was a Hezbollah operative.
Under heavy US pressure and fears of expanded Israeli strikes, Lebanon has committed to disarming Hezbollah, starting with the south.
The army plans to complete the group’s disarmament south of the Litani River — about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the border with Israel — by year’s end.
Lebanese army chief Rodolphe Haykal told a military meeting on Tuesday “the army is in the process of finishing the first phase of its plan.”
More than 340 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon since the ceasefire, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry reports.
