BEIRUT: Lebanon will need $250 million a month to help more than a million people displaced by Israeli attacks, its minister in charge of responding to the crisis said on Tuesday, ahead of a conference on Thursday in Paris to rally support for Lebanon.
Nasser Yassin told Reuters the government response, helped by local initiatives and international aid, only covered 20 percent of the needs of some 1.3 million people uprooted from their homes and sheltering in public buildings or with relatives.
Those needs are likely to grow, as daily waves of airstrikes push more people out of their homes and leave Lebanon’s government scrambling to find ways to house them, Yassin said.
“We need $250 million a month” to cover basic food, water, sanitation and education services for the displaced, he said.
Schools, an old slaughterhouse, a fresh food market, an empty complex — all of them have been turned into collective shelters in recent days. “We’re transforming anything, any public building,” Yassin said. “There is a lot to be done.”
Yassin — whose official mandate as environment minister meant he was working on preventing forest fires before the current conflict broke out a year ago — now spends much of his time at government headquarters with a crisis team, including other Lebanese ministries, the United Nations Development Programme and the Lebanese Red Cross.
They are planning for relief operations on a timeline of four to six months — but Yassin hopes the spreading war will end sooner.
“We need to have a ceasefire today, and we need everybody in the international community, for once...to be brave enough to say what’s happening,” he told Reuters, a message he said he would stress in Paris.
“There is a member state of the UN waging war against a small nation in the most aggressive manner we’ve ever seen in the history of Lebanon. This should be the message,” he said.
Yassin said he estimated the damage to Lebanon to be in the billions of dollars.
“Full villages on the border were blown up in the last few days, but also public institutions...water establishments, pumping stations, hospitals, you name it. All of these need to be rebuilt.”
Lebanese authorities have yet to put a firm estimate on the scale of destruction across Lebanon and how much money it will take to rebuild. Nasser Saidi, a former economy minister, told Reuters last week that Israel’s bombing campaign has caused damage that will cost $25 billion to repair.
UNDP’s regional representative Blerta Aliko said on Tuesday the damage would be far-reaching and include “a drastic capital loss” — including to Lebanon’s ability to feed itself long-term.
“I’m not talking from the perspective of what is required in an immediate term, in the next month — I’m talking about the impact that has on the harvesting season ... being impacted in the south, being impacted in the east, which are very, very important for the country,” she said.
Lebanon needs $250m a month for displaced, minister says ahead of Paris summit
https://arab.news/br8q6
Lebanon needs $250m a month for displaced, minister says ahead of Paris summit
- “We need $250 million a month” to cover basic food, water, sanitation and education services for the displaced, minister said
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
- Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade
DAMASCUS: The UN refugee agency said Sunday that a large number of residents of a camp housing family members of suspected Daesh group militants have left and the Syrian government plans to relocate those who remain.
Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, said in a statement that the agency “has observed a significant decrease in the number of residents in Al-Hol camp in recent weeks.”
“Syrian authorities have informed UNHCR of their plan to relocate the remaining families to Akhtarin camp in Aleppo Governorate (province) and have requested UNHCR’s support to assist the population in the new camp, which we stand ready to provide,” he said.
He added that UNHCR “will continue to support the return and reintegration of Syrians who have departed Al-Hol, as well as those who remain.”
The statement did not say how residents had left the camp or how many remain. Many families are believed to have escaped either during the chaos when government forces captured the camp from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month or afterward.
There was no immediate statement from the Syrian government and a government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
At its peak after the defeat of IS in Syria in 2019, around 73,000 people were living at Al-Hol. Since then, the number has declined with some countries repatriating their citizens. The camp’s residents are mostly children and women, including many wives or widows of IS members.
The camp’s residents are not technically prisoners and most have not been accused of crimes, but they have been held in de facto detention at the heavily guarded facility.
Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade. A ceasefire deal has since ended the fighting.
Separately, thousands of accused IS militants who were held in detention centers in northeastern Syria have been transferred to Iraq to stand trial under an agreement with the US
The US military said Friday that it had completed the transfer of more than 5,700 adult male IS suspects from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody.
Iraq’s National Center for International Judicial Cooperation said a total of 5,704 suspects from 61 countries who were affiliated with IS — most of them Syrian and Iraqi — were transferred from prisons in Syria. They are now being interrogated in Iraq.
