LONDON: Born in a shelter in Almat in Mount Lebanon governorate after her family fled Israeli bombardment in 2023, two-year-old Sarah has again been forced to flee a wave of violence, this time to Zgharta in northern Lebanon.
“She was born in displacement and now she is displaced again,” Basma Alloush, deputy director of communications at the International Rescue Committee, told Arab News. “Children like Sarah only know displacement. This is the only life they know.”
Sarah is one of more than 300,000 children uprooted in less than three weeks since fighting between Israel and Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah resumed.
Israeli security personnel secure an area around a rocket partly buried in a field in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights bordering Lebanon, on March 19, 2026. (AFP)
The latest conflict was triggered on March 2, when Hezbollah launched a barrage of rockets and drones at Israel, saying it was retaliating for the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28.
The Iran-backed group had reportedly refrained from firing on Israel for 15 months following the ceasefire of November 2024, a period during which Lebanese officials accused Israel of near-daily violations.
Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks with a sharp escalation, killing at least 1,000 people — including 116 children and 40 health workers — and wounding 2,432 others, according to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry.
Sweeping evacuation orders across the south and east, ground incursions into southern villages, and relentless airstrikes have driven more than 1 million people from their homes in under two weeks, overwhelming shelters and depriving communities of basic services.
Around 132,000 displaced people are registered in 620 collective shelters, according to official figures from March 15. Hundreds of thousands more are sleeping rough or crowded into relatives’ homes.
“Many people are out in the streets,” Alloush said. “(In the shelters), you have five or six families in one room with very little privacy and very poor sanitary conditions — without showers, without washing machines.
Displaced family members sit around a fire outside their tent along the seafront in Beirut on March 18, 2026. (AFP)
“People are having to heat water just to bathe. One woman told me she can only bathe once every five days.”
The crisis deepened further after the Israeli military announced the launch of a new operation on March 16. It described the prior two weeks as “limited” ground operations in southern Lebanon targeting “key Hezbollah strongholds.”
INNUMBERS
• 300,000 Children displaced in Lebanon since March 2.
• 1,000+ People killed by Israeli strikes during the same period.
Sources: IRC, Lebanese Public Health Ministry
The new operation began days after Defense Minister Israel Katz said the military had been ordered to expand its campaign, Reuters reported.
“Another tragic chapter in Lebanon’s history is being written, bringing more suffering to civilians,” Thameen Al-Kheetan, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a March 17 statement.
The UN human rights office warned that attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon may amount to war crimes.
The scale of the displacement has exposed the fragility of Lebanon’s social safety net and the near-collapse of the parallel welfare system that long substituted for it.
A firefighter walks past rubble at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's Bashoura neighborhood on March 18, 2026. (AFP)
For decades, the vacuum left by the state’s weak public institutions was partly filled by Hezbollah’s network of clinics, schools, reconstruction funds and social support programs, concentrated in the south and southern Beirut and run through bodies such as Jihad Al-Binaa and the Islamic Health Authority.
Degraded by two years of war, the loss of senior leadership and sharply reduced Iranian funding, that network has struggled to absorb a crisis of this scale.
However, Lebanon’s Ministry of Social Affairs has stepped up its emergency response, establishing shelters and coordinating between local authorities and international agencies, including the IRC.
“It has been positive to see the Lebanese government really stepping up and taking ownership of this crisis,” Alloush said. “They have been effective in setting up the shelters and making sure there is no duplication in efforts between humanitarian agencies.”
A displaced man who fled Israeli strikes in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, sets his mattress at a temporary settlement along the Beirut waterfront in Beirut on March 19, 2026. (AP Photo)
That effort, however, is unfolding against a backdrop of extreme financial strain.
Lebanon has been in economic freefall since 2019. More than 80 percent of the population was already living in poverty before the latest escalation, and the country hosts one of the world’s largest per-capita refugee populations, with about 1.8 million refugees.
The humanitarian response was already stretched thin: an estimated 4.1 million people urgently needed support even before March 2.
The funding picture was bleak before the fighting resumed. Lebanon’s 2025 humanitarian response plan, covering a year with no active conflict, was only one-third funded, according to Alloush.
“We’re already talking about a humanitarian response that didn’t have the sufficient level of resources — both funding wise, but also human resources — required to meet the people’s needs,” she said.
Workers unload medical aid from UNICEF and the World Health Organization donated to displaced people at Rafik Hariri International Airport in Beirut, Lebanon, on March 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
“And now, we have this added layer of an emergency, of a massive displacement, with a response that’s severely, severely underfunded.”
Last week, the UN launched a flash appeal of $308.3 million to cover three months of emergency operations and reach 1 million people. Whether it will be funded adequately, or quickly enough, remains uncertain.
The shortfall has compounded the damage to an already-fragile healthcare system. Even before the current conflict, Lebanon’s medical infrastructure had been hollowed out by years of economic attrition, brain drain and the lingering trauma of the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
First aid responders tend to a victim as residents gather at the site where an apartment was targeted by an Israeli airstrike in central Beirut's Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood on March 18, 2026. (AFP)
Since early March, 49 primary healthcare centers and five hospitals have shut down, the World Health Organization reported. Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the closures followed Israeli evacuation orders and were severely limiting access to care.
In response, the IRC has deployed mobile health units, connecting displaced people with functioning clinics outside the conflict zone and covering costs for those who cannot afford them — an improvised lifeline in a system built around neighborhood-level care.
“Healthcare in Lebanon is very localized,” Alloush said. “People go to the doctor in their neighborhood.”
In displacement, she added, “many elderly people with chronic illnesses try to track down their doctor, too, see where they were displaced — to be able to get access to prescription medication or a check-up.”
IRC staff have also been forced to flee their homes, prompting the organization to temporarily suspend operations in parts of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.
“We are caught in the struggle between wanting to prioritize the impacted populations and trying to respond to people, but at the same time we are bound by duty of care to our staff,” Alloush said.
“We’re in an era where we’re seeing so many humanitarian workers and aid workers around the world, if not targeted, be victims of conflict — collateral damage almost.”
The IRC has called on all parties to adhere strictly to international humanitarian law and guarantee unimpeded access for civilians in need.
“Our response is to meet the needs of those that are impacted, irrespective of ethnic, political, religious, or racial affiliation,” Alloush said. “We deliver based on need alone.”
While aid workers scramble to reach the displaced, the path to ending the conflict remains deeply uncertain. On March 16, Israel warned displaced Lebanese not to return to their homes until the safety of Israeli citizens in the north was ensured.
Two Israeli officials told Reuters that Israel and Lebanon were expected to hold talks in the coming days aimed at securing a ceasefire that would include Hezbollah’s disarmament. But Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar denied any planned talks were underway.
“If the Lebanese government and the Lebanese army want to change something, they should do something in order to stop the attacks being done by Hezbollah from Lebanese territory,” Sa’ar told Reuters at the site of an Iranian missile impact in the northern Bedouin town of Zarzir.
The following day, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, told reporters that a “few players were trying to mediate and host talks,” adding: “I believe the next step will be talks but first we have to degrade the capability of Hezbollah.”
A charity volunteer distributes toy balls and other gifts to displaced people who fled Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon, a day ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, in Beirut, on March 19, 2026. (AP)
For the more than 1 million people driven from their homes, the wait feels indefinite.
“Many families I spoke to during my week in Lebanon feel like they have nothing left,” Alloush said. “Many have taken on immense amounts of debt just to survive day-to-day. And now in this displacement, they just feel like they have nothing.”
Children like Sarah are sleeping in the same classrooms where they once learned, their sense of safety shattered.
“A sizable portion of Lebanon’s children are out of school, have disrupted education, and are probably (dealing with) mental health issues,” Alloush said. “These issues have a long-term impact.
“Making sure these children can integrate into Lebanese society and have prosperous futures is something I really like to bring a lot of attention to.”
