William Christou
The Guardian / September 30, 2024
Caretaker PM ‘trying to fill the gaps’ amid mass displacement of people from their homes.
Beirut – Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, announced on Monday that he would meet donor countries to seek additional funding for Lebanon’s growing displacement crisis, as hundreds of thousands of people fled Israel’s widening aerial campaign.
“We are trying as much as possible to fill the gaps; as I said yesterday, it is not an easy process,” Mikati said, announcing that he would ask donors on Tuesday to give money to Lebanon through the UN.
Donors are expected to give more than $450m (£336m), according to the caretaker minister of the environment and head of the government’s crisis cell, Nasser Yassin.
Yassin said this amount should satisfy the “immediate needs” of Lebanon’s brewing humanitarian crisis, though he noted that additional funds might be needed for reconstruction efforts when fighting between Hezbollah and Israel stops. Lebanon’s southern council has said damages were in excess of $1.7bn, though this was prior to Israel’s intense bombing campaign that started two weeks ago.
Israeli warplanes continued to bombard southern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley and parts of Beirut, creating successive waves of internal displacement. About 115,000 people are living in state-run shelters, according to the Lebanese council of ministers, though the true numbers of displaced people is believed to be far greater.
More than 77,000 people, Lebanese and Syrian, have fled to Syria over the past five days, Lebanon’s general security directorate said on Sunday.
Many displaced people were sleeping rough on the streets of Beirut, crowding public parks and lying on pavements. Those who spoke to the Guardian said they had not been given any services since their displacement on Friday night.
Hezbollah’s interim leader, Naim Qassem, announced in a speech on Monday that the group would continue its war with Israel. Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said it would use “all the capabilities we have” against Hezbollah.
In Beirut, an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in the early hours of Monday shocked residents. The strike was the first time that Israel had targeted Beirut proper since 2006, its previous airstrikes over the last two weeks having been entirely concentrated in the capital’s southern suburbs.
The area that was struck, Cola, a popular intersection where buses and taxis congregate in the mornings, was not known for its affinity for Hezbollah. The strike killed two military and security commanders, as well as a third member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a militant organisation associated with a series of high-profile aircraft hijackings in the 1970s.
On Monday afternoon, debris still lay at the foot of the apartment building, and onlookers gathered around a cordoned-off area patrolled by Lebanese special forces.
“Israel isn’t thinking of a certain sect, religion or area. Wherever they want to kill someone, they’ll kill them, there won’t ever be peace”, said Mohammed, 28, a computer scientist, who was slightly injured when the airstrike brought down a wall in his apartment.
On Sunday an Israeli airstrike in the town of Qraiyeh, east of the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, killed 45 people. Wassim Jabour, an employee in the Qraiyeh municipality, said: “There are so many dead and wounded, it was truly a massacre. And they all still trying to clear the rubble, there are entire families still missing.”
Israel announced two weeks ago that it intended to return to their homes about 60,000 residents of northern Israel displaced by Hezbollah rocket attacks since 8 October last year. Since then it has pounded Lebanon with airstrikes, killing more than 700 people, triggered an attack using sabotaged pagers and walkie-talkies commonly used by Hezbollah that killed at least 37 people, including some children, and injured nearly 3,000, and called reserve troops to its border with Lebanon.
In the first speech by any Hezbollah official since the group’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Friday, Qassem said Hezbollah was still functioning despite the killing of almost every single senior military commander by Israel over the last two months and the targeting of hundreds of weapon depots across the country. He said it “will continue to confront the Israeli enemy in support of Gaza and Palestine and in defence of Lebanon and its people”.
Qassem said Hezbollah would soon appoint a new secretary general, without naming a potential candidate. It is widely believed that Hashem Safieddine, the head of the group’s executive council, would be picked as the next leader – though the organisation has denied rumours that a successor had been picked.
Gallant, meanwhile, hinted that Israel was readying itself to conduct a ground invasion in Lebanon. “The elimination of Nasrallah is a very important step but it is not everything. We will use all the capabilities we have,” he said to troops in north Israel.
Since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah started on 8 October, more than 1,600 people have been killed in Lebanon and more than 8,400 wounded. Hezbollah attacks in the same period have killed 50 Israelis.
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist
