On Friday (Mar 13), the United Nations came up with a US$308 million emergency appeal to assist Lebanon with the aftermath of the war that displaced over a seventh of its citizens.
An announcement of the campaign was made by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at Beirut, which stated: “Solidarity in words should be solidarity in action.”
Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah last week when the Iran-supported Lebanese militant group fired at it on Mar 2, claiming that it was taking revenge on the murder of the supreme leader of Iran.
Hezbollah has maintained rocket and drone assaults on a daily basis, and Israel has intensified the actions they take on the ground and through air attacks, bombing the capital on Thursday and other regions of the country on Friday.
The attacks have claimed almost 700 lives and displaced over 800,000 people at the Israeli directive to leave areas of Lebanon, bigger and bigger.
But aid organisations claim that they are already struggling to meet the demands of limited funds, and they require large amounts of new funding.
“The World Food Programme is only aiming at those who are actually on the brink of starvation or starving,” according to the World Food Programme deputy executive director, Carl Skau.
As need increases, there will be no additional room to drop, and therefore, there will be an increase in resources to be allocated and not decreased, as Skau told Reuters.
“TIGHT FUNDING LANDSCAPE”
Humanitarian groups assert that world crises have limited their efforts in Lebanon, already devastated by a 2019 economic meltdown, the Beirut port bombing of 2020 and the 2021 war between Hezbollah and Israel.
Skau told me that WFP is worried that the donor governments will have new budgetary constraints after the Iran war, which has caused startling increases in world energy prices.
Last September, the UN refugee agency UNHCR reported that it had just 25 per cent of the resources to fund Lebanon in 2025, leaving it with no choice but to cut cash assistance programmes.
“The prevailing spike of current or the current intensification of hostilities exacerbates an already constrained funding environment,” according to Kirollos Fares, Lebanon country director at a humanitarian organisation called Medair.
The number and size of grants had already declined in the aid group Solidarités Internationale, with Lebanon country director Daniele Regazzi saying that the group had already experienced this.
“… There is no money coming out, so whatever we are putting out now as emergency response will be spent in the next couple of weeks, ” he said.
