UN Secretary-General António Guterres visiting a shelter hosting displaced people from areas affected by the ongoing conflict in the Dekwaneh area of Beirut during his visit to Lebanon in March 2026. Credit: UN Photo/Haider Fahs

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 9 2026 (IPS)

On April 8, Israeli military forces launched the deadliest series of airstrikes on Lebanon since hostilities escalated in early March, resulting in the deaths of at least 254 civilians. This latest incident threatens to further complicate humanitarian efforts in Lebanon that are already under immense pressure.

This latest escalation occurred just as a two-week ceasefire deal between the United States and Iran was announced the night prior on April 7, more than a month after the United States, Iran and Israel began engaging in military strikes against each other, which also led to Arab States in the Gulf getting caught in the crossfire. The parties targeted military bases and civilian infrastructure in Iran and Gulf states allied with the United States. Israeli and Lebanese armed forces exchanged fire across borders, which has resulted in a new wave of civilian casualties and mass displacement in a continuation of the conflict between the Israeli military and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Israeli strikes on Lebanon have resulted in nearly 1,530 deaths since March 2, including more than 100 women and 130 children.

While the temporary ceasefire was welcomed, including by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, questions were raised about where it extended, even among major players in the negotiation process. Iran and Pakistan, a mediator in the peace negotiations, have stated that the deal includes Lebanon. Meanwhile, Israeli leadership initially claimed that the ceasefire did not include Lebanon and that the airstrikes specifically targeted Hezbollah-owned strongholds. Wednesday’s airstrikes targeted residential and commercial neighborhoods in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

Humanitarian actors expressed concern and alarm over the airstrikes and urged the parties involved to consider the safety and dignity of civilians in Lebanon.  The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was “outraged” by the “devastating death and destruction” in Lebanon.

Displaced families at a makeshift shelter in a parking lot in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Credit: WFP Arete/Ali Yunes

Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar welcomed the news of a ceasefire but said in a statement that until there was an end to the hostilities across the entire region, “no one will feel truly safe.”

“This pause must become a stepping stone for wider peace,” Behar said.

The war in Iran and the Middle East has put greater strain on humanitarian aid workers on the ground, including UN agencies.

Imran Riza, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, explained that even before the latest escalation, the UN and its partners were aiming to support 1.5 million vulnerable people and that they have been forced to scale up their response with fewer resources than in previous years.

Less than a third of the emergency flash appeal for USD 308 million has been funded as of now. Yet despite these challenges, the UN and its partners have been able to provide more than four million meals and distribute more than 130,000 blankets and 105,000 mattresses to shelters. Multi-purpose cash assistance has also been provided to households as well.

Briefing reporters virtually from Beirut mere hours after the airstrikes, Riza commented on how civilians reacted to the news of a ceasefire.

“This morning, many people across Lebanon were cautiously optimistic about returning home—some even began to move. The events of the past hours, however, are likely to have triggered further displacement,” said Riza.

Also briefing from Lebanon was UNFPA Arab Regional Director Laila Baker, who described how the city of Beirut slowed to a standstill in the wake of the airstrikes. Cars are lining the streets while tents spread across the city as families seek shelter, she noted. She warned that the initial sense of unity that the Lebanese government and its partners had been working towards was now under threat due to the month-long “devastating aggression” from military forces.

“The risk is not only humanitarian collapse but also renewed fragmentation at a time when unity is most needed,” said Baker.

Displacement is already at an “unprecedented scale”, Riza said, as more than 1.1 million people—or one in five people in Lebanon—are internally displaced. More than 138,000 civilians, of which a third are children, are sheltering in 678 collective sites. The majority are dispersed across informal settings and host communities, which Riza noted leaves them with limited access to basic services. Overcrowding in shelters and limited sanitation services will likely lead to increased health risks.

The health system has also been overwhelmed and “under severe pressure.” Many facilities have been forced to close or have been damaged. Riza reported at least 106 attacks on healthcare, which have resulted in more than 50 deaths and 158 injuries among health workers.

Women and children are particularly vulnerable in this situation. Baker estimates that at least 620,000 women and girls have experienced displacement. Among them are at least 13,500 pregnant women who have been cut from essential maternal health services. At least 200 pregnant women will be delivering babies without essential support from midwives or nurses or with access to maternal and neonatal healthcare.

More than 52 primary healthcare facilities are no longer facilities and are forced to close. Among the six hospitals forced to close, five of them had maternity wards.

“These are not just statistics. They are grave violations of international humanitarian law – direct assaults on life, health, and dignity,” said Baker. “This is not only a humanitarian crisis – it is a crisis of humanity. It is a crisis of trust in the international system and in the principles meant to protect civilians.”

The UN and other humanitarian agencies urge for a permanent end to the fighting and call for international law to be upheld by all parties. Under the ceasefire agreement, all parties are urged to pursue diplomatic dialogue and work toward a long-term solution to the war.

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Secretary-General António Guterres attends the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe.

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 2 2026 (IPS)

The United States and Israel launched a joint military strike on Iran on February 28. Iran followed with military strikes on Israeli bases and on Arab Gulf states, including Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The realized threat of a new war has caused alarm for the security situation in the Middle East and its impact on civilian populations.

While the latest outbreak of fighting unfolded in the Middle East, the UN Security Council in New York convened an emergency meeting to deliberate over the military attacks in Iran. The session was convened at the request of Iran and members of the Security Council.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefed the Council on the situation up to that point and condemned the escalating hostilities. “We are witnessing a grave threat to international peace and security. Military action carries the risk of igniting a chain of events that no one can control in the most volatile region of the world,” he warned.

Under Article 2 of the UN Charter, all member states shall “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” Guterres reminded the Council. He reiterated that there would be no “viable alternative to the peaceful settlement of international disputes” and that “lasting peace” could only be accomplished through diplomatic negotiations.

Guterres also noted that the U.S.-Israeli strikes took place following the latest round of indirect negotiations between the U.S. and Iran mediated by Oman, which were expected to lead into further political talks. “I deeply regret that this opportunity of diplomacy has been squandered.”

According to Iran, the U.S.-Israeli strikes constituted a clear violation of the UN Charter and a threat to international peace and security. Sayed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, said in a letter addressed to Guterres that in response to the aggression, Iran was invoking its right to self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter. This outlines that the Charter shall not “impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense,” and that any actions taken by member states to exercise their right to self-defense must be “immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and the responsibility” of the Council to take actions as it “deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

“The United States and the Israeli regime shall bear full and direct responsibility for all ensuing consequences, including any escalation arising from their unlawful actions,” Aragchi said. Noting the “grave and far-reaching consequences” of a regional conflict, Aragchi wrote of the collective responsibility of the UN and the Security Council to take immediate action and to “discharge their duties without delay.”

Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani of Iran reiterated the point before the Security Council, remarking on the threat to the country’s sovereignty and that actions taken by the U.S. and Israel were in violation of the UN Charter. There is also the added context that the first round of U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Some members of the Council spoke against Iran’s military actions on Saturday and against the regime under Khanmenei as it related to its nuclear program and its “appalling violence and repression against its own people.” The U.K., France and Germany jointly condemned the regime and its attacks on countries in the region.

Acting Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom James Kariuki remarked that the present was a “fragile moment for the Middle East.” As the president of the Security Council for the month of February, Kariuki noted that Iran “repeatedly ignored calls” for a solution to its nuclear program and the seeming lack of cooperation with the IAEA. He stated that Iran “must refrain from further strikes, and its appalling behavior, to allow a path back to diplomacy. ”

“My country, which is a champion of peace and coexistence, never expected to be targeted by wanton aggressions without any justification,” said Bahrain Ambassador Jamal Al Rowaiei. Bahrain was one of the Gulf states targeted by Iranian military forces and currently sits on the Security Council as an elected member. Al Rowaiei condemned Iran for its attacks on residential areas and vital facilities—including a U.S. Navy base—and called for all in “containing this crisis” to protect the stability of the region.

Other member states remarked on the threats to international peace and security. In condemning the military attacks on Iran and the Arab Gulf states, Pakistan Ambassador Asim Ahmad regretted that “diplomacy has once again been derailed,” referring to the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. “These military actions undermine dialogue and further erode trust that was already in short supply,” said Ahmad.

Echoing Guterres’ sentiments, other UN entities and leaders reiterated calls to continue negotiations and to respect international law. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that he was “deeply troubled” by the situation in the Middle East and expressed that world leaders should choose the “challenging path of dialogue” over the “senseless route of destruction.”

“My heart goes out to the civilians trapped in the crossfire. Regardless of borders, everyone deserves to live without the threat of violence around them,” he said.

Across Iran, civilian infrastructures have been destroyed, leading to scores of casualties. Of note, schools have been bombed by Israeli airstrikes, including a girls’ elementary school in Minab in Hormozgan province in southern Iran. As of March 1, the death toll from this strike has risen to 165, according to state sources.

UNICEF issued a statement shortly after the school bombings, warning that the “weekend’s military escalation in the Middle East marks a dangerous moment for millions of children in the region.” They called for an immediate end to the hostilities and for all parties to uphold their obligations to international humanitarian and human rights law, including the protection of children. “Targeting civilians and civilian objects, including schools, is a violation of international law.”

“Bombs and missiles are not the way to resolve differences but only result in death, destruction and human misery,” said Volker Türk, the UN Human Rights Chief. He added that all parties must de-escalate and return to the negotiating table and warned that failing to do so would only lead to further “senseless civilian deaths” and “destruction on a potentially unimaginable scale.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said that they were “closely monitoring” developments, urging restraint to “avoid any nuclear safety risks.”

The U.S. will take over as president of the Security Council in March. It will be a matter of waiting to see the role that this institution will play in protecting the principles of international law and preventing further loss of civilian lives.

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Damaged greenhouse in Bent Jbeil, Nabatieh governorate. Credit: Action Against Hunger

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Nov 10 2025 (IPS)

Food security and livelihoods in southern Lebanon are under severe threat as the repercussions of Israeli bombing continue to be felt across the region, a report released today (NOV 10) has warned.

Almost a year since a ceasefire was agreed, many farmers in Southern Lebanon are still denied access to their land due to displacement, ongoing Israeli attacks, and soil contamination, a joint report from Action Against Hunger, Oxfam and Insecurity Insight has found.

The impacts of the war, coupled with regular Israeli attacks and occupation, have wiped out farmland and destroyed crops and essential food infrastructure, threatening food security and livelihoods in some of the country’s most fertile and productive areas, according to the report.

“Food insecurity is a huge concern in Lebanon, affecting around a fifth of its population, and this report shows how damage and displacement are devastating production in some of its most fertile lands. As winter approaches, more and more families face hunger and poverty,” Suzanne Takkenberg, Action Against Hunger Country Director, told IPS.

The report, “’We Lost Everything’: The Impact of Conflict on Farmers and Food Security in Lebanon,” lays bare the effects of repeated and ongoing attacks by Israeli forces on Lebanese agricultural land and food production.

It highlights the lasting disruption to the agricultural sector and damage to the rural economy as seeds, fuel and other items necessary to plant and harvest, such as fertilizer and fuel, fodder, workers, and equipment, have become harder to obtain, while damaged roads mean transporting goods can sometimes be impossible.

Displacement and continued lack of access to land are among the major problems farmers are facing.

Almost half of the farmers interviewed for the report had been internally displaced and nearly a year on since the ceasefire was agreed, approximately 82,000 people remain unable to go home due to ongoing Israeli occupation and armed violence.

The ongoing presence of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, despite a February 2025 deadline for their withdrawal, is also preventing people from accessing land to farm.

“Agricultural losses are not only caused by shelling or burning. When farmers cannot reach their land because of displacement or military presence, the outcome is the same: fields go unplanted, and food disappears,” Christina Wille, Director of Insecurity Insight, told IPS.

The five areas in southern Lebanon remaining under Israeli occupation as of September 2025.
Credit: Map: Insecurity Insight. Base Map: UN OCHA

But farmers have also complained of another serious effect of the bombings – contamination with/from explosive remnants of war (ERW) and white phosphorus.

White phosphorus can have detrimental effects on soil fertility and plant growth, which affects farmers’ ability to grow and harvest crops – with a knock-on effect for food security.

“ERW also poses a serious risk, as not only can these weapons degrade over time and contaminate water and soil, but they can also lead to serious injury and even death if unexploded ordnance detonates unexpectedly,” explained Wille.

“Explosive contamination freezes life in place. It keeps people displaced, fields uncultivated, and entire communities in limbo. Farmers told us that the war didn’t just destroy their crops but also their confidence. Food security is not only about seeds and soil. It is also about whether people feel safe enough to work the land,” she added.

The scale of the losses farmers have endured since the start of the conflict is immense.

“Our findings show that around 90% of farmers we interviewed have seen their food production drop since October 2023. That is a systemic collapse, not a seasonal shock,” Drew East, Researcher at Insecurity Insight, told IPS.

The food production of several farmers in Khiam, Bodai, Saaideh, Baalbek and Aitaroun has completely stopped, depriving them of their main income sources.

Meanwhile, farmers in areas of southern Lebanon and Bekaa that have seen some of the worst conflict incidents have seen losses not just of land but of homes, livestock, and agricultural assets.

But it is not just the livelihoods of farmers that have been ruined.

“Some farmers have lost everything and this will have devastating repercussions not just for them and their families, but also for the communities they help to feed,” said Wille.

The ongoing threat of violence and the levels of destruction witnessed throughout the conflict have also had a profound impact on the physical and psychological well-being of affected communities, according to the report.

“Farmers across Lebanon are already in crisis as historically low rainfall has led to the worst drought on record. This climate stress is being exacerbated by the ongoing effects of the conflict, including contamination of the land, restricted access and disruption to supply chains. Urgent action is needed to restore hope for farmers and communities who rely on them,” said Takkenberg.

Farmers also warned of the need for urgent assistance to address worsening hunger and poverty among communities.

Experts believe that until the ceasefire agreed upon one year ago is fully adhered to, affected farmers will not be able to recover fully.

“The repeated attacks on farmland in South Lebanon and Bekaa are not only destroying livelihoods but undermining Lebanon’s food security. There must be an immediate end to these violations and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces so that farmers can safely return to their land and rebuild their lives,” Oxfam in Lebanon Country Director Bachir Ayoub said.

“Three key elements farmers identified that would enable them to end the negative cycle afflicting southern Lebanon and fully resume food production were financial assistance, a complete cessation of hostilities, and the clearance of ERW-contaminated land,” added Wille.

The report comes just months after the same groups warned at least 150,000 people had been left without running water across the south of Lebanon after Israeli attacks had damaged and destroyed swathes of water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities since the beginning of the conflict.

A report detailed how repeated attacks on Lebanese water infrastructure between October 2023 and April 2025 had led to long-term disruption to supplies of fresh water and caused losses estimated at USD171 million across the water, wastewater and irrigation sectors.

Meanwhile, a severe rainfall shortage had exacerbated the problem, increasing risks of outbreaks of waterborne diseases.

In the latest report, its authors point out that all parties to the conflict have clear obligations under International Humanitarian Law to protect objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, including foodstuffs, agricultural areas, crops and livestock.

And they have issued a call for urgent action to push for more humanitarian and development material support and funding to help with the situation and have stressed the need for a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory as part of the ceasefire.

“The most urgent call could be to help people to safely return home and to work and address food insecurity as soon as possible,” said Wille.

“This is not last year’s conflict. The report tells the story of communities that are not just struggling to recover but under ongoing attack- as we’ve seen most intensely in the last few days,” said Takkenberg.

“Our teams are operating in this highly volatile environment to support those in need – rebuilding greenhouses, restoring roads, distributing cash and providing essential agricultural inputs. Working side by side with local authorities and communities, we are doing what we can to repair livelihoods and create space for renewal. But ultimately, this won’t be possible until we have lasting peace,” she added.

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Damage to the water tank at the Maisat water pumping station. Credit: WaSH Sector Lebanon

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Sep 17 2025 (IPS)

Just under a year into a fragile ceasefire, 150,000 people in southern Lebanon continue to deal with the potentially lethal aftermath of Israeli bombing, highlighting the devastating long-term effects of conflict.

A report published late last month (AUG) by Action Against Hunger, Insecurity Insight, and Oxfam said that at least 150,000 people remain without running water across the south of Lebanon after Israeli attacks had damaged and destroyed swathes of water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities since the beginning of the conflict in Lebanon.

The report, When Bombs Turn the Taps Off: The Impact of Conflict on Water Infrastructure in Lebanon, laid bare both the immediate and long-term effects of repeated attacks on Lebanese water infrastructure between October 2023 and April 2025.

It said that more than 30 villages were without any connection to running water, leading to long-term disruption to supplies of fresh water, fueling dependence on water trucking that many people cannot afford and, according to the World Bank, losses estimated at USD171 million across the water, wastewater and irrigation sectors.

A severe rainfall shortage in recent months has exacerbated the problem, increasing risks of outbreaks of waterborne diseases as  vulnerable communities are forced to resort to utilizing unsafe or contaminated water sources for their daily needs.

But groups behind the report warn that without mitigating action, the situation could become even worse.

“We can see there is the potential for some severe long-term repercussions of these attacks. There are 150,000 people without running water at the moment, but that number could rise in the future,” Suzanne Takkenberg, Action Against Hunger’s country director, told IPS.

Among the groups’ biggest concerns is the effect of the destruction on local agriculture.

In villages near the southern Lebanese border, farmers’ irrigation networks have been destroyed, cutting off vital water supplies to farms. Trucked-in water supplies have not been sufficient to replace this and allow them to irrigate land or give drinking water to their livestock, farmers say.

Meanwhile, farmers have also been unable to access their land due to security concerns—a November ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has held only partly, with violations reported regularly—compounding problems with food production.

“One of our major worries is the mid- to long-term effects of the difficulties for farmers to irrigate their land,” explained Takkenberg.

“They have been struggling to irrigate their land since October 2023, due to security concerns hindering access to their land, as well as water problems. We have seen as a consequence of these attacks that food prices have increased and food productivity has decreased.”

Another concern is the growing reliance on trucked-in water for communities.

“Worryingly, people are becoming dependent on using water that is trucked in. This is sometimes ten times more expensive than using water from a public network, and the checks on that water are not the same as those carried out on public water supply networks,” said Takkenberg.

“Water quality after any kind of conflict is a concern and we are definitely worried about it in southern Lebanon after these attacks,” she added.

Illness and disease related to water quality and shortages are major concerns.

A destroyed water pumping station in Tyre, Lebanon, following an airstrike in November 2024.
Credit: Insecurity Insight

While the report states that waterborne and water-related illnesses were not reported by people interviewed, some highlighted the limited resources available for testing water quality and possible contamination. There are also worries that water may have been contaminated by white phosphorus, the use of these munitions in Lebanon having been verified by Human Rights Watch.

Meanwhile, there are further concerns that residents may resort to using unsafe water sources due to limited supplies, a situation exacerbated by low rainfall and water shortages at critical reservoirs.

Local officials interviewed for the report also highlighted damage to sewerage networks in some areas. This, combined with the known large-scale damage to water infrastructure and the possibility that damaged sewerage infrastructure has contaminated water sources, ramps up the potential of negative long-term effects on health if the water supply crisis is not adequately addressed, the report states.

It also points to evidence from Ethiopia, Ukraine and the Middle East, demonstrating clear links between damage to water and sanitation infrastructure during conflict and adverse public health outcomes.

“People are cutting back on their water use, which can have an effect on health and hygiene and raises disease risk—cholera is already epidemic in Lebanon and this situation could exacerbate that. Other diseases could also be spread. We have already seen cases of watery diarrhea, which is bad not just in itself, but also because in children it can cause problems with malnutrition as their bodies struggle to absorb nutrients,” Takkenberg said.

But while the potential long-term impact of the damage and destruction to water infrastructure is severe, early action could mitigate the worst possible outcomes, experts say.

“There is an urgent need to repair systems and while this is ongoing, to track water into the area. The consequences of water system destruction are rarely immediate. Most often, the impacts accumulate over time. It is the combination of destroyed infrastructure with the failure to repair it, insufficient water trucking, or lack of access to trucked-in water that eventually produces devastating outcomes for individuals and communities,” Christina Wille, Director of Insecurity Insight, told IPS.

“This is why the destruction of infrastructure demands close attention: if not effectively mitigated, cascading consequences are inevitable. People may be forced to leave, adding to the numbers of displaced populations, or they may fall ill. Yet there is also an opportunity—by addressing damaged infrastructure early—to prevent the worst outcomes of displacement and disease and to save lives,” she added.

But while repairing and rebuilding water infrastructure is essential to preventing the most severe long-term impacts on local communities, implementing it is a different matter.

Authorities have managed to carry out some limited repairs to some networks, but issues around the continued presence of Israeli forces and concerns about ongoing conflict violence have prevented wider-scale or more extensive reconstruction. Finances for repairs are also under strain amid the socio-economic crisis the country has faced since 2019.

“Disease outbreaks are very predictable and the cost of not dealing with them is much worse than dealing with them now. The health ministry has been good in warning [of potential health risks] but there is a limit to what the government can do with the resources that are available after years of economic crisis. It is a very difficult situation,” said Takkenberg.

The report ends with a call for, among others, all parties to the conflict to strictly comply with the ceasefire agreement and adhere to international humanitarian law (IHL) and ensure the protection of civilians, health workers, and essential infrastructure.

It urges humanitarian programmers and donors to support the rehabilitation and operationalization of conflict-affected water infrastructure and ensure temporary access to safe water and basic sanitation services through the provision of water trucking, emergency water points, and safe wastewater discharge.

The report also says UN member states should push for the establishment of independent, impartial, and transparent investigations into all allegations of IHL violations.

Satellite imagery shown in the report indicates that in at least several incidents the damaged or destroyed facilities were located in large open areas without clearly identifiable military targets, suggesting that in some cases they may have been specifically and deliberately targeted.

The authors of the report point out that under IHL, parties to a conflict must always distinguish between lawful military targets and civilians and civilian objects and that deliberately targeting civilians and civilian objects is prohibited and amounts to a war crime. The various kinds of water infrastructure are protected as civilian objects under IHL and must never be attacked.

“Determining whether each incident deliberately targeted water infrastructure would require access to confidential military decisions, which is not available, as well as information on whether any military objectives were present at the time of the attacks. Our data is limited to the observable effects on the ground following the attacks. Nevertheless, the scale and nature of the observed damage raise serious questions regarding compliance with international humanitarian law, which governs the conduct of hostilities,” said Wille.

While it may not be possible to determine whether the attacks were deliberate, their impact is clear and highlights the need to look at not just the direct but also indirect effects of conflict, said Wille.

“Conflict deaths are not only direct (caused by weapons) but also indirect, when the destruction of systems produces cumulative and deadly consequences. The more complex and interconnected our societies become, particularly in securing food and water, the more vulnerable they are to such systemic shocks. At the same time, it becomes harder to trace devastating outcomes back to a single act of destruction.

“This is why we must learn to examine conflicts through the lens of systems and interconnectivity and to apply this knowledge to our legal analysis of the conduct of warfare,” she said.

“The public needs to ask more direct questions about the conduct of warfare and how the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution are being applied. We need a broader debate on how these principles should be interpreted in today’s conflicts. Modern societies rely on highly interconnected and complex infrastructure to secure basic needs such as food and water, while warfare is increasingly conducted remotely through advanced technologies. In this context, what counts as proportional? And what kinds of precautions are necessary in today’s world?” she added.

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Morning after an Israeli attack in Tyre, Lebanon. Credit: Nour

By Eliane Eid
JNOUB, Lebanon, Aug 15 2025 (IPS)

“Special, targeted operations in southern Lebanon,” a phrase that has echoed repeatedly over the past two years in Israeli Defence Force (IDF) statements. But behind these clinical military terms lies a human cost that statistics cannot capture.

The residents of southern Lebanon—mothers, fathers, children, and elders—are the ones who face the daily reality of displacement, loss, and uncertainty. Their homes become coordinates on military maps; their neighborhoods, theaters of “operations.” Yet their stories of endurance, grief, and quiet acts of resilience rarely reach beyond the headlines.

Through interviews with residents of “Jnoub,” we examine how communities are navigating displacement, processing communal loss, and finding ways to grieve while continuing to live. These are voices from a region too often reduced to geopolitical analysis, voices that reveal the profound human dimension of conflict.

“Ironically, my workplace is close to my old house’s rubble. I see it, as well as the zone where my pet died, on a daily basis. I haven’t grieved as I should… haven’t cried as much as I should have.

“I hate the sound of phone calls, especially the landlines and my father’s good old Blackberry phone, as they remind me of the time we received the threat and people were calling to warn us,” said Sarah Soueidan when asked about her daily routine after her home was destroyed.

Having both her residential house and her family’s house bombed by the Israeli Defence Forces, she and her family had to move repeatedly throughout the past two years. Her hometown, Yater, located in South Lebanon, was directly affected by the war, leaving nothing but old memories and rubble.

The night they had to flee their house in Southern Beirut, Sara and her family woke up to a series of calls while listening to the sounds of ‘warning shots’ on the streets. These shootings were made to help draw attention to residents who did not receive the warning to leave their houses and find shelter before the attack.

As it was only 10 am, they had to act fast, so she and her mother left the house first to see what was going on and then realized that their building would be hit. Sarah had to go back home to warn her father and siblings. Since there was not enough time, and her father needed assistance in movement, they had to pick him up and leave the house with as few objects as possible.

They made sure to put Halloum (Sarah’s cat) in his cage, but due to the rush and many people in the house trying to help, Halloum got scared and jumped out of his cage. Sara and her siblings tried to look for him before leaving, but there was no more time; people were dragging them out of the house. On that day, Sarah took his toys and food, hoping to find him again, but she never did. The Israeli attack on Sarah’s house in Southern Beirut reduced it to rubble.

Sarah and her family had nowhere to go as their house in their hometown, Yater, was also bombed, and they had to leave the area until things settled down.

The interview took place a while after the attack, as Sarah was now ready to talk about what happened with her and her family, stating, “While I am not politically affiliated with anyone, nor would I discuss the reasons for escalation, as it is debatable, yet aggression and terrorism would always be so, without any reason. I was born and raised in these areas and streets. None of the allegations regarding ‘weapons, machinery, or drones under a three-story building’ are true. We need answers or proof.”

Halloum the cat, lying next to a Christmas tree. Credit: Sarah Soueidan

Many neighborhoods, streets, and buildings were targeted in the process; no one knew how or why, they only received images of their building with a warning that they needed to evacuate.

“The bomb was so close and I heard the sound of the missiles just before they reached the ground (and here you didn’t know if the missile would fall on you or no) and when I heard that, I ran toward my son and hugged him, then the missile exploded. This was repeated three or four times,” said Zaynab Yaghi, who is a resident in Ansar, a village in South Lebanon. Zaynab and her family had to leave South Lebanon under stress and fear of the unknown, all while trying to control the emotions of her son in order not to scare him even more.

Zaynab, like many others, had to live under stressful conditions, waiting for the unknown. Even after the ceasefire was agreed upon, residents in Southern Lebanon were still unable to go back home or live a normal life.

“Nearby buildings were struck after the ceasefire (one as far as 100m away from our own home). We were very surprised the first time it happened and scrambled to leave. It was very frightening,” said Mohammad Wehbe, who lost his home in Ainata and his apartment in the suburbs of Beirut, which was affected by the bombing of nearby buildings.

After talking to many people from different villages and areas in South Lebanon, there was one thing that made them feel a sense of hope, and that was community, traditions, and resistance. Resistance by choosing to go back, to have a future, present, and past within their grandparents’ land, and to grieve by holding on to what was left.

When asked, Nour described her village as a step back in time, a place of simplicity, serenity, and beauty. Nature all around and people who are warm and always have their doors open for strangers. Nour’s village, which is located within the Tyre district, was directly affected by the Israeli attacks. Her old neighborhood was completely demolished, and while the streets feel empty, she is trying to visit the area as much as possible to remember, to tell the story of those forgotten, and to belong to something greater than a title.

“The first time I went in winter, it felt strange: silence and destruction. But visit after visit, nature and the people of nature try to live again. That gives me hope. We’ll be fixing our home again. What matters is that we acknowledge this land is ours. And on our land, I can sense existence.”

While Nour gets her strength from people around her and her will to go back and build her home again, some have lost it completely, as it is not black or white; there is not a single way of grieving, existing, and living within times of chaos and displacement. “What beliefs I had before the war are long gone now. I don’t think I have processed what happened and I cope by ignoring everything and focusing on survival. Hope certainly feels like a big word these days,” Mohammad Wehbe said.

Compounding these challenges is the absence of government support. None of the interviewees have received any assistance from official channels, instead relying on their savings and help from family members to survive. This reality adds another layer of uncertainty to their daily struggles, as they navigate displacement and loss without institutional backing

These stories from Southern Lebanon reveal the complexity of human resilience in the face of displacement and loss. While some find strength in community and connection to their ancestral land, others struggle with the weight of survival itself. What remains constant is the need to bear witness to these experiences, to ensure that behind every military briefing and policy discussion, the human cost is neither forgotten nor reduced to mere statistics.

The residents of Jnoub continue to navigate an uncertain future, carrying with them the memories of what was lost and the fragile hope of what might be rebuilt. Their voices remind us that recovery is not just about reconstructing buildings but about healing communities and honoring the stories of those who endure.

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The aftermath of a Russian attack on the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv on July 8, 2024. Credit: Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, May 19 2025 (IPS)

The international community must take action to uphold international humanitarian law, say healthcare and rights advocates, as attacks on healthcare in war zones reached a record high last year.

A new report from the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC) released today (May 19) documented more than 3,600 attacks on doctors and health care workers, hospitals, and clinics in zones of armed conflict in 2024—up 15 percent from 2023 and 62 percent since 2022.

The report’s authors say attacks on healthcare in war zones are not only more numerous but are also more destructive and involve heavier weapons—there was a growing use of explosive weapons in attacks against healthcare, rising from 36 percent of incidents in 2022 to 48 percent in 2023. Perpetrator use of drones against health care facilities drove much of the increase, as their use nearly quadrupled, according to the report.

Meanwhile, more than 900 doctors were killed last year—a rise of 21 percent from 2023—and almost 500 were arrested. More than 100 were kidnapped.

However, the report suggests attacks on healthcare in war zones may be even more widespread, as the collection of data on violence is impeded by insecurity, communications blockages, and the reluctance of some entities to share data on violence.

It also says the rise in attacks has come alongside attempts by perpetrators to limit legal protections for health care and civilians in war.

It highlights how Israel has “sought to dilute legal requirements of precaution and proportionality during conflict” while “campaigns to delegitimize the International Criminal Court (ICC) are underway,” with US president Donald Trump imposing sanctions on ICC staff and their families for having charged Israelis with war crimes, Russia criminalizing cooperation with the ICC or any foreign court seeking to hold Russians to account, and other countries announcing plans to leave the ICC.

The authors say regimes around the world are increasingly flouting international human rights laws, and action must be taken to bring actors behind these attacks to justice or risk a proliferation of military targeting of healthcare.

Christina Wille, Director of Insight Insecurity, an SHCC member, told IPS that the international community has a role to play.

“International humanitarian law, which says that healthcare in conflict must be protected, is not being respected. The international community should come together to ensure that there is accountability for these attacks and the people responsible for them are brought to justice. But if nothing is done and this continues, other states may see the targeting of healthcare as a tactic that they can use in conflict without risk of censure or sanction and will go ahead with it,” Wille said.

While the report documented more countries last year reporting attacks on healthcare, the majority of recorded incidents occurred in a handful of states.

By far the largest number of attacks on health care—more than 1,300—took place in Gaza and the West Bank, but there were also hundreds of attacks in other countries that have seen brutal conflicts, including Ukraine (544), Lebanon (485), Myanmar (308), and Sudan (276), where there has been evidence of systematic targeting of local healthcare facilities and workers by attacking, or both attacking and opposing, forces.

The results of these attacks have been dire, not just in terms of the immediate casualties among healthcare workers and civilians from such strikes but also the knock-on effects on the local civilian population from the destruction of facilities, as in some cases even the most basic of medical services subsequently become unavailable.

The report points out that in Gaza, every hospital has been hit, and many multiple times, with dire impacts on their capacity to address the massive number of traumatic injuries, treatment for chronic and infectious disease, and safe childbirth.

“The health system in Gaza has collapsed. Hospitals and clinics have been completely destroyed, like the of the civilian infrastructure. Today, only 22 out of 36 hospitals are partially functioning, and that can mean only being able to treat a few patients a day. Most of the labs are not running, there is very little material available, the staff is exhausted, and some are still detained,” Simon Tyler, Executive Director of Doctors of the World, the UK chapter of the international human rights organization global Médecins du Monde network, told IPS.

A charity organization working in Gaza, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), said that devastating attacks on two hospitals – the European Gaza Hospital (EGH) and Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza—in the last week had worsened the situation.

“The attacks put the EGH out of service and increased the pressure on services at Nasser, as well as destroying parts of the hospital, including the burns unit. EGH was the only hospital in Gaza providing cancer services following the destruction of the Turkish Friendship Hospital in March,” MAP communications manager Max Slaughter told IPS.

Israeli forces have often claimed that hospitals in Gaza were being used as bases for Hamas military operations.

But the UN has said Israeli forces’ attacks on healthcare in Gaza are a war crime.

Doctors in Myanmar who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity for security reasons said the intensified use of drones by government forces fighting rebel groups in the last 18 months “posed grave threats to the provision of humanitarian aid and healthcare services.”

“Deliberate attacks on healthcare facilities, including hospitals, rural health centers, and other related infrastructure, have resulted in severe damage to health facilities, injuries, fatalities, and, in some cases, permanent disabilities among healthcare workers,” one said.

The doctors added that a combination of people being afraid to travel and frequent displacement of healthcare service sites has significantly disrupted access to essential medical care, and drone attacks targeting group activities, such as the provision of humanitarian aid, hinder effective delivery by deterring gatherings of people and creating logistical challenges.

Meanwhile, the risk posed to humanitarian workers by these attacks has reduced the presence of organizations on the ground, diminishing aid availability for affected populations.

In Ukraine, the healthcare system has faced similar widespread destruction.

Earlier this month, Ukraine’s Health Ministry said that Russian forces had damaged or destroyed more than 2,300 medical infrastructure facilities since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

In some areas near the line, healthcare systems have all but disappeared, with people having to either rely on local aid groups and NGOs for basic care and essential medicines or travel long distances in difficult conditions to facilities that are still functioning.

But it is not hospitals that have come under attack, as Russian troops regularly target ambulances—since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, 116 ambulances have been damaged, 274 destroyed, and 80 seized.

But hospitals and clinics in areas far from the fighting have not been spared. In one of the worst attacks on healthcare since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, was hit by a missile on July 8 last year. Two adults were killed and at least 34 people, including nine children, were injured.

Despite initial denials by the Kremlin that its forces had hit the hospital, evidence showed the building had been deliberately struck with a hypersonic missile.

Another problem faced in many conflict zones is how attacks on other infrastructure, such as energy facilities, are impacting healthcare.

Volodymyr Hryshko, Senior Legal Counsel with Ukrainian group Truth Hounds, told IPS more intense Russian targeting of energy infrastructure in 2024 had had a devastating impact on healthcare. In a survey by the group, 92 percent of doctors reported such attacks had experienced power cuts at work, and 66 percent said medical procedures had been affected. The attacks had led to deaths from oxygen deprivation as life support systems failed and staff at some hospitals were forced to work in complete blackouts.

“But the impact is not only immediate risk to patients but also long-term system degradation, staff burnout—reported by over 80 percent—and psychological trauma among both patients and healthcare providers,” he said.

However, despite the death and destruction caused by such attacks, the report shows they are increasing in number.

Wille said the reasons for this are varied and that not all strikes on medical facilities documented may be deliberate.

“Weapons may not be as accurate as believed, and heavy weapons can also have a ‘wide area’ effect—attackers may not have been aiming to hit a hospital, but the impact of the strike still damaged it,” she said.

However, she pointed out that militaries are aware they can gain an advantage in conflict by targeting healthcare systems.

“Health systems are often seen by conflict parties as a system that can help keep the enemy going—treating injuries, helping them recover, and providing a place for them to rest and recuperate.

“Attacks on health systems can also damage morale significantly because health facilities and workers supply the services the population, especially very young and old people, desperately need,” she explained.

But groups working to provide medical and humanitarian help in war zones believe the fact that the regimes behind these attacks are carrying them out with seeming impunity is fueling continued attacks on healthcare in war zones.

“The principle that civilians and aid workers should be protected is being violated time and again. In recent times, we’ve seen clinics bombed, convoys attacked, and our colleagues targeted simply for doing their job in Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine. We can no longer rely on or guarantee protection for our staff and services. Civilians, humanitarian workers, health workers, and infrastructure should never be targets. We firmly condemn all attacks on healthcare and call for independent investigation and accountability for the perpetrators,” said Tyler.

“The continued inaction of… some of the most powerful governments in the world in the face of the Israeli authorities’ deadly blockade is indefensible—and could be judged as complicity under international humanitarian law and human rights law. We must hold all responsible for violations accountable to ensure justice for victims, deter further violations, and prevent future escalations,” he added.

MAP’s Slaughter warned that Israel’s “… deliberate blockade of aid and continued attacks on healthcare, all with no real accountability or impunity, are setting a precedent that the international community will permit such atrocities to be committed with no recourse.”

The SHCC report calls for UN states to take action to ensure healthcare is protected in conflicts, including ending impunity by encouraging investigations, data sharing, prosecutions through the International Criminal Court and empowering monitoring bodies.

Wille admitted, though it may be difficult to get a powerful international consensus that would lead to such attacks being stopped, or at least significantly reduced.

“I have little optimism that governments can prevent such attacks in the current climate. When major powers that should uphold the rules-based international order instead question its legitimacy—and even erode the rule of law at home, as in the US—it becomes nearly impossible to build the international consensus needed to enforce those rules,” she said.

“Yet it remains essential to keep calling for these attacks to stop and for perpetrators to be held accountable because even a fractured international order can be repaired, and justice demands persistence,” she added.

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Samira, a mother of five, was forced to leave her home following bombardment and is now living with her children in the streets of Martyrs Square in Beirut. Credit: UNICEF/Fouad Choufany

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 27 2024 (IPS)

A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah comes into effect early on Wednesday morning (November 27). It is hoped that this will mark an end to a 13-month-long period of hostilities between the two parties in Lebanon.

News of the ceasefire came from United States President Joe Biden, who made a televised announcement on Tuesday afternoon that an agreement had been reached between the Israeli and Lebanese governments. Biden remarked that the ceasefire was expected to be a “permanent cessation of hostilities” from both sides of the conflict.

“Civilians on both sides will soon be able to safely return to their communities and begin to rebuild their homes, their schools, their farms, their businesses, and their very lives,” said Biden. “We are determined that this conflict will not just be another cycle of violence.”

Under the ceasefire agreements, which will initially last for sixty days, fighting at the Israel-Lebanon border will come to an end, and Israeli troops are expected to gradually withdraw from south Lebanon. Hezbollah is expected to pull back north of the Litani river, ending their presence in southern Lebanon.

The implementation of this ceasefire will be overseen by the United States, France, and the United Nations through the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The UN has made repeated calls for the full implementation of resolution 1701 (2006), which calls for an end to the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah and the need for Lebanon to exert government control.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed the ceasefire deal, noting that it would be an “essential step towards restoring calm and stability in Lebanon,” while also warning that Israel must commit to the agreement and abide by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 (2006). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared in a video statement shortly before the ceasefire deal was reached that Israel would retaliate if Hezbollah made any moves that violated the terms of the ceasefire.

Senior leaders in the UN, including Secretary-General António Guterres, welcomed the ceasefire announcement. In an official statement from his office, Guterres urges the parties to “fully respect and swiftly implement all of their commitments made under this agreement.”

UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, also released a statement where she welcomed the ceasefire agreement. She went on to remark that this would signify the start of a critical process, “anchored in the full implementation” of the Security Council resolution 1701 (2006), to go forward in restoring the safety and security of civilians on both sides of the Blue Line.

“Considerable work lies ahead to ensure that the agreement endures. Nothing less than the full and unwavering commitment of both parties is required,” Hennis-Plasschaert said. “It is clear that the status quo of implementing only select provisions of Resolution 1701 (2006) while paying lip service to others will not suffice. Neither side can afford another period of disingenuous implementation under the guise of ostensible calm.”

The ceasefire agreement comes after a year-long period of escalating tensions and fighting, which began shortly after the October 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel. Hostilities ramped up in September of this year when the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) made repeated attacks on southern Lebanon. The fallout of the humanitarian situation has seen the displacement of over 900,000 civilians since October 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Over 3823 civilian casualties have been confirmed within Lebanon and Israel. Of those casualties, at least 1356 civilians have been killed since October 8, 2023.

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said that the work must begin to sustain this peace and that children and families, including those displaced and in host communities, need to be ensured a safe return. Humanitarian organizations need to be “granted safe, timely, and unimpeded access to deliver lifesaving aid and services to all affected areas.”

“We call on all parties to uphold their commitments, respect international law, and work with the international community to sustain peace and ensure a brighter future for children,” said Russell. “Children deserve stability, hope, and a chance to rebuild their futures. UNICEF will continue to stand with them every step of the way.”

Even as a ceasefire seemed imminent, on Tuesday Israeli warplanes bombarded Beirut’s southern neighborhoods. These attacks have resulted in the deaths of 24 civilians. Al Jazeera reported that even amidst Biden’s announcement, the war in Lebanon was “still very much going.”

In recent months, UNIFIL forces have been caught in the crossfires and have faced challenges in fulfilling their mandate. Most recently, four Italian peacekeepers were injured when rockets hit the headquarters in Shama, though they did not sustain life-threatening injuries.

On this incident, UNIFIL stated: “The deliberate or accidental targeting of peacekeepers serving in south Lebanon must cease immediately to ensure their safety and uphold international law.” Earlier this month, UNIFIL released a statement detailing the actions the IDF took against the peacekeepers, including the “deliberate and direct destruction” of UNIFIL property.

During his address on Tuesday, Biden acknowledged Gaza and the lack of a ceasefire for the ongoing war. “Just as the people of Lebanon deserve a future of security and prosperity, so do the people of Gaza,” Biden said. “They too deserve an end to the fighting and the displacement. The people of Gaza have been through hell. Their world is absolutely shattered. Far too many civilians in Gaza have suffered far too much.”

Biden pledged that the United States would make another push to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, along with Türkiye, Egypt, Qatar, and Israel; one that would see an end to the violence and the release of all hostages. The United States has vetoed Security Council resolutions that would have called for a ceasefire in Gaza on four separate occasions, most recently this November.

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UNICEF initiated the distribution of bottled water and emergency hygiene kits at Bir Hasan Public School in Beirut, Lebanon, targeting collective shelters and densely populated areas receiving internally displaced persons (IDPs). The team also began distributing 1,300 blankets and sleeping bags in displacement shelters. Credit: Fouad Choufany/UNICEF

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2024 (IPS)

The escalating hostilities between Israel and Lebanon have already threatened the safety and security of more than 1 million civilians, urging Lebanon’s government and the United Nations to take swift humanitarian action and call for international support.

On Tuesday, October 1, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati and the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon, Imran Riza, launched an emergency Flash Appeal of USD 426 million to mobilize resources that will support civilians affected by the hostilities and the developing humanitarian situation.

The appeal is intended to support the government-led emergency response through October to December 2024. It is intended to help in providing life-saving assistance for immediate needs that include food, shelter, healthcare, water, and municipal services. Funds will be allocated to humanitarian partners collaborating with the emergency response.

“This is a critical moment that demands the immediate attention and action of the international community,” said Mikati. “I urge all nations to step up their support in providing humanitarian aid and to use their influence to help bring an end to the violence.”

The appeal launched today would go forward to addressing the new and existing humanitarian needs of affected civilians. It will support the Lebanon Response Plan (LRP) 2024, which is the main framework for an integrated humanitarian plan in the country.

“Our aim is to build on and reinforce the strong cooperation and collaboration already in place, working closely with the government and our partner ministries at both national and subnational levels,” said Humanitarian Coordinator Imran Riza.

“Without sufficient resources, humanitarians risk leaving the population of an entire country without the support they urgently require,” he said.

According to the report issued on the appeal, the humanitarian response still faces multiple challenges. In addition to limited funding, humanitarian partners on the ground have also reported that securing unimpeded access to critical areas is a concern. Reaching affected groups in southern Lebanon is an issue, where congestion is limiting access to shelters. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has warned that the number of internally displaced peoples will only increase as the Israeli military issues evacuation orders, including for 30 villages in south Lebanon.

Senior leaders in the UN system, including the Secretary-General, are calling for a ceasefire or an end to the hostilities. UN Secretary-General António Guterres implored the international community to “urgently support” the appeal. In a statement, spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said that Guterres is “extremely concerned with the escalation of the conflict in Lebanon” and calls for an immediate ceasefire.

“An all-out war must be avoided in Lebanon at all costs, and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon must be respected,” said Dujarric.

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell also called for a ceasefire in the region. In a statement issued on Monday, she warned that humanitarian conditions were worsening by the hour as the violence intensified, adding that 300,000 children accounted for the 1 million people displaced.

“Any ground offensive or further escalation in Lebanon would make a catastrophic situation for children even worse. Such an outcome must be avoided at all costs,” she said. “We reiterate our call for all parties to protect children and civilian infrastructure, and to ensure that humanitarian actors can safely reach all those in need—in accordance with their obligations under international humanitarian law.”

UNICEF, along with its partners and fellow UN agencies, have been providing emergency supplies such as emergency hygiene kits, food, and sleeping bags. In addition to its child protection and psychosocial support services for children, UNICEF has also supported nearly 200 collective shelters in Lebanon hosting 50,000 displaced people by providing essential supplies.

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Dr. Abdulrahman Bizri, member of the Lebanese parliament and the parliamentary committee on public health, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and chair of the national COVID vaccine committee and response.

By Randa El Ozeir
BEIRUT & TORONTO , Jul 8 2024 (IPS)

This summer is bringing an additional challenge to the public health front in Lebanon, along with higher-than-normal temperatures.

An uptick in food- and water-borne communicable diseases, mainly viral hepatitis A, has been registered in the country, according to recent statistics released by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health from numbers collected in hospitals, health centers and laboratories.

The hepatitis A virus (HAV) causes hepatitis A, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which causes inflammation of the liver. The virus is primarily spread when an uninfected (and unvaccinated) person ingests food or water that is contaminated with the feces of an infected person. The disease is closely associated with unsafe water or food, inadequate sanitation, poor personal hygiene and oral-anal sex.”

An unrelenting, thorny economic crisis has been ravaging the country for years and is considered the main culprit for the deterioration of basic facilities, community installations and public services.

Dr. Abdulrahman Bizri, member of the Lebanese parliament and the parliamentary committee on public health, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and chairperson of the national COVID vaccine committee and response, blames the collapse of Lebanese currency, the negligence, the intractable economic, political and livelihood crises, the mismanagement and the prevailing misconduct for the complications of preventing and containing diseases, including communicable types.

“All these factors led to failure in sustaining health infrastructure, such as sewage, and providing clean water to households for direct or indirect human use through produce and/or livestock, which resulted in the spread of many diseases, namely the infectious ones transmitted through contaminated water, such as cholera, hepatitis A, acute diarrhea, dysentery, salmonella and other diseases.”

Staff Shortages and Budget Cuts

Government dysfunction, scarcity of maintenance and investment and corruption slowed down the development of services and responses to health outbreaks.

Dr. Hussein Hassan, professor and researcher in food safety and food production at Lebanese American University (LAU), points out two additional elements that have deeply affected the public health situation: the reduced funding and the exodus of medical doctors.

“In hospitals, for example, we have staff shortages due to the brain drain while we are suffering from inefficiency and ghost workers. Unfortunately, we also have bribery and budget cuts that delay much-needed projects.”

Can the Ministry of Health (MoH), with its current shape in light of government spending, decrease its ability to manage and protect against communicable diseases?

Bizri says that “MoH is facing an uphill battle due to its limited and low capacities. It relies heavily on the support of the international community,  for example, WHO, UNICEF, and UNHCR, among others, to control these diseases.”

Dr. Hussein Hassan, professor and researcher in food safety and food production at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

Bridging the gap requires a comprehensive and holistic approach to dealing with the situation based on short-term and long-term steps to be taken on many official and public levels. Hassan believes that “we need to strengthen the surveillance of outbreaks, execute mass vaccination campaigns, provide affected individuals with required supplies, and improve the water and sanitation in crowded areas by installing purification systems and even distributing bottled water.”

Large Presence of Syrian refugees

Poverty, poor public awareness, inadequate education, a social environment with minimal knowledge and disregarding good hygiene practices contribute to communicable disease transmission.

Bizri refers to the sizable presence of Syrian refugees who live in difficult and bad conditions, congregated in unorganized camps with insufficient reliable health structures or safe drinking water. He applauded the three-way partnership between the Lebanese Ministry of Health,  international organizations like WHO and UNHCR, and the considerable Lebanese medical private sector in fighting diseases threatening the country.

“Lebanon succeeded in containing many epidemics that had the potential to prevail. The Lebanese medical body, including civil society, massively volunteered to control the spread of these diseases. The health sector spearheaded the efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic and is still at the forefront of fighting communicable diseases.”

However, he has reservations regarding the “skeptical role of UNHCR in its fight against many of the epidemics menacing Lebanon as an outcome of the concentrated existence of Syrian refugees, since it does not deal transparently with the Lebanese government and its official institutions.”

To ensure continuity of public health preventative and controlling programs, Hassan mapped out some long-term measures to be put in place, including “economic and political stability, strengthening the healthcare system, investing in improving water supply and sewage systems, and developing and implementing maintenance programs related to water safety, particularly among refugees.”

He acknowledges the crucial role played by international collaboration and financial and technical support delivered by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Mistrust has dented the relationship between the healthcare system and the citizens.

“I believe that Lebanese citizens lost faith in the health sector long ago,” said Bizri. “Yet they keep depending on this sector, which offers affordable health and medical services compared to the private healthcare costs in Lebanon. The country boasts advanced medical services and treatments, but its public health is still enduring a significant deficit.”

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Women have taken the helm in Lebanon’s protests, but not in the realm of formal politics. This role is symbolized in this statue of a protesting woman in Martyrs' Square, Beirut. Credit: Mona Alami

By Mona Alami
Beirut, Lebanon, Dec 21 2021 (IPS)

Despite its apparent liberalism, Lebanon scores low in gender equality, especially in politics.

According to the Gender Gap index, Lebanon ranks third last in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with only Syria and Yemen, both plagued by war, scoring lower.

According to Reliefweb, since 2010, Lebanon has witnessed a consistent decline in its relative gender gap score – reaching close to zero in terms of political empowerment.

In November, incumbent Prime Minister Najib Mikati was criticized for saying that Lebanon’s Independence Day celebrations were similar to a “divorced woman celebrating her wedding anniversary … but let’s not forget that if she had remained understanding until her last day in the marriage, she wouldn’t be divorced…”

Rima Husseini, professor at the Lebanese American University (LAU), says empowerment in the country is superficial.

“On the surface, we are seen as an example because Lebanon has a high number of educated women, with many female entrepreneurs. In appearance, we seem more liberated, but that does not translate into political empowerment at a practical level,” she says in an exclusive interview with IPS.

There is only one woman in the current government.

In the previous election in 2018, only six of 86 women who registered to run for the 128-seat Parliament won their seats. Five of them were members of political parties, which helped facilitate their victory.

Paula Yaacoubian, ventured into politics without the usual patronage – a family name, wealth, or the support of a male political leader.

Only one, former television news presenter Paula Yacoubian ran as an independent, won a seat. Unlike other female candidates, she did not come from a political family nor backed by a local male political leader.

While under Article 7 of the Lebanese constitution, gender equality is guaranteed, personal status is often in the hands of religious communities.  Lebanon recognizes 18 religious communities, each with a different status law, which means gender equality may not apply.

“Inequality stems from the patriarchal framework of households, where family codes and communal laws see women as objects owned by their family. This reality affects women’s political participation in Lebanon,” explains Husseini.

The patriarchal system, where women educate their sons differently from their daughters, is one of the biggest challenges faced by Lebanese women. Another stems from the sectarian system, one of the most detrimental factors hindering women’s political representation, explains Yaacoubian.

More than two decades have passed since Lebanon adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Yet, it has failed so far to comply with the treaty, more specifically when it comes to the gender quota system allowing women’s integration into political life.

“Lebanon’s patriarchal system, which is built on laws that aim to control women and youth, does not allow for real citizenship, with factors of separation such as class and religion prevailing,” says Husseini. “When you think of it, there is no real Lebanese citizenship, no social contract that binds us together. Women have a great role to play but cannot because of the legal system that differentiates between men and women.”

This translates to Lebanon falling behind regarding women’s representation, with no quotas to act as a safeguard, unlike other regional countries.

In nearby Jordan, in appearance, a more conservative country than Lebanon, nine percent of women hold ministerial positions. Another 12 percent participate in Parliament, with an additional 32 percent participating in the local legislatures.

Women played a major role in recent protests in Lebanon. However, this has not translated into political power. Credit: Mona Alami

In Iraq, Women set an unprecedented historical record in the 2021 election. According to an article by the New Arab, 97 female candidates were elected to the 329-seat chamber this year, which equals 29.4 percent of the new Iraqi parliament. This represents 14 more seats than the required quota for female MPs, which is 83, or 25% of parliament according to Iraq’s electoral laws.

The New Arab estimates that the support for female candidates was so significant that 57 MPs will enter the next parliament based solely on registered votes rather than the allocated quota system.

“Conversely, women’s access to politics is restricted in Lebanon. As an example, former MP Dina Boustany only entered parliament after the death of her father. Women get into parliament due to their familial relations,” says Myriam Sfeir, Director of the LAU Arab Institute for Women. “There is a famous saying: ‘women enter parliament as a result of the death of a relative’. Then they leave political life when their male descendant comes of age. In addition, Lebanese political parties are simply more willing to fund men.”

Yaacoubian, who is the only woman to have broken the rules by venturing into politics without the sponsor of a family name, wealth, or the support of a male political leader, underlines that entering political life as a woman is not without cost in Lebanon.

“Women are treated as if they are missing some quality (that men are supposed to have). The prevailing mentality is that men know better, although studies have shown that women tend to be less corrupt and more humane in politics,” she says.

Independent political players such as Yaacoubian, explains Husseini, are often the object of bullying, with efforts made to diminish their value on a personal level or attack their reputation, which would never happen to a male political candidate.

Despite remaining on the sideline of the Lebanese parliamentary life, women have been at the helm of the 2019 protest movement.

They succeeded in easing conflict between separate sectarian regions, such as Ain Remaneh and Chiyah in Beirut, and protected protestors when the riot police attacked them.

In November, three judges, all women, handed in their resignation to protest political interference in the judiciary’s work and the undermining of decisions issued by judges and courts.

“Women are very present, especially as civil society actors. Lebanese women are demanding to be included on decision tables. They are carving a space for themselves in the political world. However, a quota system is essential to ensure better representation in the next parliamentary elections,” says Sfeir.

Women must be brave and persevere at any cost if they want to enter politics, concludes Yaacoubian.

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Poverty and hunger are on the rise in Lebanon. The World Food Programme estimates food prices have increased by 628 percent in two years. Credit: Mona Alami /IPS

By Mona Alami
Beirut, Nov 18 2021 (IPS)

On the streets of Beirut, Hadi Hassoun begs for a few pounds to feed his five children. He has little hope of a job, especially now that the economic crisis in Lebanon has destroyed wealth.

The country already significantly lagged with UN Sustainable Development Goals of poverty and inequality, but the situation has gone from bad to worse.

In the past year, poverty has tripled, and one in every four children in the country are skipping meals. The Lebanese pound (LP) has witnessed a devaluation exceeding 90%, dropping from 1,500 LP to the dollar to over 22,000 LP to the US dollar. At least half of the population is suffering in extreme ways because of this situation, experts say.

The streets of Beirut are an illustration of Lebanon’s dire situation. Hassoun sits begging on the streets of Hamra. “I have five kids, and my youngest daughter has a congenital heart problem,” he explains. “So, I do my best to raise some money every day to try catering to their basic needs.”

In Beirut, the UNICEF office reported that three out of 10 children go to bed hungry or skip meals.

A few meters away, Khalid, using a pseudonym, is a garbage collector for one of Beirut’s main waste management companies. The man, in his sixties, hails from Wadi Khaled, a border town over 150 km away from Beirut.

“I do not have the means to visit them anymore because of rising fuel prices, so I send them money every two weeks, which allows them to eat basic staples such as rice and lentils,” he says. Khalid makes 60,000 LP per day, which amounts to less than $2.5 a day.

The World Food Programme (WFP) estimated that food prices have gone up by 628 percent in just two years.

According to Nassib Ghobril, chief economist for Lebanese Byblos Bank, the CPI rose by 144% in September 2021 compared with the same month in 2020, while it registered its 15th consecutive triple-digit increase since July 2020.

“The cumulative surge in inflation is due, in part, to the inability of authorities to monitor and contain retail prices, as well as to the deterioration of the Lebanese pound’s exchange rate on the parallel market, which has encouraged opportunistic wholesalers and retailers to raise the prices of consumer goods disproportionately,” Ghobril says.

He adds that the smuggling of subsidised imported goods has resulted in shortages of these products locally, which also contributed to price increases.

“Further, the emergence of an active black market for gasoline during the summer has put upward pressure on prices and inflation.”

The prices of fresh or frozen cattle meat in Lebanon jumped by 118.6% in the period, constituting the highest increase in the price of this item in the region, reported Ghobril.

In parallel, the price of bread and other manufactured articles sold went up by 32.8%, representing the third-highest increase in bread prices among MENA countries.

The impact is devastating.

“My family can barely afford bread,” says Khalid.

Lebanon falls short on the UN SDGs at every level, particularly when it comes to poverty and inequality.

Economist Kamal Hamal Hamdan explains that while there are no credible governmental statistics, at least 55% of the Lebanese population live under the poverty line.

“However, estimates actually point to 75% of the Lebanese population falling under the poverty line. This number goes up to 85% in extremely poor areas such as North Lebanon or the Baalback Hermel area,” points out Adib Nehme, a Lebanese development and poverty consultant.

However, both Ghobril and Hamadan believe these statistics may not consider the various sources of income of Lebanese in the form of aid and remittances. Lebanon received last year $ 6.5 billion in remittances from Lebanese expatriates.

Before the crisis, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population owned almost 70 percent of total wealth. Nehme underlines that around 73% of the Lebanese population earned 2.4 million LP per month before the crisis.

“If these people managed to keep their jobs despite Lebanon’s meltdown, this means that around three-quarters of the population earns around $120,” says Nehme.

Additionally, Hamdan underlines that around 60% of wage earners in the pre-crisis era contributed to 25% of the Lebanese GDP, which has worsened.

The financial crisis plaguing Lebanon has created further inequality. The poor and the middle class have been the hit hardest. When they have the luxury have bank accounts, their funds are frozen, and when withdrawn, the funds earn a lower than the black-market rate.

The richest and politically connected have been able to transfer their funds despite the unofficial capital control imposed by Lebanese banks.

“One has to keep in mind that around 963 depositors own $23billion, that is not considering these people’s wealth in land and investments. There is growing polarisation because of concentration of wealth, with Lebanon’s economic collapse,” says Nehme.

Hamdan and Nehme believe this is leading to the disintegration of the country’s social and economic fabric.

“This could lead to growing social pressure and transient violence across the country,” says Hamdan.

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A man and a woman in front of the Beirut Port, Lebanon, following the blast. Courtesy: UN Women Arab States/Dar Al Mussawir

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 29 2021 (IPS)

Lebanon must “shield and preserve” the skills, knowledge, and experience of its people in order to move forward with its development, according to Christophe Abi-Nassif, the Lebanon programme director for the Middle East Institute (MEI).

“Shielding and preserving whatever is left of Lebanon’s human capital should be the main policy-making concern at the moment,” Abi-Nassif told IPS. “We are in fire-fighting mode right now and when you’re a fire-fighter, you prioritise saving human lives.”

He spoke with IPS following a panel on COVID-19-integrated recovery policies for the country, organised by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

At the panel, experts spoke on a range of issues from the country’s private and public sector partnerships, the health sector and its COVID-19 response, the impact on children, and the challenges faced by Syrian refugees.

The panel took place on Wednesday, Jan. 27, just as the country was embroiled in massive protests in response to COVID-19 restrictions and the worst economic crisis in Lebanon’s history.

“What is the point of any other policy priorities anyway when your people are impoverished, dying at hospital doors, or emigrating?” Abi-Nassif added. “Any serious effort would entail providing immediate financial, logistical and mental health support to families living below the poverty line since extreme poverty breeds unrest and chaos.”

Lebanon is at the intersection of one crisis after the other: the COVID-19 pandemic, the August 2020 explosion — which left an estimated 200,000 people homeless or living in homes without windows or doors — and an extremely high poverty rate. The World Bank estimates the poverty rate in the country could go up to 45 percent, with the rate of extreme poverty nearing 22 percent, and a projected 19.2 percent decline in GDP.

This dire situation is affecting marginalised groups differently: from children to refugees. 

Yukie Mokuo, a representative with the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), pointed to an enormous lack of social protection in the country.

“This is a really unprecedented crisis for children,” she said, citing the country’s poverty rate. “About 1.2 million children are impacted in their access to education, and child labour has increased, including early marriage.”

Dr. Rita Rehayem, a representative for the National Committee for Sustainable Development, shared the different challenges that civil society organisations are experiencing under the current crises. While the number of vulnerable populations increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, so did the costs for CSOs in implementing their work, she said. With added costs, it has affected the work of CSOs.  

“Additional budget was needed to purchase PPEs, to protect staff and volunteers but as well as the beneficiaries. Many additional budgets were allocated for this, and development projects were unfortunately put on hold,” she said. “Although we in Lebanon are in desperate need of development projects, the budget or the funds were really allocated for humanitarian assistance.”

While the Lebanese population is being impacted by these different crises, the Syrian refugee population in the country is also suffering immensely, according to Karolina Lindholm, Deputy Representative of UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Lebanon, who was speaking at the panel.

Lebanon’s Syrian refugee community — more than half of whom are under 18 — is facing a number of challenges under the current circumstances: difficulty buying food due to lack of money, inability to pay rent, loss of livelihoods and employments, reduced access to healthcare due to lack of money, and increased morbidity rate among the refugees.

A mental health crisis in the community has also led to a spike in suicide cases, Lindholm added, citing cases of self-immolation among the refugees.

“The erosion of resilience is very, very striking,” Lindholm said.

Abi-Nassif expressed concern that on top of these challenges, the refugee community might be subject to more discrimination.

“As more and more people compete for fewer resources such as food supplies or vaccines, one thing I worry about is an increase in extreme right-wing rhetoric and violence against refugees,” he told IPS.

With demonstrators out on the streets protesting the current economic and political crises, Abi-Nassif warned of against conspiracy theories.

“In Lebanon, even misery and tragedy are politicised. The notion that people are taking to the streets for the pure sake of voicing grievances is foreign to the political class,” he said. “In the latter’s eyes, it is always about conspiracy and foreign interference. Although this possibility may hold sometimes in some places, it cannot hold everywhere all the time.”

Nigerian migrants arrive in Lagos from Libya. Nigeria has, in the last two years, evacuated thousands of its citizens from Libya and Lebanon after they suffered several forms of abuses, including enslavement. Trafficking has resulted in at least 80,000 Nigerian women being held as sex slaves and forced labour in the Middle East. Credit: Sam Olukoya/IPS

By Sam Olukoya
LAGOS, Nigeria, Sep 14 2020 (IPS)

“I need help, right now I cannot walk properly,” trafficking victim Nkiru Obasi pleaded from her hospital bed in a video she posted online.

The young Nigerian woman had been injured in the Aug. 4 Beirut blast, which ripped through the Lebanese capital, killing 190 people injuring a further 6,500 and damaging 40 percent of the city. However, it’s not her injuries keeping her in Lebanon but a restrictive and abusive system of migrant laws.

Obasi is just one of thousands of young Nigerian women trafficked to Lebanon with false promises of a better life. The Lagos-based New Telegraph newspaper quoted a source in the Nigerian embassy in Lebanon as saying that some 4,541 Nigerian women were trafficked to the country last year. The chair of Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, described the rate at which Nigerian women are trafficked to Lebanon as “an epidemic”.

After sustaining injuries in the blast, Obasi tried to return to Nigeria but she and four others were stopped at the airport under the exploitative Kafala system.

The system, which is widely practiced in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East, prohibits migrant workers from returning to their countries without the permission of their employer.

“Lebanon’s restrictive and exploitative kafala system traps tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in potentially harmful situations by tying their legal status to their employer, enabling highly abusive conditions amounting at worst to modern-day slavery,” according to Aya Majzoub, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. The rights organisation called for a revised contract that recognises and protects workers’ internationally guaranteed rights.

In late May, Nigeria attempted to repatriate 60 trafficked women from Lebanon but only 50 could return home. Anti-trafficking activists in the Middle East said the remaining 10 women were held back in Lebanon under the Kafala system.

The Kafala system operates alongside a system that enslaves trafficked women. In April, a Lebanese man posted an advert under the “Buy and Sell in Lebanon” Facebook group. “Domestic worker from Nigeria for sale with new legal document, she is 30 years old, she is very active and very clean,” the advert said in Arabic. The price tag was $1,000.

An outcry from Nigeria forced Lebanese authorities to rescue the woman while a man thought to be responsible for the Facebook post was arrested. The Lebanese Ministry of Labour said the man would be tried in court for human trafficking.

But this is not an isolated case. Many Nigerian women trafficked to the Middle East have spoken out about being sold as slaves.

In January, 23-year-old Ajayi Omolola appeared in an online video saying she and a few other Nigerian women were being held under harsh conditions and that their lives were at risk.

“When we are ill, they don’t take us to the hospital, some of those I arrived in Lebanon with have died,” she said.

Omolola said on arrival in Lebanon, her passport was taken away and she was “sold”.

“I did not realise that they had sold me into slavery,” she said, adding that she only realised the gravity of her situation when her boss told her she could not return to Nigeria because he had “bought her”.

Kikelomo Olayide had a similar account. On arrival in Lebanon from Nigeria she was taken to a market. “In that market, they call us slaves,” she said.

Roland Nwoha, head of programmes/coordinator of migration and human trafficking at Idia Renaissance, a Nigerian organisation working to discourage irregular migration and human trafficking, told IPS that even though Europe is a major attraction for Nigerians in search of a better future abroad, the Middle East is proving an alternative for many.

Nwoha explained that unlike the journey to Europe, which involves a dangerous land journey through the desert and an equally dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, traffickers fly their victims to the Middle East after procuring visas for them with the promise of good jobs.

The chair of Nigeria’s House of Representatives Committee on Diaspora Affairs Tolulope Akande-Sadipe said 80,000 Nigerian women are being held as sex slaves,and forced labour in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Nigerian women trafficked to the Middle East “almost always end in labour and sexual exploitation,” Daniel Atokolo Lagos commander of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons said.

Gloria Bright, a Nigerian teacher who was promised a teaching job with a monthly salary of $1,000 in Lebanon, was held captive and made to work as a domestic worker upon her arrival. She posted an online video in which she pleaded for help and to be rescued. She said besides being made to work under very harsh conditions, her boss sexually harassed her. “At times he will ask me to massage him, he will hug me, he will kiss me,” she said.

Bright was fortunate to be rescued by Nigerian authorities before the Aug. 4 Beirut blast.

Dabiri-Erewa said the trafficking of Nigerians to Lebanon “is becoming a big embarrassment and it has to be stopped”. In an effort to stop the crime, Nigerian authorities have arrested several people, including Lebanese residents in Nigeria. A Lebanese is being investigated in connection with the trafficking of 27 women to Lebanon, two of whom have been rescued.

The Lebanese ambassador to Nigeria, Houssam Diab, says his embassy is assisting the Nigerian government to stop the trafficking of women to his country. He said the issuance of work visas to Nigerians has been suspended following cases of the abuse of Nigerian women at the hands of their Lebanese employers.

The ambassador said the Lebanese Ministry of Labour will work out a “legal and systemic way to make domestic staff to come into Lebanon legally without the fear of inhuman treatment”.   

Nigerian activists, like Nwoha, who are working against human trafficking say the Nigerian government has to do more to curtailing the activities of the traffickers. They said the government should make conditions at home better to stop Nigerians desperately seeking a better life abroad.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

A man and a woman in front of the Beirut Port, Lebanon, following the blast. Courtesy: UN Women Arab States/Dar Al Mussawir

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 12 2020 (IPS)

Migrant workers and refugees in Lebanon will “inevitably” suffer the most as food insecurity threatens the nation following last week’s blast.

“People already living in poverty – including destitute migrants and refugees – will inevitably suffer the most,” Angela Wells, public information officer at the department of operations and emergencies at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), told IPS.

This is because, prior to the blast, they were already among those most affected by food insecurity, with about 62 percent reporting inadequate access to food in July, Wells said.

Wells spoke to IPS after Najat Rochdi, United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator and Deputy Special Coordinator for Lebanon, warned at a U.N. press briefing on Monday that Lebanon is facing a potentially dire food shortage.

“We are left with only four weeks of wheat and grain,” she said, adding that there will be a “very serious food insecurity situation” in the country unless Lebanon receives assistance immediately.

The Aug. 4 blast left an estimated 200,000 people homeless or living in homes without windows or doors, according to the BBC. An estimated 200 people were killed and some 5,000 injured.

The World Food Programme has since announced they will send 50,000 tonnes of wheat flour to Lebanon, “to stabilise the national supply and ensure there is no food shortage in the country”.

This week the country’s government resigned as protestors took to the streets to express their mounting anger about the explosion and the government’s corruption.

Rochdi, who had felt the effects of the blast, spoke of her personal experience and said she was still reeling from the trauma. Rochdi said that the explosion was yet another blow to Lebanon. This past year has seen poverty and unemployment rates soar, and Lebanon has been immersed in an “unprecedented economic and financial crisis”.

Wells confirmed that a large percentage of the migrant workers in Beirut live within the “damage radius” of the explosion.

The number of migrant workers stranded in Lebanon due to COVID-19 travel restrictions will also likely increase given that the international and in-country movement will continue for a prolonged period, she added.

Refugee and migrant workers from the Horn of Africa and Asia were among the worst affected by the financial crisis in Lebanon. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated this, and many migrant workers were left on the streets with no money from their employers.

For many in the community, it was also difficult to maintain social distancing, which only adds to the problem.

“Many migrant workers live or work in crowded or unsanitary conditions with limited access to clean water, sanitation or hygiene supplies,” Wells told IPS. “In these places, COVID-19 can easily spread. Their access to health care is often compromised, particularly for those who are undocumented.” 

This doesn’t help a community that was already vulnerable before both the blast and the pandemic. Refugee and migrant workers often don’t have access to social safety nets that citizens benefit from during times of crisis like this, Wells said.

For many, being undocumented means they are more vulnerable to abuse, while their access to services such as healthcare remain limited.

“The needs of migrants and refugees deserve immediate attention,” Wells said. “As a matter of priority, these include food; a safe roof over their heads or cash that helps them to pay rent; as well as health care for those whose physical or mental health has been compromised.”

At Monday’s talk, Rochdi highlighted key areas that need to be addressed immediately. This includes: assistance to help sustain emergency intensive and specialised healthcare; shelter and expansion of protection of assistance, including counselling and psychological support; support to basic water and sanitation; assistance to enable educational activities to resume; and support to ease the growing food insecurity among the most vulnerable.

“We want the Lebanese people to go back on their feet,” Rochdi said. “I encourage and urge donors to continue to be generous to ensure that no one is left behind and that the Lebanese and Beirut people know they are not alone.”

A young Syrian girl sits on a broken chair by her tent in Faida 3 camp, an informal tented settlement for Syria refugees in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Credit: UNICEF/Alessio Romenzi

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jan 12 2016 (IPS)

Few months ago, an unprecedented “humanitarian auction” was opened in Brussels at the European Commission, shortly after watching the image of the three-year old Syrian child that the sea threw up on the Turkish shores. The “auction” was about deciding upon the number of Syrian refugees to be hosted by each EU country. Germany won the largest batch.

Before taking a final decision, some less rich European countries, like Spain, rushed to argue: “We are trying to get out of the crisis; we have a much too high percentage of unemployed people; also a huge public deficit…,” Spanish authorities, for instance, would try to explain their reluctance, with a more diplomatic wording.

The EU decision was also subject to a wave of political controversies. Some conservative political leaders, like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, would strongly alert against this “tsunami” of Muslims threatening to attack “our Christian civilisation”. And some figures, like US multimillionaire Republican pre-electoral runner Donald Trump, would even call for prohibiting the entry to the US of all Muslims.

Labour Factor

Meanwhile, labour market experts would argue that the so-called “natural selection” process would solve the problem –i.e, that the market forces would hire those skilled refugees as non-expensive manpower, while the non-skilled ones would necessarily end up as undocumented, illegal migrants, therefore easy to repatriate.

But such an argument has never been enough to calm the panic that several politicians and many media outlets induced among European ordinary people.

Another factor these experts take into account is the fact that the European population is steadily ageing, without the needed demographic replacement, a problem that is translated in more pension takers and less tax payers to replenish the retirement budget.

All this, of course, comes aside of Europe’s humanitarian convictions, those that moved the EU to act in view of the massive arrival of refugees.

It was when the EU, led by Germany, decided to offer economic assistance to less rich “reception” countries (6,000 euro per refugee) that the most reluctant ones accepted the deal. This way, Spain, which agreed to host 14,000-16,000 refugees, hailed some weeks ago the arrival of the first 14!

Big Hell

Meanwhile, the mainstream media disseminated tens of dramatic footage and tragic stories about those kilometres-long barbed-wire barriers built by some East European states; the “Calais jungle” in France; the hundreds of refugees stranded at frontiers; the arrival of cold winter, or the daily death of tens of human beings on Greek shores.

Then came the brutal, inhuman, execrable killing of French civilians on 13 November 2015 by Jihadist Islamist terrorists; the immediately previous attacks against unarmed population in Lebanon, and the even previous ones in Tunisia, and, later on, the horrible New Year’s eve assaults in Cologne, Germany, not to mention the daily murdering of innocent people in Egypt, Iraq and Syria, among others.

This created serious problems at home for several European rulers, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, apart from feeding more fears among European citizens.

A Turkish Warehouse

All of a sudden, a “solution” was found: the EU asked Turkey to keep the Syrian refugees in its territory or at its borders, preventing them from passing to Europe, against the payment of 3,000 million euro and the promise to unfreeze the deadlocked process of negotiations with Ankara for its potential integration in the European club.

In other words: to transform Turkey in a “storage room” or “warehouse” of Syrian refugees, until…

Facts

Meanwhile, it would be necessary to recall some facts:

The current number of Syrian refugees exceeds 4,5 million – according to the United Nations refugee agency, (UNHCR); This figure does not include the around 7,5 million internally displaced persons, i.e. refugees at home. The total would make over 50 per cent of the Syrian population (23 million.)

The number of Syrian refugees “auctioned” in Europe would represent barely one fifth of their total.

The number of Syrian refugees to be effectively allowed to stay in Europe is expected to come down to less than 15 per cent of those 4.5 million plus.

The remaining ones. i.e, 85 per cent of the 4.7 million Syrian refugees are currently spread out in the Middle East, Arab, poor and/or troubled countries, like Lebanon (with more than one million refugees, representing one fifth of its total population); unstable Iraq, and Jordan, where the Za’atri camp now represents the fourth most populated “city”;

The largest portion of humanitarian aid and assistance comes either from a short-funded UN agencies or civil society organisations.

That the Europeans themselves were also refugees during and after World War II, with numbers that exceeded those of Syrian refugees;

UNICEF’s humanitarian work began in the aftermath of World War II — and by the mid 1950’s millions of European children were receiving aid. Seventy years later, refugees and migrants are entering Europe at levels not seen since World War II. Nearly 1 in 4 are children.

And Now What?

What to do now with the total of 4,5 million Syrian refugees?
The five biggest military powers on Earth (US, UK, France, Russia and China), on 18 December 2015 adopted United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 2254 (2015) endorsing a “road map” for peace process in Syria, and even setting a timetable for UN-facilitated talks between the Bashar al Assad regime and “opposition” groups.
The whole thing moved so rapidly that the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has already set the 25 January 2016 as the target date to begin talks between the parties.

The “road map” talks about many things, including the organisation of “free and fair” elections in 18-months time.

No explicit mention, however, to the fate of the 13 millions of refugees and displaced at home Syrians who do not know what to do or where to go.

(End)

By Emma Bonino
ROME, Dec 31 2015 (IPS)

The appalling crisis ravaging the Middle East and striking terror around the world is a clear challenge to the West, but responses are uncoordinated. This is due on the one hand to divergent analyses of the situation, and on the other to conflicting interests.

Emma Bonino

The West has historic alliances with the Gulf area, but apparently nothing has been learned from the 3,000 deaths caused by the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Turkey plays by its own rules, while Russia does not hesitate to resort to any means to recover its position on the global stage, and is only now showing concern about the so-called foreign combatants that Turkey is allowing into Syria. In truth, there is very little common ground.

Consequently, all reactions are inadequate, including the bombing of territory occupied by the Islamic State – whether motivated by emotion or based on reason with an eye to the next elections – by countries like France or the United Kingdom, which wants to demonstrate in this way to the rest of Europe that it is an indispensable part of the EU. Bombings take place, only to be followed by public recognition that aerial strikes are insufficient because there are no more targets to be hit from the sky without guidance from troops on the ground.

The fact is that while the impossibility of achieving victory by air attacks alone is repeated like a mantra, the bombings continue. At the same time, every Arab medium complains daily that these are acts of war waged, once again, by the West against the Arab world.

Doubtless for this reason, the British government has not only increased its military budget but also given the BBC more funding for Arabic language services. The battle in hand is above all a cultural one; arguments are needed over the medium and long term, in addition to attempts at overcoming the contradictions.

The first step is to admit that there is no magical solution; only partial and complex solutions exist. The first measure must be to oblige Sunni Muslims, the Gulf monarchies and the Muslim Brotherhood – the sources of funds and material support for Islamic State combatants – to assume responsibility for their roles. Secondly, we in Europe must take serious measures to address our own shortcomings, by reinforcing our security.

EU counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove recently appealed for an agreement to unify the intelligence services of European countries, to no avail. European governments do not want a common intelligence service, they do not want a common defence system, and they do not want a common foreign policy. Some are only willing to commit their air forces to the fray.

In the meantime, we lurch from one emergency to another, managing only to agree on improvised, temporary measures. For instance, now we have forgotten all about the immigrants, as if they had ceased to exist. Vision is lacking, not only for the long term but even for the medium term.

Now European governments are focused on Syria, leaving aside the conflicts in Libya and Yemen, and are not giving needed help to our Mediterranean neighbours threatened by serious crises: Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan. Lately, oil facilities in the Islamic State are being bombed and the tanker trucks used for black market oil exports are being attacked. As is well known, during the first Gulf War bombing of oil wells brought about an ecological disaster and history is repeating itself in the territories occupied by the Islamic State. Meanwhile the attacks on ground transport are blocking supplies of provisions to Syria, where food is already scarce.

For its part, Italy has done well in choosing not to participate in military interventions that risk being counterproductive and that no one believes are effective, as shown by other scenarios from Afghanistan to the Lebanon. But this does not exempt Italy from making greater efforts toward a common European intelligence service and a broader and more efficacious immigration policy.

In a nutshell: the European Union should formulate and apply its own foreign policy in line with its own interests and reality, and dispense with the policies of the United States, Russia, or other powers.

Translated by Valerie Dee

Excerpt:

Queuing up to vote in Cairo. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS.

By Derek Davison
WASHINGTON, Dec 14 2015 (IPS)

A new public opinion survey undertaken in six Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey finds that people are more likely to blame “corrupt, repressive, and unrepresentative governments” and “religious figures and groups promoting extremist ideas and/or incorrect religious interpretations” for the rise of violent groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State than they are to blame “anger at the United States.”

These findings are the result of a series of face-to-face polls conducted by Zogby Research Services on a commission from the Sir Bani Yas Forum in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and released at a Middle East Institute-sponsored event on Wednesday. In September, ZRS interviewed a total of 7,400 adults across eight countries—Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE—on a broad range of topics, including the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen; the Israel-Palestine situation; the Iranian nuclear deal; and the threat of religious extremism. Respondents in Iran and Iraq were also asked a separate series of questions about internal affairs in those countries.

the two most commonly cited factors in the development of religious extremism were “corrupt governments” and “extremist and/or incorrect religious ideas"
With respect to Israel-Palestine, the poll found that people in five of the six surveyed Arab nations are less likely to support a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace deal now than they were back in 2009, when Zogby International’s “Six-Nation Arab Opinion Poll” asked a similar question of respondents in those five countries. In Egypt, which has seen the sharpest decline in support for a peace deal, almost two-thirds of respondents said that they would oppose a peace deal “even if the Israelis agree to return all of the territories and agree to resolve the refugee issue,” compared with only 8% who answered similarly in the 2009 survey. This represents a potential risk for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has worked to improve Egyptian-Israeli relations despite the apparent feelings of most of the Egyptian public. Similar, albeit smaller, shifts were seen in Jordan (where 24% oppose a deal today, compared with 13% in 2009), Lebanon (30% vs. 18%), Saudi Arabia (36% vs. 18%), and the UAE (19% vs. 8%). Iraq was not part of the 2009 survey, but 59% of respondents in this survey said that they would also oppose a comprehensive peace deal with Israel.

On Iran and the P5+1 nuclear deal, the poll reveals several divergences in terms of the way Arabs and Iranians approach the deal’s terms. Majorities in Egypt (63%), Jordan (53%), Saudi Arabia (62%), and the UAE (91%) said that the deal would be “only good for Iran, but bad for the Arab states,” and that they were “not confident” that the deal will keep Iran from developing a “nuclear weapons program.” Large majorities in Egypt (90%) and Saudi Arabia (66%) predicted that any additional revenue that Iran sees as a result of sanctions relief would primarily go to “support its military and political interference in regional affairs.”

Inside Iran, on the other hand, 80% of respondents said that they “supported” the deal, but 68% agreed that it was a “bad idea” for the Iranian government to accept limits on its nuclear program—or, as ZRS managing director John Zogby put it at the poll’s roll-out event, “they’re for the deal, but they don’t like it.” On the question of whether Iran should have nuclear weapons, roughly 68% of Iranians said that it should, either because Iran “is a major nation” or because “as long as other countries have nuclear weapons, we need them also.” However, the percentage of Iranians saying that their country should have nuclear weapons “because it is a major nation” declined from 49% in 2014 to only 20% this year, and the percentage of Iranians who said that “nuclear weapons are always wrong and so no country, including my own, should have them” rose from 14% last year to 32% this year.

Meanwhile, in contrast with Arab fears about Iranian expansionism, Iranians themselves seem to be growing increasingly isolationist. Just 19% of Iranian respondents agreed with the statement “my country should be the dominant player in the Gulf region,” while a plurality, 44%, agreed with the statement “my country should not be involved in the Gulf region; it should focus on internal matters.” And whereas majorities of Iranians agreed that Iran should be involved in Syria (73%), Lebanon (72%), Iraq (64%), and Bahrain (57%), those numbers each declined sharply (by 10% or more) from last year, and a majority of Iranians (57%) now oppose Iran’s involvement in Yemen (which had 62% support last year). For Iranians, “the first priority is always economic, followed by greater political freedom,” the Atlantic Council’s Barbara Slavin pointed out, “there is not and has never been a huge enthusiasm for intervention in what Iranians call ‘Arab causes.’”

Still, it was in the area of extremism and its causes where the poll generated its most interesting findings. When asked to rate eight factors on a 1-5 scale (where 1 means “very important factor”) in terms of their importance as a driver of religious extremism, respondents in all eight countries gave “anger at the U.S.” the fewest number of ones and twos, although that factor was still rated as important by a majority of respondents in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey. Zogby argued that this was a sign that Barack Obama’s attempt to leave a “softer U.S. footprint in the region pays off.” However, when asked whether the United States is playing a positive or negative role in combating extremist sectarian violence, large majorities in each country said that the U.S. was playing a negative role.

Instead, the two most commonly cited factors in the development of religious extremism were “corrupt governments” and “extremist and/or incorrect religious ideas.” Other commonly cited factors, like “lack of education,” “poverty,” and “youth alienation” also speak to a consistent sense that extremism is an internal problem stemming from poor governance. Majorities in each of the eight countries except Iran agreed that “countering the messages and ideas promoted by recruiters for extremist groups” and “changing the political and social realities that cause young people to be attracted to extremist ideals” were “most important” in terms of defeating violent extremist groups like the Islamic State. Within Iraq, majorities from all three of the country’s major ethno-religious groups (Sunni Arabs, Shi’a Arabs, and Kurds) agreed that “forming a more inclusive, representative government” is the best way to resolve the conflict there, but even larger majorities from each group said that they were “not confident” that such a government will be formed within the next five years.

As with any public opinion poll, these results must be considered with the caveat that respondents may have different ideas about the concepts in question. One respondent in one country may define “corrupt government” or “extreme religious ideas” much differently than another respondent in another country. Theoretical public support for a “Joint Arab Force,” which the poll showed was consistent across all six Arab countries surveyed, could break down very quickly if such a force were really to be formed and then deployed in an actual conflict zone. Middle East Institute scholar Hassan Mneimneh noted that “even when elements seem to align, we’re not necessarily in alignment.”

This piece was originally published in Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy Lobelog.com

A child stands amid the rubble of what was once his home, after an aerial bombardment on the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria. Credit: Freedom House/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 9 2015 (IPS)

Barely 10 months ago, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said the refugee population from Syria had reached the three million mark. Today, the latest data from the field show that the number has passed four million.

“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres said in a statement on Jul. 9.

"I took [my son] to the field hospital in Tafas. They tried to help him but couldn't, since the appropriate equipment is not available in Syria. He needed to go to Jordan for treatment." -- Murad, the father of a 27-day-old baby injured in a barrel bomb attack in Syria
“It is a population that deserves the support of the world but is instead living in dire conditions and sinking deeper into abject poverty.”

Midway through its fifth year, the Syrian conflict that began in March 2011 has reached catastrophic heights, and yet shows no sign of abating.

What started out as mass demonstrations against long-time ruler Bashar al-Assad now involves multiple armed groups including fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

A quarter of a million people are dead, according to estimates by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A further 840,000 are injured, with many thousands maimed for life.

And as U.N. agencies struggle to cobble together the funds needed to heal, house and feed millions who have fled bullet-ridden towns and demolished cities, the exodus just keeps growing.

A UNHCR press release issued Thursday said Turkey is hosting 1.8 million Syrians, more than any other nation in the region. Over 250,000 of these refugees are living in 23 camps established and maintained by the Turkish government.

Other countries in the region that have opened their doors to scores of families fleeing the fighting include Lebanon (currently home to over 1.7 million Syrians), Jordan (hosting 629,000 refugees), Iraq (249,000) and Egypt (132,000).

In every single one of these countries, health and infrastructure facilities are quickly nearing breaking point as the hungry, sick and wounded arrive in droves.

On Jul. 9 Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that Jordanian hospitals are groaning under a huge patient burden, including numerous Syrians injured by barrel bombs.

In the last two weeks alone more than 65 war-wounded patients turned up at the emergency room of Al-Ramtha hospital in northern Jordan – less than three miles from the Syrian border – where MSF teams have been working with the Jordanian Ministry of Health to provide emergency care to refugees.

The medical humanitarian organisation has called repeatedly for an end to the use of these deadly, improvised weapons, which are typically constructed from oil drums, gas cylinders or water tanks filled with explosives and locally-sourced scrap metals dropped from high-altitude helicopters.

Due to the wide impact radius of barrel bomb attacks, victim often suffer wounds that are impossible to treat within Syria’s borders, where many health facilities have been reduced to rubble in the past five years.

“More than 70 percent of the wounded we receive suffer from blast injuries, and their multiple wounds tell their stories,” Renate Sinke, project coordinator of MSF’s emergency surgical programme in Ramtha, said in the statement released Thursday.

Dr. Muhammad Shoaib, MSF’s medical coordinator in Jordan, added, “A significant proportion of the patients we receive have suffered head injuries and other multiple injuries that cannot be treated inside southern Syria, as CT-scans and other treatment options are limited.”

One of the patients at Al-Ramtha Hospital, the father of a 27-day-old child who suffered head injuries as a result of shrapnel from a barrel bomb, recounted his family’s plight, which mirrors the experience of millions of civilians caught in the crossfire of the deadly conflict.

“At 9:00 a.m., a barrel bomb hit our house in Tafas […]. When I heard the news, I dropped what I was doing and I ran to the house as fast as I could […]. I saw my little boy. He was quiet and his head seemed to be injured. I took him to the field hospital in Tafas. They tried to help him but couldn’t, since the appropriate equipment is not available in Syria. He needed to go to Jordan for treatment,” Murad, the boy’s father, told MSF staff.

“It took us one-and-a-half hours from the time of injury until we arrived at the border, and some more before arriving in Ramtha. Now, all I want is for my baby to be better and go back to Syria.”

It is families like these that comprise the bulk of Syrian refugees, the highest recorded since 1992 when Afghan refugees reached an estimated 4.6 million, says the U.N. Refugee Agency.

Indeed, the figure from Syria could well be even higher than field reports suggest, and does not include the roughly 270,000 asylum applications by Syrians in Europe. A further 7.2 million people are displaced inside Syria itself, in remote or heavily embattled regions.

Worse, officials say, is the apparently inverse relationship between emergency needs and humanitarian funding: with the former constantly rising, while the latter shrinks.

UNHCR and its partners had requested 5.5 billion dollars for relief operations in 2015, but so far only a quarter of those funds have been received.

The World Food Programme (WFP), tasked with feeding about six million Syrians inside the country and in the surrounding region, is facing a massive shortfall, and warned last week that unless immediate funding became available, half a million people could starve.

There is also the very real possibility that over 1.7 million people will have to face the coming winter months without fuel or shelter.

As aid supplies dwindle, desperate and impoverished families are sending their children out to earn a living – according to a joint report released this week by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children, three quarters of all refugee households surveyed reported that children have become breadwinners.

Against the backdrop of soaring poverty rates, these findings are perhaps not unexpected. An estimated 86 percent of refugees outside of camps in Jordan, for instance, live below the poverty line, while a further 55 percent of refugees in Lebanon are living in “sub-standard” shelters, according to the refugee agency.

While world leaders oscillate between political and military solutions to the crisis, Syrians are faced with a choice: death by shrapnel at home or death by starvation abroad?

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Aboudi, 12, spends his evenings selling flowers outside Beirut's bars. His parents are stuck in his war-torn hometown Aleppo in Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2015 (IPS)

In a conflict that has claimed over 220,000 lives and injured a further 840,000 people as of January 2015, it is sometimes hard to see beyond the death toll.

What started as a confrontation between pro-democracy activists and the entrenched dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Syria’s civil war is today one of the world’s most bitter conflicts, involving over four separate armed groups and touching numerous other countries in the region.

“I feel responsible for my family. I feel like I’m still a child and would love to go back to school, but my only option is to work hard to put food on the table for my family." -- Ahmed, a 12-year-old Syrian refugee in Jordan
With millions on the brink of starvation and displaced Syrians now representing the largest refugee population in the world, after Palestinians, scores of lesser-known war-related atrocities are jostling for space in the headlines.

On Jul. 2, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children released a joint report highlighting one of the hidden impacts of the Syrian crisis – a rise in child labour throughout the region.

In a press release issued in Jordan’s capital, Amman, Thursday, the agencies warned, “Syria’s children are paying a heavy price for the world’s failure to put an end to the conflict.

“The report shows that inside Syria, children are now contributing to the family income in more than three quarters of surveyed households, In Jordan, close to half of all Syrian refugee children are now the joint or sole family breadwinners in surveyed households, while in some parts of Lebanon, children as young as six years old are reportedly working.”

“The most vulnerable of all working children are those involved in armed conflict, sexual exploitation and illicit activities including organised begging and child trafficking,” the release stated.

Before the outbreak of war four years ago, Syria was considered a middle-income country, providing its people a decent standard of living and boasting a literacy rate of 90 percent, according to UNICEF data.

By the middle of 2015, however, four in five Syrians were living below the poverty line and 7.6 million were classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs).

With whole cities and towns emptied of residents, businesses and industries have collapsed, sending unemployment rates soaring from 14.9 percent in 2011 to 57.7 percent today.

The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that about 3.3 million people have fled the country altogether and now live in camps or makeshift shelters in neighbouring states. Women and children comprise over half the refugee population.

The vast majority of those who remain inside Syria – over 64.7 percent – are classified as living in “extreme poverty”, unable to meet the most basic food or sanitary needs.

Thus, experts say, it comes as no surprise that children are becoming breadwinners, taking to the streets and selling their labour in a range of industries to help keep their families alive.

As 12-year-old Ahmed, a Syrian refugee in Jordan, pointed out in interviews with UNICEF, “I feel responsible for my family. I feel like I’m still a child and would love to go back to school, but my only option is to work hard to put food on the table for my family.”

Entitled ‘Small Hands, Heavy Burden: How the Syrian Conflict is Driving More Children into the Workforce’, the report notes that an estimated 2.7 million Syrian children are currently out of school.

With few education opportunities and dwindling humanitarian rations, these children now either comprise, or are at risk of joining the ranks of, a veritable army of child workers.

“In Jordan, for example a majority of working children in host communities work six or seven days a week; one-third work more than eight hours a day,” the report noted. “Their daily income is between four and seven dollars.”

Quite aside from representing an irreversible interruption to their education, cognitive development, and – almost certainly – limiting their chances of securing better jobs later in life – the child labour epidemic is harming young people’s bodies.

Save the Children estimates that “Around 75 percent of working children in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan reported health problems; almost 40 percent reported an injury, illness or poor health; and 35.8 percent of children working in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are unable to read or write.”

In this climate of conflict, with the specter of hunger haunting countless families, every industry is considered fair game.

In the Bekaa Valley, for instance, landowners who used to pay a daily wage of 10 dollars to migrant agricultural workers now pay kids four dollars a day, often for performing the same tasks alongside their adult counterparts.

In urban centers, garages, workshops and construction sites are “popular” employers, with 10-year-old Syrian boys hired on a full-time basis to do carpentry, metal work or motor repairs in cities across Lebanon.

Street work represents one of the most dangerous occupations for children, with a recent survey of two major Lebanese cities identifying over 1,500 child street-workers, of whom 73 percent were Syrian refugees.

These kids earn an average of 11 dollars a day, either begging or hawking, while illicit activities like prostitution could earn a small child up to 36 dollars in a single working day.

UNICEF says child labour “represents one of the key challenges to the fulfillment of the ‘No Lost Generation’ initiative”, launched in 2013 with the aim of putting child rights and children’s education at the centre of the humanitarian response to the Syrian crisis.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness, who says that unless someone steps in to alleviate the financial crisis facing the U.N. agency, “ it is innocent refugees who will again suffer”. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
JERUSALEM, Jul 3 2015 (IPS)

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) faces a severe financial crisis which could see core services to desperate Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank halted unless donors step in before the end of September.

“Currently we have a deficit of 101 million dollars and, as things stand now, UNRWA will struggle to function after September because we don’t have enough money to fund even our core activities for the last few months of the year,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told IPS in an exclusive interview.

“However, following a number of stringent austerity measures already in place, we should be able to continue with life-saving, emergency services to the end of the year,” he added.“As things stand now, UNRWA will struggle to function after September because we don’t have enough money to fund even our core activities for the last few months of the year” – UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness

Due to the financial crisis, the contracts for 35 percent of the 137 internationals employed by UNRWA will end by Sep. 30 without further extension or renewal. The U.N. organisation has taken these steps to reduce costs while trying not to reduce basic services to Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

“UNRWA is facing financial crises on all fronts. Broadly speaking we have two sources of funding,” Gunness told IPS. “We have our general fund which funds our core services such as education, health relief and social services. Then we have our emergency funds which are for Gaza and the West Bank because there is a blockade and an occupation respectively.

“We’re also dealing with more than 400,000 displaced people in Syria, the 45,000 refugees who’ve fled to Lebanon and the 15,000 who’ve escaped over the border into Jordan.”

Following Israel’s devastating military campaign against Gaza in July and August last year, UNRWA launched a reconstruction initiative, worth 720 million dollars, at the international reconstruction conference in Cairo in October last year.

Part of the money was for rental subsidies for those Gazans whose homes were so damaged that they were uninhabitable and needed a roof over their heads, and part of it was for reconstruction.

“In February this year, we had to suspend that programme because there was a 585 million dollar shortfall. Due to the deficit not one single home in Gaza has been rebuilt, so there is a real crisis in regard to reconstruction,” said Gunness.

Last year in Syria, UNRWA launched an appeal for 417 million dollars but only 52 percent of this money was received. The shortfall forced the organisation to reduce its six cash distribution programmes from six to three.

Cash distributions have become one of UNRWA’s major emergency response programmes in Syria due to so many U.N. installations being bombed and destroyed as a result of the civil war raging there, thereby crippling its normal means of helping refugees.

With the money received for Syria, UNRWA was only able to distribute an average of 50 cents per refugee per day.

“Imagine trying to survive on 50 cents daily. It is almost impossible and although our donors have been very generous, they have not been generous enough,” said Gunness.

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees from Syria rely on UNRWA for various things, including rental subsidies so that they can have a roof over their heads.

“We had been giving out a 100 dollar monthly rental allowance. This gets you very little in Lebanon, which is an expensive country,” Gunness told IPS.

“When I was last in Lebanon I visited a Palestinian refugee family in the poverty-stricken Shatila camp in Beirut. They were paying 200 dollars a month to live in a room 20 feet by 20 feet [6 metres by 6 metres] with a tiny bathroom and kitchen.

“Their rental subsidy was cut at the end of June and I suspect that family is now living on the street. This is the reality of the crash crisis for just one family of refugees from Syria who have been made homeless.

“And this is only one story that relates to the emergency funding UNRWA receives,” Gunness added.

“In relation to the general side of our funding, what we’ve seen over the years is a gradual increase in the structural deficit of our general fund which has led to the current deficit of 101 million dollars.”

UNRWA’s monthly running costs are 35 million dollars. This includes the salaries of 30, 000 staff members, 22,000 of whom are teachers, as well as the distribution of basic necessities for refugees such as food.

“So, unless someone steps in to alleviate the crisis, even tougher decisions may need to be made in the next few weeks and it is innocent refugees who will again suffer,” said Gunness.

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, Jun 2 2015 (IPS)

The euphoria that spread though the world after the Iran nuclear agreement reached in Lausanne in April this year with the United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom and Germany, plus the European Union, is  proving short-lived.

Republicans in the U.S. Congress have made it clear that they will spare no effort to block it.  Hilary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presidential hopeful, is keeping her options open. Whispers are escaping from European chancelleries that the sanctions on Iran will only be lifted in stages. Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani have responded by insisting that they must be lifted “at once”.

Prem Shankar Jha

But the agreement’s most inveterate enemy is Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. In the week that followed the Lausanne agreement, he warned the American public in three successive speeches that the agreement would “threaten the survival of Israel” and increase the risk of a “horrific war”. This is a brazen attempt to whip up fear and war hysteria on the basis of a spider’s web of misinformation.

Netanyahu is not new to this game. At the U.N. General Assembly in 2012, he unveiled a large cartoon of a bomb and drew a red line across it, just below the neck. This was how close Iran was to making a nuclear bomb, he said. It could get there in a year. Only much later did the world learn that Mossad, Netanyahu’s own intelligence service, had told him that Iran was very far from being able to build a bomb.

Mossad probably knew what a U.S. Congress Research Service (CRS) report revealed two months later:  that although Iran already had enough five percent, or low-enriched,  uranium in August 2012 to build  five to seven bombs, it had not enriched enough of it to the intermediate level of  20 percent to meet the requirement for even one  bomb. The CRS had concluded from this and other evidence that this was because  Iran had made no effort to revive its nuclear weapons programme after stopping it ‘abruptly’ in 2003.“[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran”

Another of Netanyahu’s deceptions is that he only wants to punish Iran with sanctions until it gives up trying to acquire not only nuclear weapons but any nuclear technology that could even remotely facilitate this in the future. However, he knows that no government in Iran can agree to this, so what he is really trying to steer the world towards is the alternative – a military attack on Iran.

What is more, because he also knows that destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities will not destroy its capacity to rebuild these in the future, he does not want the attack to end until it has destroyed Iran’s infrastructure (as Israel destroyed southern Lebanon’s in 2006), its industry, its research facilities and its science universities.

He knows that Israel cannot undertake such a vast operation without the United States. But there is one stumbling block – President Barack Obama – who has learned from his recent experience that, to put it mildly, U.S. interests do not always tally with those of its allies in the Middle East.

So Netanyahu is following a two-pronged strategy: first to get the U.S. Congress to insert clauses in the nuclear treaty draft that Iran will be forced to reject, and second to take advantage of  the spike in paranoia that will follow to push the West into an attack on Iran.

He has been joined in this endeavour by another steadfast friend of the United States – Saudi Arabia. At the end of February, Saudi Arabia quietly signed an agreement with Israel that will allow its warplanes to overfly Saudi Arabia on their way to bombing Iran. This has halved the distance they will need to fly. Then, four weeks later, on Mar. 26,  it declared war on the Houthis in Yemen, whom it has been relentlessly portraying as a tiny minority bent upon taking Yemen over through sheer terror, with the backing of  Iran.

This is a substantial oversimplification, and therefore distortion, of a complicated relationship.

Iran may well be helping the Houthis, but not because they are Shias.  The Houthis, who make up 30 percent of Yemen’s population, are Zaidis, a very different branch of Shi’a-ism than the one practised in Iran, Pakistan and India. They inhabit a region that stretches across Saada, the northernmost district of Yemen, and three adjoining principalities, Jizan, Najran and Asir, that Saudi Arabia annexed in 1934.

The internecine wars that Yemeni Houthis have fought since the 1960s have not been sectarian, or even against the Saudis specifically, but in quest of independence and, more recently, a federal state. This is a goal that several other tribes share.  

The timing of Saudi Arabia’s attack, four weeks after its overflight agreement with Israel, and its incessant portrayal of the Houthis as proxies of Iran, hints at a deeper understanding between it and Israel. The Houthis’ attacked Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, in September last year. So why did Saudi Arabia wait until March this year before sending its bombers in?

Iran has kept out of the conflict in Yemen so far, but the manifestly one-sided resolution passed by the U.N. Security Council and the immediate resignation of the U.N. special envoy for Yemen, Jamal Benomar, who had been struggling to bring about a non-sectarian resolution of the conflict in Yemen and been boycotted by the country’s president Abed Rabo Mansour Hadi for his pains, cannot have failed to raise misgivings in Tehran.

Iraqi President Haydar Abadi’s sharp criticism of the Saudi attack in Washington on the same day reflects his awareness of how these developments are darkening the prospect for Iran’s rehabilitation, and therefore Iraq’s future.

To stop this drift Obama needs to tell his people precisely how far, under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel’s interests have diverged from those of the United States, and how single-mindedly Israel has used its special relationship with the United States to push it into actions that have imperilled its own security in the Middle East.

Instead of dwelling on how the nuclear treaty will make it practically impossible for Iran to clandestinely enrich uranium or produce plutonium, he needs to remind Americans of what Netanyahu has been carefully neglecting to mention: that a nuclear device is not a bomb, and that to convert it into one Iran will need not only to master the physics of bomb-making and reduce its weight to what a missile can carry, but conduct at least one test explosion to make sure the bomb works. That will make escaping detection pretty well impossible.

Finally, the White House needs to remind Americans that Iranians also know the price they will pay if they are caught trying to build a bomb after signing the agreement. Not only will this bring back all and more of the sanctions they are under,  but it will vindicate Netanyahu’s apocalyptic predictions and make a pre-emptive military strike virtually unavoidable.

Should a  military strike, whether deserved or undeserved,  destroy Iran’s economy, it will add tens of thousands of Shi’a Jihadis to the Sunni Jihadis already spawned in Libya, Somalia, Chechnya and  the other failed states and regions of the world. The security that Netanyahu claims it will bring will turn out to be a chimera.

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, Lebanon, has been given a new lease of life thanks to an initiative for recycling waste glass normally destined for landfills. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Apr 5 2015 (IPS)

In the Khalife workshop, in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, four men stand beside an oven, fixed in concentration despite the oppressive temperature. Blowing through a long tube, one of the group carefully shapes white-hot melted glass into a small ball, while two others coax it into the form of a beer glass. The fourth, the veteran of the group, cuts off the top of the glass, creating an opening from which beer will one day flow.

Working in shifts, the members of Lebanon’s last dynasty of glass blowers work tirelessly day and night to ensure customers receive their products on time. Currently they are in the process of producing 133,000 artisan glasses commissioned by Almaza, a subsidiary of Heineken, and the most popular beer in Lebanon.

When Ziad Abichaker phoned the Khalife family two years ago, they could not even dream of an order of such a size. The workshop’s oven had been idle for five months and the business was about to close.The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

As manager Hussein Khalife explains, the workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

However, Abichaker, a multi-disciplinary engineer and owner of Cedar Environmental, an environmental and industrial engineering organisation that aims to build recycling plants to produce organically certified fertilisers, saw an opportunity to revive the family business.

During the July 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the country’s only green glass manufacturing plant, located in the Bekaa valley. Lacking investors to pump in the about 40 million dollars necessary to rebuild it, the plant has remained in a state of disrepair and as a consequence, local beer and wine companies have become reliant on importing their bottles.

Abichaker – who operates ten municipal waste management plants through Cedar Environmental which had previously supplied the Bekaa glass plant – began stockpiling glass rather than see it end up in Lebanon’s landfills.

“Around 71 million bottles end up in the landfills per year,” says Abichaker. “All the green glass that we sorted from the waste management plants had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to throw it away, so we started stocking the bottles while thinking of a solution”.  By the time Abichaker started working with Hussein Khalife in 2013, he had already stocked around 60 tonnes of beer bottles.

Together, they began working on a solution that would give new life to all the stocked glass, and also save the Khalife business. After putting together a business plan, they decided to create a number of new glass designs with a chic and modern finish as well as create more niche sales points.

Besides glasses, the business plan also called for the production of cups, vases and lamps whose bases are made from recycled wood.

Known as the Green Glass Recycling Initiative – Lebanon (GGRIL), Abichaker explains that for Cedar Environmental, the project is a non-profit initiative. “Eighty percent of the revenues go back to the Khalife glass blowers and the remaining 20 percent to the retailer. What we gain as Cedar Environmental is that they take all the green glass from our plants. So we still maintain zero waste status in our recycling plants.”

Today, the initiative’s products are on sale in ten different locations in Beirut, including restaurants, alternative galleries and gift shops, and recently Abichaker and Khalife also started selling them online.

Hussein Khalife shows his satisfaction at being able to preserve the family’s artisan business, the legacy of generations of glass blowers. “When Ziad [Abichaker] proposed creating new designs, we decided to go ahead,” says Khalife. “It was a risk for us but it was worth it.”

After closing 2014 over 42,000 dollars up on sales, the Almaza order – GGRI’s biggest to date – came through and Abichaker is adamant that it will not be a one-off.

The most recent step for the fledgling initiative was to raise funds to purchase a truck to pick up used glasses from bins they plan to place around some of Beirut’s more popular nightspots. A crowd-funding project last year raised 30,000 dollars.

“I think that by the end of 2015 we will have diverted one million beer bottles from landfills,” estimates Abichaker, but while this is a considerable amount, it constitutes only a tiny portion of the 1.57 million of tonnes of solid waste that Lebanon produces per year, according to a 2010 report from SWEEP-Net, a regional solid waste exchange of information and expertise network in Mashreq and Maghreb countries.

Currently, most of Lebanon’s green glass ends up in the landfill of the coastal municipality of Naameh, a town just south of Beirut. Created in 1997, the landfill was only meant to be active for six years due to environmental concerns. However, 18 years later it is still in use. Once again scheduled to close in January this year, the Lebanese government approved an extensions of the deadline for three months due to the absence of an alternative site.

“It is a catastrophe there, it is overfull”, says Paul Abi Rached, president of the Lebanese environmental non-governmental organisation TERRE Liban. “You have big impacts on air pollution, climate change. In particular,  leachate – the liquid that drains from a landfill – is being thrown into the Mediterranean Sea.”

Abi Rached criticises the government for a perceived lack of commitment to developing recycling policies. The government, notes Abi Rached, award contracts to private sector waste management companies without prioritising environmentally friendly methods.

In addition to the shortcomings of governmental waste-management programs, Abichaker argues that it is absolutely necessary to raise the general public’s awareness of the importance of protecting the environment.

“Now people are becoming more aware that they should safeguard their environment because they have realised that it affects their own health, their own habitat,” he says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

Edited by Phil Harris

The Qassem family from Beit Hanoun in Gaza, civilians whose home was targeted by Israeli air strikes during the 2007/2008 Israel-Gaza war, leaving them homeless. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
GAZA, Mar 30 2015 (IPS)

The U.N. investigation into Israel’s devastating military campaign against Gaza, from July to August 2014, has been delayed until June and in the interim Israel and the Palestinians are waging a media war to win the moral narrative as to why so many Palestinian civilians were killed during the bloody conflict.

The postponement of the investigation was announced at the Mar. 23 U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) meeting in Geneva.

Israel says it went out of its way to avoid civilian casualties but its critics, including Israeli human rights organisations, have questioned this claim.

“The ferocity of destruction and high proportion of civilian lives lost in Gaza cast serious doubts over Israel’s adherence to international humanitarian law principles of proportionality, distinction and precautions in attack,” Makarim Wibisono, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, told the UNHCR meeting.“The ferocity of destruction and high proportion of civilian lives lost in Gaza cast serious doubts over Israel's adherence to international humanitarian law principles of proportionality, distinction and precautions in attack" – Makarim Wibisono, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967

During the war over 2,300 Palestinians were killed, the majority of them civilians including more than 500 children, and over 10,000 injured. On the Israeli side, six civilians and 67 soldiers were killed.

Many of the Palestinian civilians killed died after Israel targeted residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of Palestinians inside as the buildings collapsed on them.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem released a report in January titled Black Flag: The Legal and Moral Implications of the Policy of Attacking Residential Buildings in the Gaza Strip, Summer 2014.

The report focuses on the policy that the Israeli military implemented of strikes on homes, attempting to explain if and how “policymakers’ claims about Israel’s commitment to International Humanitarian Law (IHL) provisions comport with the policy of attacking residential buildings.”

Damage to residential buildings was enormous, with 18,000 homes either destroyed or badly damaged. More than 100,000 Palestinians were left homeless and with little to no reconstruction taking place, most of these Gazans remain displaced.

B’Tselem investigated 70 incidents involving attacks on civilian homes which killed 606 Palestinians, half of whom were women, 93 babies and children under the age of 5, 129 children aged 5 to 14, 42 teenagers and 37 elderly Palestinians.

B’Tselem said that a number of the cases it examined indicated that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) actions contravened IHL.

“A military objective, the only legitimate target for attack by parties to hostilities, is defined as one that makes an effective contribution to military action whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage to the attacking side,” said the rights group.

“Over the course of the fighting that took place in the summer, both government officials and top military commanders refrained from spelling out the specific objective of most of the attacks.

“Instead, the IDF spokesperson provided only general figures on the number of strikes carried out each day against what the spokesperson defined as ‘terror sites’.”

The rights group added that the IDF also appeared to change its definition as the war progressed, with many of the residential homes targeted allegedly belonging to Hamas operatives.

Kamal Qassem, 43, his wife Iman, and their five children aged 6 to 12, from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza were forced to flee to an emergency U.N. shelter after their house was destroyed by Israeli bombs, which targeted their homes over two nights during the war.

“My wife Iman was injured during the bombing and spent two nights in hospital. She also requires regular hospital treatment for kidney problems,” Qassem told IPS

“My daughter Shadha, 9, was severely traumatised during the aerial assault and now suffers from epilepsy and soils her sheets at night. None of us were fighters.”

However, Israel’s newly appointed military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s contribution to the Dahiya Doctrine, established during the second Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, could provide some answers to the immense destruction wrought on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

The Dahiya Doctrine is a military strategy that envisages the destruction of the civilian infrastructure of hostile regimes, and endorses the employment of disproportionate force to secure that end.

The doctrine is named after a southern suburb in Beirut with large apartment buildings which were flattened by the IDF during the 2006 war.

“What happened in the Dahiva quarter of Beurut in 2006 would happen in every village from which shots were fired in the direction of Israel,” stated Eizenkot.

“We will wield disproportionate power and cause immense damage and destruction.”

Former Rapporteur to the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, wrote that under the doctrine, “the civilian infrastructure of adversaries such as Hamas or Hezbollah are treated as permissible military targets, which is not only an overt violation of the most elementary norms of the law of war and of universal morality, but an avowal of a doctrine of violence that needs to be called by its proper name: state terrorism.”

Members of the U.N. fact-finding mission into the 2007/2008 Israel-Gaza war suggested that the Dahiya Doctrine had been employed while other analysts added it was also behind Israel’s 2014 military campaign.

Meanwhile, Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli civilian towns, preceding last year’s war and one of the main reasons for Israel launching its assault on Gaza, could resume again should the siege on Gaza continue with no political breakthrough on the horizon – an ominous sign for Gaza’s civilians.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Ahmad (right), a 19-year-old student of engineering and one of Bab Al-Tabbaneh’s fortunate young people, chatting with a friend. He has been able to go to university, thanks to a grant from the Ruwwad Al Tanmeya NGO. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 10 2015 (IPS)

“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games,” says Mohammad Darwish, a calm man with a curled beard framing his face.

Sitting behind the counter of his cybercafé, located in one of the main streets of the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood in this northern Lebanese city, Darwish says that his young customers have resigned themselves to the persistence of armed conflicts.“People get used to war. During the last battle, children were still coming to play. Can you imagine, a seven-year-old boy running through the bullets just to play video games” – Mohammad Darwish, owner of a cybercafé in the Bab Al-Tabbaneh neighbourhood of Tripoli

Despite their age, they are pretty sure that clashes – which have become routine here over the past six years – will erupt again sooner or later. Even when calm reigns, the shelled and bullet-riddled buildings in Tabbaneh stand as a reminder of previous clashes.

The last eruption of violence was in late October 2014. Clashes between the army and local Sunni gunmen paralysed Tripoli for three days and destroyed part of the historic old city, leaving at least eight civilians, 11 soldiers and 22 militants dead. The army now controls Tabbaneh, with soldiers and tanks deployed on every street corner.

Curiously, flags and posters of the Islamic State (IS) can be seen displayed in houses and shops.

“I support IS [Islamic State] and the [Al-Qaeda-affiliated] Jabhat Al-Nusra (JN)”, says 19-year-old unemployed Hassan with a smile, explaining that he thinks IS will give him rights “to have a job, to live peacefully according to Islamic precepts, to move freely.”

Tabbaneh is probably the hardest neighbourhood to grow up in the whole of Tripoli. Despite being the second largest city in Lebanon, barely 80 kilometres north of Beirut, policy neglect by various central governments has left this Sunni-majority city suffering from alarming poverty, unemployment and social exclusion, and Tabbaneh is one of its poorest and most marginalised areas.

Seventy-six percent of Tabbaneh inhabitants live below the poverty line, according to a study on ‘Urban Poverty in Tripoli’, published in 2012 by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

These circumstances, aggravated by the political exploitation of sectarianism within a very conservative society, have fuelled the frequent rounds of violence, mainly between Tabbaneh and the neighbourhood of Jabal Mohsen.

A giant poster on a balcony in Bab Al-Tabbaneh in memory of a young boy killed during clashes in the neighbourhood. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

Both neighbourhoods are separated just by one street, but while Bab Al-Tabbaneh inhabitants are mostly Sunni (like the main Syrian rebel groups), most of Jabal Mohsen’s inhabitants are Alawites (the same sect as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad).

This sectarianism has determined a rivalry that dates back to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon which began in 1976 and ended in 2005, but which has turned violent again since 2008, and especially since the beginning of Syrian civil war in 2011. During the last three years, more than 20 rounds of fights have broken out in Tripoli, most of them between Tabbaneh and Mohsen militias.

“We fight to defend our people, to achieve peace,” says 19-year-old Khaled, who usually works in a bakery but also belongs to a local militia. But Ahmad, who is of the same age, is sceptical: “People fight because they don’t have money or work.”

Ahmad is studying engineering, thanks to a grant provided by Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, a regional NGO that works in the area through youth activism, civic engagement and education. Because his father served in the army, the state paid the major part of his school fees when he was younger and he was able to study in private schools outside Tabbaneh.

Hoda Al-Rifai, a Ruwwad youth officer, agrees with Ahmad: “Many families don’t have incomes. Whenever the conflict starts, the fighters get paid. And these fighters also give money to children to fulfil specific tasks. They can have three dollars a day and this is better than going to school. Their parents also think this way.”

Stereotypes also contribute to make things hard for Tabbaneh’s youth – including finding a job outside the neighbourhood – and shape their personality, explains Hoda. “When we started, the youth had no self-confidence. The media do not produce an image of these neighbourhoods as areas where you can find brilliant young men, willing to study. They just underline the clashes and all kinds of negatives things.”

“There are no members of JN or IS here,” Darwish tells IPS, adding that many in Tabbaneh see the IS flags as a way of showing dissatisfaction over the government’s alleged abandonment of the Sunni community and specifically of Tabbaneh.

“This is not a religious conflict but political. When politicians want to send a message to each other, they pay for clashes here,” adds Darwish’s 49-year-old aunt, veiled and dressed completely in black. “In this city, you can give 20 dollars to a boy so he starts a war,” explains Darwish.

Nevertheless, various studies have found that only a small percentage of the estimated up to 80,000 Tabbaneh inhabitants take part in combats, and Sarah Al-Charif, Lebanon director of Ruwwad, stresses the immediate improvements observed in Tabbaneh and Mohsen youths who participate in the NGO’s projects.

“They become aware of their shared interests, values and pain,” she says. “They became more open-minded, especially the girls.”

For Sarah, in addition to public investment and job opportunities, any solution must include awareness and education, to which Hoda adds: “First of all, citizens need to understand why the clashes take place.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

President Barack Obama speaks at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Jun. 4, 2009. In his speech, President Obama called for a 'new beginning between the United States and Muslims', declaring that 'this cycle of suspicion and discord must end'. Credit: White House photo

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

This year, Arab political Islam will be greatly influenced by U.S. regional policy, as it has been since the Obama administration came into office six years ago. Indeed, as the U.S. standing in the region rose with Obama’s presidency beginning in January 2009, so did the fortunes of Arab political Islam.

But when Arab autocrats perceived U.S. regional policy to have floundered and Washington’s leverage to have diminished, they proceeded to repress domestic Islamic political parties with impunity, American protestations notwithstanding.Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

This policy linkage, expected to prevail in the coming year, will not bode well for political Islam. Like last year, the U.S. will in 2015 pay more attention to securing Arab autocrats’ support in the fight against Islamic State forces than to the mistreatment of mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which will have severe consequences in the long run.

Since the middle of 2013, the Obama administration’s focus on the tactical need to woo dictators in the fight against terrorist groups has trumped its commitment to the engagement objective. America’s growing support for Arab dictators meant that Arab political Islam would be sacrificed.

For example, Washington seems oblivious to the thousands of mainstream Islamists and other opposition activists languishing in Egyptian jails.

What is political Islam?

Several assumptions underpin this judgment. First, “political Islam” applies to mainstream Islamic political parties and movements, which have rejected violence and made a strategic shift toward participatory and coalition politics through free elections.

Arab political Islam generally includes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, al-Nahda in Tunisia, and al-Wefaq in Bahrain.

The term “political Islam” does not include radical and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL or IS), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iraq, and Syria, or armed opposition groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Nor does it apply to terrorist groups in Africa such as Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and others.

Unfortunately, in the past three years, many policy makers in the West, and curiously in several Arab countries, have equated mainstream political Islam with radical and terrorist groups. This erroneous and self-serving linkage has provided Washington with a fig leaf to justify its cozy relations with Arab autocrats and tolerance of their bloody repression of their citizens.

Repression breeds radicalism

It has also given these autocrats an excuse to suppress their Islamic parties and exclude them from the political process. In a press interview late last month, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi forcefully denounced the Muslim Brotherhood and pledged the movement would not enter the Egyptian parliament.

Egypt’s recent terrorism laws, which Sisi and other Arab autocrats have approved, provide them with a pseudo-legal cover to silence the opposition, including mainstream political Islam.

They have used the expansive and vague definitions of terrorism included in these decrees to incarcerate any person or group that is “harmful to national unity.” Any criticism of the regime or the ruler is now viewed as a “terrorist” act, punishable by lengthy imprisonment.

The Dec. 28 arrest of the Bahraini Sheikh Ali Salman, Secretary General of al-Wefaq, is yet another example of draconian measures against peaceful mainstream opposition leaders and parties in the region. Regime repression of these groups is expected to prevail in 2015.

Second, whereas terrorist organisations are a threat to the region and to Western countries, including mainstream political Islam in the governance of their countries in the long run is good for domestic stability and regional security. It also serves the interests of Western powers in the region.

Recent history tells U.S. that exclusion and repression often lead to radicalisation.  Some youth in these parties have given up on participatory politics in favour of confrontational politics and violence. This phenomenon is expected to increase in 2015, as suppression of political Islam becomes more pervasive and institutionalised.

Third, the serious mistakes the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda made in their first time ever as governing parties should not be surprising since they lacked the experience of governance. Such poor performance, however, is not unique to them.  Nor should it be used as an excuse to depose them illegally and to void the democratic process, as the Sisi-led military coup did in Egypt in 2013.

Although Islamic political parties tend to win the first election after the toppling of dictators, the litmus test of their popular support lies in succeeding elections. The recent post-Arab Spring election in Tunisia is a case in point.

When Arab citizens are provided with the opportunity to participate in fair and free elections, they are capable of electing the party that best serves their interests, regardless of whether the party is Islamic or secular.

Had Field Marshall Sisi in 2013 allowed the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi to stay in power until the following election, they would have been voted out, according to public opinion polls at the time.

But Sisi and his military junta were not truly committed to a genuine democratic transition in Egypt. Now, according to Human Rights Watch reports, the current state of human rights in Egypt is much worse than it was under former President Hosni Mubarak.

The U.S. and Political Islam

Upon taking office, President Obama understood that disagreements between the United States and the Muslim world, especially political Islam, were driven by specific policies, not values of good governance. A key factor driving these disagreements was the widely held Muslim perception that America’s war on terror was a war on Islam.

The Obama administration also realised that while a very small percentage of Muslims engaged in violence and terrorism, the United States must find ways to engage the other 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. That drove President Obama early on in his administration to grant media interviews to Arab broadcasters and give his historic Cairo speech in June 2009.

However, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, and as drone strikes caused more civilian casualties in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, many Muslims became more sceptical of Washington’s commitment to sincere engagement with the Muslim world.

The Arab uprisings beginning in 2011 known as the Arab Spring and the toppling of dictators prompted the United States to support calls for freedom, political reform, dignity, and democracy.

Washington announced it would work with Islamic political parties, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nahda, as long as these parties were committed to peaceful change and to the principles of pluralism, elections, and democracy.

That unprecedented opening boosted the fortunes of Arab political Islam and inclusive politics in the Arab world. American rapprochement with political Islam, however, did not last beyond two years.

The way forward

Much as one might disagree with Islamic political ideology, it’s the height of folly to think that long-term domestic stability and economic security in Egypt, Bahrain, Palestine, or Lebanon could be achieved without including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Wefaq, Hamas, and Hezbollah in governance.

Coddling autocrats is a short-term strategy that will not succeed in the long run. The longer the cozy relationship lasts, the more Muslims will revert to the earlier belief that America’s war on terrorism is a war on Islam.

The Arab countries that witnessed the fall of dictators, especially Egypt, will with Washington’s acquiescence revert back to repression and autocracy, as if the Arab Spring never happened.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Banner in the village of Fidae (near Byblos) which reads: "The municipality of Al Fidae announces that there is a curfew for all foreigners inside the village every day from 8 pm to 5.30 am". Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

Staring at the floor, Hassan, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee from Idlib in northwestern Syria, holds a set of identification papers in his hands. He picks out a small pink piece of paper with a few words on it stating that he must obtain a work contract, otherwise his residency visa will not be renewed.

Hassan (not his real name) has been given two months to find an employer willing to cough up for a work permit, something extremely unlikely to happen. After that, his presence in Lebanon will be deemed illegal.

Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service, tells IPS that all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.Hassan, who fled Syria almost three years ago to avoid military service … [says that] all that awaits him if he returns are jail, the army or death, so he has decided that living in Lebanon illegally after his visa expires is his best bet.

Sitting next to Hassan is 24-year-old Ahmed (not his real name) from Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, who lost his residency one month ago. Since then he has been forced to watch his movements. “I live with permanent fear of being caught by the police and deported,” he says.

Since the start of Syria’s civil war in March 2011, over 1.2 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon, where they now account for almost one-third of the Lebanese population.

Particularly since May, the Lebanese government has increasingly introduced measures to limit the influx of Syrian refugees into the country. Speaking after a cabinet meeting on Oct. 23, Information Minister Ramzi Jreij announced that the government had reached a decision “to stop welcoming displaced persons, barring exceptional cases, and to ask the U.N. refugee agency [UNHCR] to stop registering the displaced.”

Dalia Aranki, Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance Advisor at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told IPS that Lebanon “is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention” and, as a result, “is not obliged to meet all obligations resulting from the Convention.”

“Being registered with UNHCR in Lebanon can provide some legal protection and is important for access to services,” she wrote together with Olivia Kalis in a recent article published by Forced Migration Review. “But it does not grant refugees the right to seek asylum, have legal stay or refugee status. This leaves refugees in a challenging situation.”

Current legal restrictions affect the admission of newcomers, renewal of residency visas and the regularisation of visa applications for those who have entered the country through unofficial border crossings.

One aid worker who is providing assistance to Syrian refugees in Mount Lebanon told IPS that the majority of the Syrian beneficiaries they are working with no longer have a legal residency visa.

Aranki notes that fear of being arrested often forces those without legal residency papers to limit their movements and also their ability to access various services, to obtain a lease contract or find employment is severely limited. It could also impede birth registration for refugees -with the consequent risk of statelessness, or force family separations on the border.

Before May this year, Syrians could usually enter Lebanon as “tourists” and obtain a residency visa for six months (renewable every six months for up to three years), although this process cost 200 dollars a year, which already was financially prohibitive for many refugee families.

However, NRC has noted that under new regulations Syrians are only permitted to enter Lebanon in exceptional or humanitarian cases such as for medical reasons, or if the applicant has an onward flight booked out of the country, an appointment at an embassy, a valid work permit, or is deemed a “wealthy” tourist. Since summer 2013, restrictions for Palestinian refugees from Syria have become even more severe.

Under its new policy, the Lebanese government also intends to participate in the registration of new refugees together with the UNHCR. Khalil Gebara, an advisor to Minister of Interior Nohad Machnouk, says that the government has taken these measures for two reasons.

“First, because the government decided that it needs to have a joint sovereign decision over the issue of how to treat the Syrian crisis. (…) Previously, it was UNHCR to decide who was deemed a refugee and who was not, the Lebanese government was not involved in this process.”

Secondly “because government believes that there are a lot of Syrians registered who are abusing the system. A lot of them are economic migrants living in Lebanon and they are registered with the United Nations. The government wants to specify who really deserves to be a refugee and who does not”.

Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesperson, said that the U.N. agency has “for a long time” encouraged the Lebanese government to assume a role in the registration of new refugees and affirms that registration is going on.

“There is concern about the protection of refugees but there is also understanding on UNHCR’s part,” said Redmond. “Lebanon has legitimate security, demographic and social concerns.”

Meanwhile, accompanying the increasing fear of deportation from Lebanon, Syrian refugees have also been forced to deal with routine forms of discrimination.

Over 45 municipalities across Lebanon have imposed curfews restricting the movement of Syrians during night-time hours, measures which, according to Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Director Nadim Houry, contravene “international human rights law and appear to be illegal under Lebanese law.”

Attacks targeting unarmed Syrians – particularly since clashes between the Lebanese army and gunmen affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Arsal in August – have  also occurred.

Given such realities, life in Lebanon for Hassan, Ahmed and many other Syrian refugees, is becoming a new exile, stuck between a rock and a hard place.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, Oct 15 2014 (IPS)

As the international media is mesmerised by the Islamic State’s advance on Kobani or ‘Ayn al-Arab on the Syrian-Turkish border, Arab states and the United States would need to look beyond Kobani’s fate and the Islamic State’s territorial successes and defeats.

The crumbling Levant poses a greater danger than ISIL and must be addressed—first and foremost by the states of the region.Although the so-called deep security state has been able to maintain a semblance of order around the national capital, the state’s control of territories beyond the capital is fading and is rapidly being contested by non-state actors.

The British colonial term Levant encompasses modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, with a total population of over 70 million people. The population—mostly young, unemployed or underemployed, poor, and inadequately educated—has lost trust in their leaders and the governing elites.

The Levant has become a bloody playground for other states in the greater Middle East, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Iran, and Turkey. While dislocations in the Levant could be contained, the regional states’ involvement has transformed the area into an international nightmare. The resulting instability will impact the region for years to come regardless of ISIL’s short-term fortunes.

The Levantine state has become marginalised and ineffectual in charting a hopeful future for its people, who are drifting away from nationalist ideologies toward more divisive, localised, and often violent, manifestations of identity politics. National political identity, with which citizens in the Levant have identified for decades, has devolved mostly into tribal, ethnic, geographic, and sectarian identities.

The crumbling state structure and authority gave rise to these identities, thereby fueling the current conflicts, which in turn are undermining the very existence of the Levantine state.

The three key non-state actors—ISIL, Hizbollah, and Hamas—have been the beneficiaries of the crumbling states, which were drawn up by colonial cartographer-politicians a century ago.

Although the so-called deep security state has been able to maintain a semblance of order around the national capital, the state’s control of territories beyond the capital is fading and is rapidly being contested by non-state actors.

This phenomenon is readily apparent in Baghdad, Damascus, Ramallah, and Gaza, partially so in Beirut, and less so in Amman. Salafi groups, however, are lurking in the background in Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine ready to challenge state authority whenever they sense a power vacuum.

Political systems in the Levant are often propped up by domestic ruling elites, regional states, and foreign powers for a variety of parochial and transnational interests. More and more, these ruling structures appear to be relics of the past. A key analytic question is how long would they survive if outside economic, military and political support dries up?

Levant regimes comprise a monarchy in Jordan; a perennially dysfunctional parliamentary/presidential system in Lebanon; a brutal, teetering dictatorship in Syria; an autocratic presidency in Palestine; and an erratic partisan democracy in Iraq. They have subsisted on so-called rentier or “rent” economies—oil in Iraq, with the rest dependent on foreign aid. Providers of such aid have included GCC countries, Iran, Turkey, the United States, the EU, Russia, and others.

Corruption is rampant across most state institutions in the Levant, including the military and the key financial and banking systems. For example, billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Iraq following the 2003 invasion have not been accounted for. According to the New York Times, American investigators in the past decade have traced huge sums of this money to a bunker in Lebanon.

The collapse of the Levant states in the next decade is not unthinkable. Their borders are already becoming more blurred and porous. The decaying environment is allowing violent groups to operate more freely within states and across state boundaries. ISIL is causing havoc in Iraq and Syria and potentially could destabilise Jordan and Lebanon precisely because the Levantine state is on the verge of collapse.

As these states weaken, regional powers—especially Saudi Arabia plus some of its GCC junior partners, Iran, and Egypt—will find it convenient to engage in proxy sectarian and ethnic wars through jihadist and other vigilante mercenaries.

Equally disturbing is that U.S. policy toward a post-ISIL Levant seems rudderless without a strategic compass to guide it. It’s as if U.S. policymakers have no stomach to focus on the “morning after” despite the fact that the airstrikes are proving ineffective in halting ISIL’s territorial advances.

Kobani aside, what should the Arab states and the United States do about the future of the Levant?

1. Iraq. If the Sunnis and Kurds are to be represented across all state institutions in Iraq, regional states with Washington’s help should urge Prime Minister Abadi to complete the formation of his new government on the basis of equity and fairness. Government and semi-public institutions and agencies must be made accountable and transparent and subject to scrutiny by domestic and international regulatory bodies. Otherwise, Iraq would remain a breeding ground for terrorists and jihadists.

2. Syria. If Washington remains committed to Assad’s removal, it should end its Russian roulette charade toward the Syrian dictator. Ankara’s view that Assad is more dangerous in the long run than ISIL is convincing and should be accepted and acted upon.

If removing Assad remains a serious policy objective, is the coalition contemplating imposing a no-fly zone and a security zone on Syria’s northern border any time soon to facilitate Assad’s downfall?

3. Lebanon. If Hizbollah and other political parties do not play a constructive role in re-establishing political dialogue and stability in Lebanon, it won’t be long before the ISIL wars enter the country. Are there regional and international pressures being put on Hizbollah to end its support of Assad and disengage from fighting in Syria?

The upcoming presidential election would be a useful barometer to assess the key Lebanese stakeholders’ commitment to long-term stability. If no candidate wins a majority, does Washington, in conjunction with its Arab allies, have a clear plan to get the Lebanese parliament to vote for a president?

Unless Lebanon gets its political house in order, religious sectarianism could yet again rear its ugly head in that fragile state and tear Lebanon apart.

4. Palestine. If the Obama administration urges Israel to facilitate a working environment for the Palestinian national unity government, to end its siege of Gaza, and dismantle its 47-year occupation, Palestine would no longer be an incubator of radical ideologies.

An occupied population living in poverty, unemployment, alienation, repression, daily humiliation, and hopelessness and ruled by a corrupt regime is rarely prone to moderation and peaceful dialogue. On the contrary, such a population offers fertile recruiting ground for extremism.

5. It is in the United States’ interest to engage Iran and Saudi Arabia—the two countries that seem to meddle most in the Levant—in order to stop their proxy wars in the region. These sectarian wars could easily lead to an all-out military confrontation, which would surely suck in the United States and other Western powers. Israel would not be able to escape such a conflict either.

The Saudi government claims that it opposes ISIS. Yet one would ask why hasn’t the Saudi clerical establishment denounced—forcefully and publicly—the ISIL ideology and rejected so-called Islamic State Caliphate? Why is it that thousands of ISIL jihadists are from Saudi Arabia and neighbouring Gulf countries?

6. Since Levant countries face high unemployment, it’s imperative to pursue serious job creation initiatives. Arab states, with Washington’s support, should begin massive technical and vocational education programs and entrepreneurial initiatives in the Levant countries. Young men and women should be trained in vocational institutes, much like the two-year college concept in the United States.

Vocational fields that suffer from shortages in Levant countries include plumbing, carpentry, home construction, electricity, welding, mechanics, automotive services, truck driving, computers and electronics, health services, hotels and tourism, technology management, and TV and computer repairs. Services in these fields are badly needed. Yet thousands of young men and women are ready to be trained and fill these needs.

In addition to vocational training, wealthy Arab countries should help the Levant establish funds for entrepreneurial, job-creation initiatives, and start-ups. A partnership between government and the private sector, with support from the U.S and other developed countries, could be the engine that drives a new era of job creation and economic growth in the region where the ISIL cancer is metastasizing.

Let’s be clear, the United States has significant leverage to help implement these policies should American leaders decide to do so. One could ask why should the US make such a commitment? If ISIL is primarily a threat to Levantine countries, why can’t they deal with it?

These are fair questions but, as we have discovered with Ebola, what happens in Liberia doesn’t stay in Liberia. A crumbling Levant will have ramifications not just for the region but for the United States and the rest of the world as well.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Editing by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

A young mother approaches a healthcare facility inside the Domiz refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, mid-September 2014. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
DOHUK, Iraq, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the largest refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, young Syrian mothers and pregnant women are considered relatively lucky.

The number of registered Syrian refugees surpassed 3 million in late August, with the highest concentrations in Lebanon (over 1.1 million), Turkey (over 800,000), and Jordan (over 600,000). In all of the above, serious concerns have been expressed about the availability of healthcare services for expectant mothers.

In Lebanon, for example – which hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees, 76 percent of whom are women and children – the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) last year had to reduce its coverage of delivery costs for mothers to 75 percent instead of 100 percent, due to funding shortfalls.Though some in the Domiz camp live in tents on the edges of the camp with little access to basic sanitation facilities, others reside in small container-like facilities interspersed with wedding apparel shops and small groceries, and enjoy the right to public healthcare

The Domiz camp in the northern Dohuk province houses over 100,000 mostly Syrian Kurds, but is in a geographical area with a 189 percent coverage rate of humanitarian aid funding requests in 2014. The Syria Humanitarian Response Plan (SHARP) has received only 33 percent of the same.

Though some in the Domiz camp live in tents on the edges of the camp with little access to basic sanitation facilities, others reside in small container-like facilities interspersed with wedding apparel shops and small groceries, and enjoy the right to public healthcare.

This does not necessarily equate with quality healthcare, however. Halat Yousef, a young mother that IPS spoke to in Domiz, said that she had been told after a previous birth in Syria that she would need a caesarean section for any subsequent births.

On her arrival at the Dohuk public hospital, she was instead refused a bed, told to come back in a week and that she would have to give birth normally. They also told her she had hepatitis.

Fortunately, she said, her husband realised the seriousness of the situation and took her to the capital, where they immediately performed a C-section and found that she was instead negative for hepatitis. IPS met her as she was leaving healthcare facilities set up in the camp, holding her healthy 10-day-old infant.

Until recently, many mothers would also simply give birth in their tents. On August 4, Médicins San Frontiéres (MSF) opened a maternity unit in the camp that offers ante-natal check-ups, birthing services headed by MSF-trained midwives and post-natal vaccinations provided by staff who are also refugees.

Information on breastfeeding and family planning advice is also provided, according to MSF’s medical team leader in the camp, Dr Adrian Guadarrama.

MSF estimates that 2,100 infants are born in the camp every year, and others to refugees living outside of it.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has long been providing safe delivery kits to healthcare providers. It also works to prevent unwanted pregnancies and provides contraceptives to those requesting them, thereby ensuring that pregnancies are planned, wanted and safer.

The clean delivery kits contain a bar of soap, a clear plastic sheet for the woman to lie on, a razor blade for cutting the umbilical cord, a sterilised umbilical cord tie, a cloth (to keep the mother and baby warm) and latex gloves.

UNFPA humanitarian coordinator Wael Hatahet told IPS that so far the programmes in Iraqi Kurdistan for Syrian refugees had received enough funding to cover the necessary services, and this was why ‘’the situation is no longer an emergency one for Syrians here’’.

Hatahet said that he gives a good deal of credit to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which – despite having seen a major cut in public funds from the central government as part of a prolonged tug-of-war between the two – continues to support Syrian refugees coming primarily from the fellow Kurdish regions across the border.

Many residents expressed dissatisfaction to IPS about what they considered ‘’privileged treatment’’ given to Syrian refugees while the massive influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) that have arrived in the region over the past few months – after the Islamic State (IS) extremist group took over vast swathes of Iraqi territory in June – are seen to be suffering a great deal more.

Even Hatahet, who is of Syrian origins himself, noted that he had seen ‘’Iraqi IDPs wearing the same set of clothes for the past 15 days’’.

‘’We obviously try to support with garments and dignity kits,’’ he said, ‘’but it’s really, really sad.’’

However, he also noted that ‘’almost all the IDP operations are supported by the Saudi Fund [for Development]’’ totalling some 500 million dollars and announced in summer, ‘’which was strictly for IDPs and not refugees.’’

Hatahet expressed concerns that a broader shift in focus to Iraqi IDPs might result in a loss of the gains made in this geographical area of the Syrian refugee crisis, urging the international community to remember that ‘’we have 100,000 refugees scattered within the host community’’ and not just in the camps.

The Turkish office of UNFPA told IPS that, in its area of operations, ‘’it is estimated that about 1.3 million Syrian refugees have entered Turkey, of which only one-fifth of them are staying in camps due to limited space. 75 percent of the refugees are women and children under 18 years old.’’

It pointed out that ‘’women and girls of reproductive age under conditions of war and displacement are especially vulnerable to gender-based violence, including sexual violence, early and forced marriage, high-risk pregnancies, unsafe abortions, risky deliveries, lack of family planning services and commodities and sexually transmitted diseases.’’

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Gays partying in Beirut. Credit: Mona Alami/IPS

By Mona Alami
BEIRUT, Aug 24 2014 (IPS)

In a country where civil liberties remain the prerogative of the powerful and wealthy, the Lebanese gay scene is to be treaded carefully.

The recent arrest of 27 members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community shows that those not so lucky – those belonging to the more vulnerable tranches of society – are always at risk of experiencing the darker side of Lebanon.

On August 9, a raid targeted Hamam Agha, a popular public bath in the hipster Hamra area in the capital Beirut. Of the 27 men arrested, “there are still 14 non-Lebanese in detention, in spite of the fact that the judge has ruled they should be released,” says Ahmad Saleh, an activist from Helem, a Beirut-based NGO, advocating LGBT rights at parliamentary level.Article 534 of the Lebanese penal code states that any sexual intercourse “contrary to the order of nature is punished by imprisonment for up to one year.” The obscurely-worded article has been repeatedly used to crackdown on the LGBT community in Lebanon.

Article 534 of the Lebanese penal code states that any sexual intercourse “contrary to the order of nature is punished by imprisonment for up to one year.” The obscurely-worded article has been repeatedly used to crackdown on the LGBT community in Lebanon.

This month’s incident was not, unfortunately, isolated. In 2013, security forces raided Ghost, a gay nightclub in the Dekwaneh suburbs of Beirut. Four people were arrested during the raid and were subjected to physical and verbal harassment. In a similar case a year earlier in the Burj Hammoud popular area – another Beirut suburb – 36 men were arrested in a cinema and forced to undergo anal probes.

According to researcher Lama Fakih from Human Rights Watch (HRW), men often arrested on unrelated charged are subjected to anal testing if suspected of being gay. “However there are no real statistics,” she points out. The tests also violate international standards against torture, including the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which Lebanon has ratified, according to HRW.

While anal probes have been banned by former minister of Justice Antoine Kortbawi, they are still used by the police, or as a threat to force detainees to admit their homosexuality, explains Saleh.  According to HRW, two people have been subjected to anal probes since the directive was enacted last year.

While the struggle to change the law continues in Lebanon, the country has scored points in terms of the advocacy of legal rights. In January 2014, Judge Naji El Dahdah of the Jdeideh Court in Beirut dismissed a claim against a transgender woman accused of having a same-sex relationship with a man.

The judge stressed that a person’s gender should not be based on their personal status registry document, but on their outward physical appearance and self-perception.

In 2012, the Lebanon Medical Association issued a directive to put an end to the practice of anal examinations supposed to detect homosexuality.

The Lebanese Psychiatric Society issued a statement in early 2013 saying that: “the assumption that homosexuality is a result of disturbances in the family dynamic or unbalanced psychological development is based on wrong information.”

And in 2009, Judge Mounir Suleiman of the Batroun Court decided that consensual relations could not be deemed unnatural.

In addition to advances made on the legal front, the Lebanese public has become more aware of gay rights thanks to changes in mentalities and the promotion of creative works focusing on gay issues.

The media and the art scene have been challenging social norms. Wajdi and Majdi, two gay figures from a comedy TV show called La Youmal, have popularised the image of the LGBT community in Lebanon. Popular TV host Paula Yacoubian has also defended gay rights in Lebanon in a tweet. Mashrou’ Leila, a famous Lebanese rock band, has discussed homosexuality in Lebanon in its songs and last year a Lebanese movie called Out Loud featured five young Lebanese engaged in a group marriage. The movie was nonetheless banned in Lebanon by the censors.

“Youth are becoming increasingly aware of gay issues,” says activist Ghassan Makarem.  Compared with other countries in the region, Lebanese have far more liberal views than their counterparts as shown in a 2013 Pew Research Centre study. Some 18 percent of the Lebanese population believe that homosexuality should be accepted in society, compared with Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia where over 94 percent of the population view homosexuality as deviant.

However, Makarem adds, “despite recent positives, being gay can still mean being the subject of discrimination, from a legal standpoint, especially for those without the right connections or wealth.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Poster in Lebanon's Beqaa of Hezbollah 'shaheed' killed in Syrian conflict. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Aug 5 2014 (IPS)

Concerns about supporting a national army collaborating with a ‘terrorist organisation’ in Lebanon have in recent times been superseded by threats inherent in growing regional conflict.

The fact that Hezbollah, officially designated as a ‘terrorist organisation’ by both the United States and the European Union, no longer conceals its involvement in the fighting across the Lebanese-Syrian border makes little difference.

When traveling through the eastern Beqaa Valley, posters of Hezbollah ‘shaheed’ (‘martyrs’) of the Syrian conflict vie for space with those of popular Shia imams and the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.The fact that Hezbollah, officially designated as a ‘terrorist organisation’ by both the United States and the European Union, no longer conceals its involvement in the fighting across the Lebanese-Syrian border makes little difference.

In one seen by this IPS correspondent on a recent trip to the area, Nasrallah’s face and that of another Shia political leader flank that of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, with the writing ‘’this is what heroes are’’.

On July 26, the ‘Party of God’ announced in a statement that Nasrallah’s nephew, Hamzah Yassin, had been killed performing his ‘’jihadist duty defending holy sites’’, implying he had lost his life fighting in Syria.

The United States and other nations’ support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has long served as a bulwark against excessive volatility in the small but confessionally-diverse Middle Eastern country. At the same time, care has been taken to prevent it from becoming so strong as to pose a threat to its southern neighbour and strong U.S. ally – Israel.

Hezbollah, sworn enemy of the ‘Zionist entity’ (as it refers to Israel), continues to claim that its more powerful arsenal is for its struggle against Israel, even as ever more of its means and men are directed at fighting rebel groups in Syria.

At the same time, it seems to be gaining ever more influence in Lebanon’s policies and military.

Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told IPS that Hezbollah ‘‘is believed to have a lot of influence on the military intelligence [directorate] in particular –which would make sense as it is the most sensitive agency and the agency that would, potentially, monitor Hezbollah.’’

On the fact that Hezbollah moves fighters and weapons across the border, Sayigh said that ‘’Hezbollah has a lot of de facto power; it acts autonomously on these issues. They must have some sort of agreement that allows them to bring back their dead and wounded, for example,’’ or ‘’it may be that they move them through corridors no one, including the army, is allowed to enter.’’

Sayigh noted that compared with the LAF, Hezbollah ‘’has heavier, longer-range missiles.’’

However, the LAF will benefit, he said, ‘’if the current development programme goes through’’, because ‘’significant quantities of more up-to-date weaponry, transport systems and so on’’ will be available to them.

In January, Saudi Arabia pledged 3 billion dollars in aid and the International Support Group for Lebanon promised at a Rome conference in June to provide more training, among other support.

However, Hezbollah’s key strategic advantage remains ‘’its superior organisation, intelligence, battlefield management and the close relationship between its political and military leaders,’’ which is what the LAF lacks, according to Sayigh. ‘’It is also thought to have a lot of say in the choice, recruitment and promotion of Shia officers in the army.’’

In relation to border control and weapons smuggling in certain areas by Syrian rebel groups, he noted that ‘’once Hezbollah accepted the deployment of the police in its own strongholds in southern Beirut, it became possible for the army to deploy more extensively along the northern and eastern border, and be somewhat more effective.’’

The effectiveness of the LAF is further weakened by such problems as the soldier-to-general ratio, which according to a paper published earlier this year, stands at just under one general for every 100 soldiers, compared with the U.S. army, which in October 2013 had one general for 1,357 soldiers.

The more efficiently organised non-state actor has instead been called a ‘’jihadist’’ organisation, and describes what its fighters dying in the conflict in Syria are doing as their ‘’jihadist duty’’.

Asked to comment on whether Hezbollah is comparable to Sunni jihadist organisations, Sayigh said that ‘’it is an Islamist organisation’’ but ‘’it has accepted that it cannot construct an Islamic state in Lebanon.’’

Sayigh noted that ‘’to the extent that they are mobilising Shia fighters from Iran or from Iraq to go fight in Syria, we do witness a growing form of Shia jihadism, the idea that people are going to fight in defence of the Shia doctrine, to protect Shia shrines. There is a growing sense of, if you like, Shia jihadism,’’ but ‘’Hezbollah stands out for working within a much more careful political and military framework.’’

He said, however, that ‘’they are increasingly recruiting from outside of their own ranks,’’ showing a ‘’higher level of mobilisation among the Shia community. Whether or not these people get paid is unclear.’’

Mustafa Allouch, head of the Tripoli branch of the Future Party and former MP for the city, said instead that ‘’a lot of money is being paid.’’

‘’It is said that Hezbollah provides 20,000 dollars for a ‘martyr’ buried openly, and 100,000 if the parents agree to bury him without a funeral,’’ he said.

In relation to the United States and its financial support for Lebanon overall, Sayigh said ‘’there seems to have been a strategic decision to continue to cooperate with the Lebanese government, the Lebanese army, and other agencies even when Hezbollah is in a coalition government.’’

‘’The country is fragile and in deep economic trouble,’’ Sayigh pointed out, ‘’and the U.S. decision has been to ‘’avoid overburdening the Lebanese system to breaking point.’’

However, a local employee of a U.N. agency expressed concerns to IPS – on condition of anonymity – that de facto authorisation in many areas comes from Hezbollah and not the government itself.

Nevertheless, the army can point to some achievements in the past few months. In December 2013, LAF was given a mandate to keep order in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli amid rapidly escalating violence. In a visit to the city in July by IPS, overall calm prevailed and many of the sandbags, tanks and troops deployed earlier in the year were nowhere to be seen.

When asked what the major factor was that led to the calm, Allouch said that ‘’when you have a political agreement to withdraw all gang leaders,’’ citing arrest warrants issued for Alawite community leaders accused of crimes, which led to their escaping across the border to Syria, ‘’you can achieve things. The military is simply imposing what the political agreement was.’’

He noted that, although Hezbollah could be compared in many ways to a ‘’gang’’, there could be no talk of the Lebanese army ‘’confronting Hezbollah militarily’’.

‘’It would end in civil war. And the Lebanese army itself would not hold, given the situation in the region. Hezbollah is not a local issue, it is a regional one.’’

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Syrian refugee schoolchildren being taught in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Aug 1 2014 (IPS)

The Shatila Palestinian camp has no library, nor does adjacent Sabra or Ain El-Hilweh in the south. And, after recent statements by Lebanon’s foreign minister, some fear that the thousands of Syrian refugee children within them will soon have even slimmer chances of learning to read and write.

The United Nations stated earlier last month that Syrian refugees would total over one-third of Lebanon’s population by the end of 2014, and that at least 300,000 refugee children were not enrolled in school.

In early July, Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil said that no assistance should be given to Syrian refugees as “all this aid – be it food, shelter or health care – encourages Syrian refugees to stay in Lebanon, while what we want is to encourage their speedy exit.”“The overcrowded breezeblock camps are filled with school-age children from across the [Lebanese-Syrian] border, suffering from psychosocial disorders, nutritional problems and limited possibilities for enrolling in Lebanese educational institutes

During his time as energy minister in the previous government, Bassil had said that Syrians should be seen as a “threat to the safety, economy and identity of the country.”

Tangled electrical wires droop dangerously low and posters of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad are prominent alongside those of Palestinian ‘resistance’ leaders and ‘martyrs’ in the Lebanese capital’s camps, where refugees are said to have initially been welcomed.

Lebanon’s security forces do not enter the 12 officially registered Palestinian camps in the country despite withdrawal from a 1969 agreement granting the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) control over them.

Several Syrians told IPS they feel more comfortable there than they would in areas controlled by Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside the Syrian regime and whose political wing is part of the government.

With 10,000-20,000 having arrived since the conflict began, refugees from Syria now outnumber the original inhabitants of Beirut’s Shatila camp, set up in 1949 to shelter stateless Palestinians.

The overcrowded breezeblock camps are filled with school-age children from across the border, suffering from psychosocial disorders, nutritional problems and limited possibilities for enrolling in Lebanese educational institutes.

There than the capacity of the public school system capacity, the most obvious hurdle for refugee children, says Fadi Hallisso, co-founder and general manager of the Syrian-run NGO Basmeh & Zeitooneh which works in the camp, is that Syrian public schools teach in Arabic while their Lebanese counterparts use either French or English.

Destitute or missing parents leading to the need to work or beg to survive, transport costs and war-induced trauma are other factors at play, and the problem is compounded by nutritional deficiencies.

A UNICEF study found earlier this year that severe acute malnutrition had doubled in certain parts of the country between 2012 and 2013. It noted that almost 2,000 children under the age of five were at risk of dying if they did not receive immediate treatment, while even milder states of malnutrition stunt children’s physical and mental growth.

Basmeh & Zeitooneh has set up a school in Shatila for about 300 students using the Lebanese curriculum taught by Syrians and Palestinians, who are paid between 400 and 700 dollars a month, according to Hallisso, “which no Lebanese teacher would be willing to work for.”

The facilities have been newly renovated and are in a building with a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinic and dispensary on the second floor.

The organisation is trying to get funding for a small library where the children can come, read, consult reference works, use computers and find a space open to them with generator-powered electricity.

Maria Minkara, who works with Hallisso, told IPS that it would be open to both Palestinian and Syrian schoolchildren and that not a single library exists in the entire area housing tens of thousands of inhabitants.

Many of the children, she noted, live in dark, unhealthy environments, cut off from the power grid with no physical space in which to study. A walk through the crowded camps makes this obvious.

The Joint Christian Committee for Social Service in Lebanon, another organisation working with refugees, recently succeeded in obtaining permission for about 120 Syrian refugee children from its school in the Ain El-Hilweh camp near Sidon to return to Damascus for their 9^th grade and Baccalaureate exams, Executive Director Sylvia Haddad told IPS. Over 83 percent of them passed, she said.

Haddad admitted that several students’ families had refused to allow their children to go back to Syria out of fear of the regime, but said that “’they are regretting that decision very much now.”

Stressing that all politics and religion were kept out of the instruction of refugee children, Haddad said that questions on the curriculum being used by the group were referred to Abu Hassan, a Palestinian inhabitant of the camp who in the manner of militia fighters in the region uses an alias preceded by ‘Abu’ (‘father of’).

Abu Hassan said he had fought in the Palestinian ‘resistance’ in the past but declined to say with which faction, and denied that any pro-regime rhetoric was contained in the textbooks.

Abu Hassan was allowed to accompany the students to Damascus and back, but recent changes in Lebanese law make it harder for Palestinians fleeing Syria to enter Lebanon. Amnesty International published a report last month denouncing the restrictions, which require ‘pre-authorisation’ from the government or a residency permit.

Regulations regarding Syrian refugees also changed at the beginning of June, limiting entry to those coming from areas near the Lebanese border where fighting is under way and stipulating that refugees who cross back into Syria forfeit the right to return.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Tank trucks being filled with water in front of Osman Bin Affan Mosque in Beirut. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Jul 28 2014 (IPS)

In front of Osman Bin Affan Mosque, in a central but narrow street of Beirut, several tank trucks are being filled with large amounts of water. The mosque has its own well, which allows it to pump water directly from the aquifers that cross the Lebanese underground. Once filled, the trucks will start going through the city to supply hundreds of homes and shops.

In a normal year, the water trucks do not appear until September, but this year they have started working even before summer because of the severe drought currently affecting Lebanon.

This comes on top of the increased pressure on the existing water supply due to the presence of more than one million Syrian refugees fleeing the war, exacerbating a situation which may lead to food insecurity and public health problems.“The more we deplete our groundwater reserves, the less we can rely on them in the coming season. If next year we have below average rainfalls, the water conditions will be much worse than today” – Nadim Farajalla of the Issam Fares Institute (IFI)

Rains were scarce last winter. While the annual average in recent decades was above 800 mm, this year it was around 400 mm, making it one of the worst rainfall seasons in the last sixty years.

The paradox is that Lebanon should not suffer from water scarcity. Annual precipitation is about 8,600 million cubic metres while normal water demand ranges between 1,473 and 1,530 million cubic metres per year, according to the Impact of Population Growth and Climate Change on Water Scarcity, Agricultural Output and Food Security report published  in April by the Issam Fares Institute (IFI) at the American University of Beirut.

However, as Nadim Farajalla, Research Director of IFI’s Climate Change and Environment in the Arab World Programme, explains, the country’s inability to store water efficiently, water pollution and its misuse both in agriculture and for domestic purposes, have put great pressure on the resource.

According to Bruno Minjauw, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative ad interim in the country as well as Resilience Officer, Lebanon “has always been a very wet country. Therefore, the production system has never looked so much at the problem of water.”

Referring to the figures for rainfall, Minjauw says that “what we are seeing is definitely an issue of climate change. Over the years, drought or seasons of scarcity have become more frequent”. In his opinion, the current drought must be taken as a warning: “It is time to manage water in a better way.”

However, he continues, “the good news is that this country is not exploiting its full potential in terms of sustainable water consumption, so there’s plenty of room for improvement.”

Meanwhile, water has become an issue, with scarcity hitting particularly hard the agricultural sector, which accounts for 60 percent of the water consumed despite the sector’s limited impact on the Lebanese economy (agriculture contributed to 5.9% of the country’s gross domestic product in 2011).

“Some municipalities are limiting what farmers can plant,” explains Gabriel Bayram, an agricultural advisor with KDS, a local development consultancy.

Minjauw believes that there is a real danger “in terms of food insecurity because we have more people [like refugees] coming while production is diminishing.” Nevertheless, he points out that the current crisis has increased the interest of government and farmers in “increase the quantity of land using improved irrigation systems, such as the drip irrigation system, which consume much less water.” Drip irrigation saves water – and fertiliser – by allowing water to drip slowly through a network of  tubes that deliver water directly to the base of the plant.

FAO is also working to promote the newest technologies in agriculture within the framework of a 4-year plan to improve food security and stabilise rural livelihoods in Lebanon.

Sheik Osama Chehab, in charge of the Osman Bin Affan Mosque, explains that, 20 years ago, water could be found three metres under the ground surface. “Yesterday,” he told IPS, “we dug 120 metres and did not find a drop.”

Digging wells has long been the main alternative to insufficient public water supplies in Lebanon and, according to the National Water Sector Strategy, there are about 42,000 wells throughout the country, half of which are unlicensed.

However, notes Farajalla “this has led to a drop in the water table and along the coast most [aquifers] are experiencing sea water intrusion, thus contaminating these aquifers for generations to come. The more we deplete our groundwater reserves, the less we can rely on them in the coming season. If next year we have below average rainfalls, the water conditions will be much worse than today.”

Besides, he cautions, “most of these wells have not passed quality tests. Therefore there are also risks that water use could trigger diseases among the population.”

The drought is also exacerbating tensions between host communities and Syrian refugees.

The rural municipality of Barouk, for example, whose springs and river supply water to big areas in Lebanon, today can count on only 30 percent of the usual quantity of water available. However, consumption needs have risen by around 25 percent as a result of the presence of 2,000 refugees and Barouk’s deputy mayor Dr. Marwan Mahmoud explains that this has generated complaints against newcomers.

However, Minjauw believes that “within that worrisome context, there is the possibility to mitigate the conflict and turn it into a win-win situation, employing both host and refugee communities in building long-term solutions for water management and conservation as well as forest maintenance and management. This would be beneficial for Lebanese farmers in the long term while enhancing the livelihoods of suffering people.”

For Farajalla, part of the problem related to water is that “there is a general lack of awareness and knowledge among decision-makers” in Lebanon, and he argues that it is up to civil society to lead the process, pressuring the government for “more transparency and better governance and accountability” in water management.

He claims that “the government failed with this drought by not looking at it earlier.” So far, a cabinet in continuous political crisis has promoted few and ineffective measures to alleviate the drought. One of the most recent ideas was to import water from Turkey, with prohibitive costs.

“Soon, you will also hear about projects to desalinate sea water,” says Farajalla. “Both ideas are silly because in Lebanon we can improve a lot of things before resorting to these drastic measures.”

A declining economy and a severe drought have raised concerns in Lebanon over food security as the country faces one of its worst refugee crises, resulting from the nearby Syria war, and it is these refugees and impoverished Lebanese border populations that are most vulnerable to this new threat.

A severe drought has put the Lebanese agricultural sector at risk. According to the Meteorological Department at Rafik Hariri International Airport, average rainfall in 2014 is estimated at 470 mm, far below annual averages of 824 mm.

The drought has left farmers squabbling over water. “We could not plant this year and our orchards are drying up, we are only getting six hours of water per week,” says Georges Karam, the mayor of Zabougha, a town located in the Bekfaya area in Lebanon.“Any major domestic or regional security or political disruptions which undermine economic growth and job creation could lead to higher poverty levels and associated food insecurity” – Maurice Saade of the World Bank's Middle East and North Africa Department

The drought has resulted in a substantial decline in agricultural production throughout the country. “The most affected products are fruits and vegetables, the prices of which have increased, thus affecting economic access of the poor and vulnerable populations,”says Maurice Saade, Senior Agriculture Economist at the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Department.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs. Although most households in Lebanon are considered food secure, lower income households are vulnerable to inflationary trends in food items because they tend to spend a larger share of their disposable income on staples, explains Saade.

Lebanon’s poverty pockets are generally concentrated in the north (Akkar and Dinnyeh), Northern Bekaa (Baalbek and Hermel) and in the south, as well as the slums located south of Beirut. These areas currently host the largest number areas of refugee population, fleeing the nearby Syria war.

According to Clemens Breisinger, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Lebanon currently imports about 90 percent of its food needs. “This means meant that the drought’s impact should be limited in term of the food available on the market,” he says.

However, populations residing in Lebanon’s impoverished areas are still at risk, especially those who are not financially supported by relatives (as is the custom in Lebanon) or benefit from state aid or from local charities operating in border areas. Lebanese host populations are most likely the most vulnerable to food insecurity, explains Saade.

According to the UNHCR, there are just over one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While the food situation is still manageable thanks to efforts of international donors who maintain food supplies to the population, “these rations are nonetheless always threatened by the lack of donor funding,” Saade stresses. In addition, refugee populations are largely dependent on food aid, because they are essentially comprised of women and children, with little or no access to the job market.

Given that Lebanon depends to a large extent on food imports, mostly from international markets, maintaining food security also depends on the ability of lower income groups to preserve their purchasing power as well as the stability of these external markets.

“This means that any major domestic or regional security or political disruptions which undermine economic growth and job creation could lead to higher poverty levels and associated food insecurity,” says Saade.

In addition any spikes in international food prices, such as those witnessed in 2008, could lead to widespread hunger among vulnerable populations.

Breisinger believes that despite increased awareness of the international community, the factors leading to a new food crisis are still present.Increased demand for food generally, fuel prices, the drop in food reserves, certain government policies as well as the diversion of grain and oilseed crops for biofuel production are elements that put pressure on the food supply chain and can eventually contribute to hunger in certain vulnerable countries.

To avoid such a risk, some countries have implemented specific measures such as building grain reserves. “I am not sure how Lebanon has reacted so far,” says Breisinger.  With little government oversight and widespread corruption, Lebanon’s vulnerability to food insecurity has been compounded by unforgiving weather conditions, a refugee crisis and worsening economic conditions which, if left unattended, could spiral out of control.

Syrian mother and child near Ma'arat Al-Numan, rebel-held Syria, in autumn 2013. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Jul 19 2014 (IPS)

Gaunt, haggard Syrian children begging and selling gum have become a fixture in streets of the Lebanese capital; having fled the ongoing conflict, they continue to be stalked by its effects.

Most who make it across the Syria-Lebanon border live in informal settlements in extremely poor hygienic conditions, which for many means diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, and – for the most vulnerable – sometimes death.

By the end of January, almost 40,000 Syrian children had been born as refugees, while the total number of minors who had fled abroad quadrupled to over 1.2 million between March 2013 and March 2014.Most who make it across the Syria-Lebanon border live in informal settlements in extremely poor hygienic conditions, which for many means diarrhoeal diseases, malnutrition, and – for the most vulnerable – sometimes death.

Lack of proper healthcare, food and clean water has resulted in countless loss of life during the Syrian conflict, now well into its fourth year. These deaths are left out of the daily tallies of ‘war casualties’, even as stunted bodies and emaciated faces peer out of photos from areas under siege.

The case of the Yarmouk Palestinian camp on the outskirts of Damascus momentarily grabbed the international community’s attention earlier this year, when Amnesty International released a report detailing the deaths of nearly 200 people under a government siege. Many other areas have experienced and continue to suffer the same fate, out of the public spotlight.

A Palestinian-Syrian originally from Yarmouk who has escaped abroad told IPS that some of her family are still in Hajar Al-Aswad, an area near Damascus with a population of roughly 600,000 prior to the conflict. She said that those trapped in the area were suffering ‘’as badly if not worse than in Yarmouk’’ and had been subjected to equally brutal starvation tactics. The area has, however, failed to garner similar attention.

The city of Homs, one of the first to rise up against President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, was also kept under regime siege for three years until May of this year, when Syrian troops and foreign Hezbollah fighters took control.

With the Syria conflict well into its fourth year, the U.N. Security Council decided for the first time on July 14 to authorize cross-border aid without the Assad government’s approval via four border crossings in neighbouring states. The resolution established a monitoring mechanism for a 180-day period for loading aid convoys in Turkey, Iraq and Jordan.

The first supplies will include water sanitation tablets and hygiene kits, essential to preventing the water-borne diseases responsible for diarrhoea – which, in turn, produces severe states of malnutrition.

Miram Azar, from UNICEF’s Beirut office, told IPS that  ‘’prior to the Syria crisis, malnutrition was not common in Lebanon or Syria, so UNICEF and other actors have had to educate public health providers on the detection, monitoring and treatment’’ even before beginning to deal with the issue itself.

However, it was already on the rise: ‘’malnutrition was a challenge to Syria even before the conflict’’, said a UNICEF report released this year. ‘’The number of stunted children – those too short for their age and whose brain may not properly develop – rose from 23 to 29 per cent between 2009 and 2011.’’

Malnutrition experienced in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life (from pregnancy to two years old) results in lifelong consequences, including greater susceptibility to illness, obesity, reduced cognitive abilities and lower development potential of the nation they live in.

Azar noted that ‘’malnutrition is a concern due to the deteriorating food security faced by refugees before they left Syria’’ as well as ‘’the increase in food prices during winter.’’

The Syrian economy has been crippled by the conflict and crop production has fallen drastically. Violence has destroyed farms, razed fields and displaced farmers.

The price of basic foodstuffs has become prohibitive in many areas. On a visit to rebel-held areas in the northern Idlib province autumn of 2013, residents told IPS that the cost of staples such as rice and bread had risen by more than ten times their cost prior to the conflict, and in other areas inflation was worse.

Jihad Yazigi , an expert on the Syrian economy, argued in a European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR) policy brief published earlier this year that the war economy, which ‘’both feeds directly off the violence and incentivises continued fighting’’, was becoming ever more entrenched.

Meanwhile, political prisoners who have been released as a result of amnesties tell stories of severe water and food deprivation within jails. Many were detained on the basis of peaceful activities, including exercising their right to freedom of expression and providing humanitarian aid, on the basis of a counterterrorism law adopted by the government in July 2012.

There are no accurate figures available for Syria’s prison population. However, the monitoring group, Violations Documentation Centre, reports that 40,853 people detained since the start of the uprising in March 2011 remain in jail.

Maher Esber, a former political prisoner who was in one of Syria’s most notorious jails between 2006 and 2011 and is now an activist living in the Lebanese capital, told IPS that it was normal for taps to be turned on for only 10 minutes per day for drinking and hygiene purposes in the detention facilities.

Much of the country’s water supply has also been damaged or destroyed over the past years, with knock-on effects on infectious diseases and malnutrition. A major pumping station in Aleppo was damaged on May 10, leaving roughly half what was previously Syria’s most populated city without running water. Relentless regime barrel bombing has made it impossible to fix the mains, and experts have warned of a potential humanitarian catastrophe for those still inside the city.

The U.N. decision earlier this month was made subsequent to refusal by the Syrian regime to comply with a February resolution demanding rapid, safe, and unhindered access, and the Syrian regime had warned that it considered non-authorised aid deliveries into rebel-held areas as an attack.

Hezbollah clashes with Syrian rebels on the outskirts of Ersal seem to be widening the divide between residents of the Eastern Bekaa town – increasingly dominated by Syrian rebels, including the radical Nusra Front – and other regions as well as the Lebanese state. 

At the bottom of the rugged Syrian Qalamoun mountain chain lies the predominantly Sunni town of Ersal. The region is known historically as a smuggling route between Syria and Lebanon.

Since the beginning of the Syria revolution, politics have pushed its people away from their Bekaa neighbours, who mostly belong to the Shiite community. Ersal largely sympathises with the Sunni-led uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad, while Bekaa Shiites support the Lebanese Hezbollah, which is currently fighting alongside Syrian regime forces.“Clashes between Hezbollah and Syrian rebels have aggravated tensions between local residents and their neighbours, and every incident is causing a backlash on the village [Ersal]” – deputy mayor of Ersal, Ahmad Fleety

Despite the fall of Qalamoun to Hezbollah and Assad regime troops in March, fighting has resumed in the Syrian region as well as the barren valley and rocky tops of Ersal in Lebanon, where rebels are also present.

“The clout of Syrian insurgents over the town has become an unavoidable reality,” says a Lebanese army officer speaking on condition of anonymity.

This week, seven members of Hezbollah died and 31 others were wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The fighters were killed in an ambush in the hills above Ersal. The rugged area is also used a rocket launch pad by rebels who frequently target Hezbollah villages in Bekaa.

“The Syrian-Lebanese border there is the soft belly of Hezbollah’s stronghold as it overlooks the Bekaa and more importantly the city of Baalbeck, which is the birthplace of the militant organisation,” says Professor Hilal Khashan from the American University of Beirut.

“Rebels, including the Nusra Front, are using Ersal to launch attacks on Hezbollah, which is self-compelled to retake the region, at a very high cost,” he adds.

The military source underlines that an estimated 6,000 Syrian fighters have found refuge in Ersal. Hundreds of opposition militants are believed to be hiding in the hills and caves above the town. Dirt tracks connecting Ersal to the Bekaa mountain tops are also used by residents to ferry aid, gasoline and supplies to insurgents.

Deputy mayor Ahmad Fleety admits that Ersal is paying a high price for backing the Syrian revolution.  “Clashes between Hezbollah and Syrian rebels have aggravated tensions between local residents and their neighbours, and every incident is causing a backlash on the village,” he says.

The official points out that an Ersal resident, Khaled Hujairi, was wounded in nearby Laboueh after the funeral of one of the Hezbollah fighters who died in the recent battles.

However, the divide separating Ersal residents from those residing in surrounding villages dates back to the beginning of the uprising and a spate of tit-for-tat kidnappings between Sunnis and Shiites.

Relations between the two communities took a turn for the worse after four Shiites were killed in June last year near Ersal.  The trend was only exacerbated when the town remained under siege for several weeks early this year, after the village became a transit point from Syria into Lebanon for booby-trapped cars targeting Shiite areas.

Ersal’s grim reality is only compounded by the town’s isolation. A small asphalt road connects it to the rest of Bekaa, and from there onward to the capital Beirut. Syrian planes frequently fly over, firing missiles into the village and the mountain tops above it. An attack this week led to the injury of seven Ersal residents.

These repetitive incidents rarely draw any complaints from Lebanon.

“Ersal is an outlying territory neglected by the government, which can explain the rise of extremism there. If Ersal residents felt they belonged to the Lebanese state, they would not be so supportive of Syrian rebels,” points out Khashan.

In addition, relations with the state have been strained by a series of incidents, the most recent leading last year to clashes between an army patrol and local residents, claiming the lives of two Lebanese armed forces members as well as one suspect who was being pursued.

The presence of over 120,000 Syrian refugees – which exceeds the local population threefold – is further straining relations with the state and other villages. “Ersal people have chosen to support the Syrian revolution, they won’t back down,” says local activist Abu Mohamad Oueid.

The deepening feeling of distrust between old neighbours now turned foes seems to be here to stay, and the fates of Ersal residents to be intertwined with that of Syrian rebels.