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UN: Most of Lebanon's shelters are overflowing with displaced people

2024-10-04 16:02:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

UN: Most of Lebanon's shelters are overflowing with displaced people

United Nations officials said Friday that most of Lebanon's nearly 900 shelters are full and that people fleeing Israeli bombardment are sleeping on the streets and in public parks.

"Almost all 900 collective shelters set up by the Government in Lebanon are already full," said Rula Amin of the UN refugee agency.

She said they are working with local authorities to find more places and that, in the meantime, some hotels and even nightclubs in Beirut are opening their doors to accommodate displaced people.

Lebanese authorities say more than 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes and nearly 2,000 have been killed in the past year since the conflict between Israel and the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah escalated. But most of them have been displaced and killed in the last two weeks.

Hezbollah, which controls southern Lebanon, has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, while the European Union has blacklisted its armed wing but not its political party.

"The streets are full of vehicles, people are sleeping in public parks, on the streets, on the beach," said Mathieu Luciano, head of the International Organization for Migration's office in Lebanon.

He confirmed that most shelters are full, including those in Beirut, and that there is still space in some of them.

Many of the shelters are schools, he added, meaning classes have been disrupted.

On Friday, the Israeli army sealed off the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, blocking the passage of vehicles, although Amin said some people were crossing on foot.

"We have seen people walking, eager to flee Lebanon. So they walk down that broken road," she said.

About 60 percent of the more than 185,000 people who have fled to Syria so far are children and teenagers, some of them without their parents, Amin said./ REL





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