Red Cross delivers aid in Lebanon
Aid workers moved gingerly around unexploded bombs littering southern Lebanon today to deliver food and fuel to people cut off by weeks of fighting and to evacuate war wounded to hospitals, officials said.
Refugees rushing to take advantage of the Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire have clogged the road from Beirut to the southern port of Tyre, but farther south near the Israeli border the scene is more desolate, said Annick Bouvier, spokeswoman in Geneva for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“There is a lot of unexploded ordnance in the very remote areas of southern Lebanon,” Bouvier said. “There is not much traffic because it is a highly dangerous area.”
The international Red Cross sent convoys into the region. Distributing relief supplies to villages south of Marjayoun, aid workers found people who had been isolated during the month of fighting, she said. The relief workers gave villagers food and provided fuel so that pumps could start restoring water service.
“These people were trapped,” Bouvier said. “Clearly people have been waiting for a quite a long time.”
The ICRC evacuated three wounded people, and the Lebanese Red Cross in the convoy spent the day shuttling wounded people to hospitals in the area, she said.
“They had to go very carefully,” Bouvier said, adding that she didn’t have precise figures of the number of wounded found so far, but she said the Lebanese Red Cross had evacuated about 100 casualties from the one area yesterday.
The ICRC also supplied fuel to hospitals and helped repair the power station in Tyre so that electricity could be re-established, she said.
The United Nations World Food Programme said 60,000 people have already crossed into Lebanon from Syria in private cars, taxis, buses and trucks since the ceasefire went into effect on Monday.
“It is reassuring that in spite of all the suffering they have been through and the uncertainty of what awaits them back home, they are filled with hope and excitement, keen to start rebuilding their lives,” said Pippa Bradford, WFP’s Representative in Syria.
UN relief workers and volunteers are working around the clock at the border to distribute food and other supplies to returnees, officials said.
Christian Berthiaume, WFP spokeswoman in Geneva, said the UN had dispatched ship carrying 21 trucks full of relief items from Beirut to Tyre and another convoy by road.
“There’s a lot of staff that are being right now dispatched in the country,” she said.
The ICRC provided enough fuel to Rmeish, a Christian village about a mile from the Israeli border, to restore electricity and water, said Bouvier.
“Other villages are very badly bombarded. One village near Rmeish is almost totally destroyed,” Berthiaume said, adding that “road damage is a huge problem.”
WFP aid workers who were able to go to the southern part of Beirut yesterday are reporting extensive damage from the suburbs of Haret, Hreik and Ruhbeiri, said Berthiaume.
“It is estimated that some 200,000 of the displaced from southern Beirut have returned,” she said.
WFP estimates that overall in Lebanon 500,000 people need urgent assistance and that the number is expected to increase in the coming days.
The agency appealed today for more cash contributions, saying that lack of funds for its logistics operation in Lebanon is threatening to halt its aid efforts.
WFP said it has so far received only $19.2m (€15m) of the $39.5m (€30.75) it needs for its three-month operation, leaving a shortfall of 47%.
“We are now seeing hundreds of thousands of people returning to the south of the country and many more crossing the border from Syria. With the extent of the damage, many of them will find they have nothing left when they get home,” Thomas Keusters, WFP’s head of logistics in Lebanon, said in a statement.
“They will be relying on relief assistance for many weeks to come.”
