Desperate scenes at Lebanon - Syria border - UNHCR

Since the Israeli military escalated its offensive against Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon last month whose deadly rocket attacks at Israel have not stopped, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, reported that the death toll in Lebanon is now more than 2,200 since the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023. That number “continues to climb as the situation becomes more dramatic”, said Rema Jamous Imseis, UNHCR Director for the Middle East.

Over 10,000 people have also been injured amid Israeli airstrikes and Israeli evacuation orders that have left more than 25 per cent of the country “under a direct Israeli military evacuation order”, the UNHCR official told journalists in Geneva.

Desperate scenes have also been reported on Lebanon’s border with Syria, where more than 283,000 people have now crossed into northern Syria “seeking safety, fleeing Israeli airstrikes”, the UNHCR official said. About 70 per cent of those people are Syrians and roughly 30 per cent are Lebanese.

“We saw women with - two women - with about nine children between them who described their journey on foot for 10 hours to reach that point. They had seen directly the impact of the violence, an airstrike had hit a home 100 metres from their home and they fled, literally, with just the clothes on their backs.”