The United Nations said on Saturday that the destruction in Lebanon caused by the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel and the subsequent Israeli military campaign against the country now exceeds that recorded during the violent armed conflict between the two sides in 2006.
In mid-July of that year, a Hezbollah ambush of a group of Israeli soldiers triggered four weeks of fighting that resulted in some 2,000 Lebanese dead, more than half of them civilians. More than 150 Israeli soldiers and 40 civilians died in this conflict.
However, these figures have been surpassed by the year of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel since October 8, 2023, one day after the massacre committed by Palestinian militias in Israeli territory, which left 1,200 dead and opened the door to an Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip that has already left more than 43,000 Palestinians dead.
The Lebanese government estimates that 2,867 people have died and more than 13,000 have been injured by the Israeli military campaign in Lebanon, accelerated last month by an invasion by Israeli forces in the south of the country (as already happened in 2006) and a wave of bombings on the south of the capital, Beirut, a presumed stronghold of Hezbollah; a balance that exceeds that of the armed conflict almost 20 years ago.
The authorities estimate that there are 178 children among the dead and 1,178 minors injured. The number of internally displaced people is approaching 845,000 and at least 85 health workers have died under the bombings.
“The number of fatalities has been exacerbated by the destruction of critical infrastructure, including health care, and many hospitals are overwhelmed and blood donations are urgently requested to cope with the critical influx of victims,” according to the latest report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published this Saturday.
The humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, Imran Riza, has condemned in this regard the attacks against civilians and infrastructure and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities to protect vulnerable populations.
Finally, the United Nations warns that the galloping economic crisis that the country was experiencing before the outbreak of the conflict will accelerate the current food insecurity, which “will significantly worsen due to the intensification of the conflict and economic tension.”
The UN recalls in this regard that between April and September 2024, 1.3 million people, or 23 percent of Lebanon’s population, faced high levels of acute food insecurity, including 85,000 in emergency conditions.
