Lebanon & the unfolding humanitarian crisis
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk.
What is the current humanitarian situation in Lebanon?
While a 10-day ceasefire has been agreed by Lebanon and Israel, the humanitarian situation is still deteriorating with more than a million people displaced and critical infrastructure under strain. On the ground, overcrowded shelters are becoming flashpoints of a different kind of crisis where access to basic care, particularly for older people and those with disabilities, is increasingly out of reach. What's emerging is not just a story of conflict, but of a system struggling to cope with the scale and complexity of enormous human need. Sally Hayden, award-winning journalist with the Irish Times, is on the line from Lebanon. Sally, good morning.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me.
Now, Sally, to put this in context, 1.1 million people at least have been displaced in a population of 5.8 million. That's like saying the population of Dublin City has been displaced in Ireland. So that gives you a sense of the scale of the problem.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not actually sure, to be honest, because so a ceasefire came into force yesterday at midnight and huge numbers of people have now at least attempted to return home. Many have returned home. Obviously, the ceasefire is 10 days long. That's what's been announced. So, yeah, whether they will stay there or be able to stay there, we're not certain. But I was actually inside Lebanon yesterday.
How are overcrowded shelters impacting vulnerable populations?
People started returning literally within half an hour or an hour of the ceasefire coming into force. The roads were packed. It was almost a standstill. There were cars with mattresses loaded up and blankets loaded up. And yeah, so a lot of people, they have at least attempted to return. I know that some realized that the Israeli military is still in their areas, so they couldn't get back. Some got back only to realize that their homes were destroyed and others stayed in displacement shelters or even like I met them also yesterday, people were just staying in tents. In open areas because they said they have nowhere to go anymore or they're just scared. So they sent like in one case, I met a grandmother who had her sons had gone back and she was minding her granddaughter and they were waiting for word as to whether it was okay for them also to go back.
So the problem being that for many of them, as you say, when they go back to their home place, which is where they want to be, there is no home to go to because it's been destroyed. For others, they may even have difficulty accessing if they have to, for example, cross the Latani River, all the bridges are gone. So there's no going back there. Not easily at any rate.
Yeah.
You can cross the Litani River now. There's been kind of what I understand to be a kind of attempt at repairing at least one of the bridges. But yeah, it's very, very slow moving and people were waiting a huge amount of time to cross. And we really have no idea whether the ceasefire is going to hold. So even those going back, they were saying, you know, is this a good idea? I was in a shelter yesterday. A stadium in Beirut was turned into a shelter and 1,500 people have been sheltering there. And the volunteers there, they said only a few dozen families had gone back because they were worried they'd lose their spots in the shelter. So they don't want to, in case the ceasefire doesn't hold, they didn't want to leave most of them.
But yeah, I mean, people, they certainly are going back. Also, so much is destroyed in the south and in the east as well.
What challenges do displaced people face when returning home?
And they reach southern suburbs that even if their home isn't destroyed, the infrastructure often is either lacking or, you know, very poor or destroyed and so yeah there's going to be a lot of problems if people do stay as well.
Now people are literally shell-shocked from what they have been through in Beirut for example and the atrocity that was committed by Israel a week or so ago when they killed what more than 300 people in the center of Beirut we could see that what they had targeted were apartment blocks and They said they got 100 key Hezbollah.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:07
2
What is the current humanitarian situation in Lebanon?
0:07–1:24
3
How are overcrowded shelters impacting vulnerable populations?
1:24–3:28
4
What challenges do displaced people face when returning home?
3:28–5:46
5
How is the ceasefire affecting the situation on the ground?
5:46–12:14