Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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.
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Chapter 4: 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. That's what they were after.
They seem to dismiss the fact that 200 people who were not Hezbollah were also killed and many, many more were injured in that bombing. How are people feeling about what has happened to them? I mean, they must feel, you know, what did we do wrong to deserve this?
Yeah, I actually asked a few people that yesterday. One paramedic who had just been reunited with his family, his colleague was killed on Wednesday. And I'm sure people saw it was called a triple tap strike that hit three successive kind of first responder groups, according to witnesses. And I asked him, like, how, you know, how are you holding up?
And he said basically he just feels like he has a duty to be resilient because this is his land.
he doesn't want to leave but then i was also on thursday at the funeral of the brother of one of those paramedics who was killed and a lot of people have been buried in temporary burial sites so because it wasn't safe to return they were buried somewhere else first and then their families will take them back and the brother broke down crying
for quite a while and then he said actually he wants to say that men in particular what he was saying is that a lot of the men have been forced to be strong to protect their families during this time and you know to keep going and he wanted to say that they should also express their emotions because
He felt like this is, you know, wound upon wound basically is being inflicted on people and that's quite, you know, it's not healthy. But of course, like the scale of this is, you know, it's impossible really to explain because there's been this all that war.
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Chapter 5: How is the ceasefire affecting the situation on the ground?
But then before that, there was 15 months of, you know, what people here call a one-sided ceasefire where attacks did continue on a near daily basis from Israel. And hundreds of people were killed. And then there was the previous war. And then, of course, Lebanon has had a lot of other issues, you know, economic crisis. Yeah, the Beirut port explosion as well. So it's kind of crisis upon crisis.
And it's really hard to know how people are coping with that.
Now, almost 100 medics have been killed by the Israelis so far. They are not abiding by international law. They don't think it applies to them. They will attack supermarkets, pharmacies. They're using the same language that they used in Gaza. The ambulances were being used as a cover, and not by Hamas in this case, but by Hezbollah. That's what they're saying. Same old story, same old story.
Do the Lebanese people wonder why? what the world is doing, allowing Israel to act with such impunity without calling a halt.
Yeah, again, I mean, that's something. And it's really important when we talk about Lebanese people to obviously understand that there's lots of different views in Lebanon. You know, there are people that support Hezbollah, people who hate Hezbollah, people who, you know, have lots of different views on this situation. But I do hear from a lot of people that they don't
feel, yeah, they don't feel supported and they don't feel like every life is being valued equally. I actually was on a site yesterday, speaking of the April 8th attacks. So I think I've been to nine different airstrike sites now of airstrikes that hit at that one exact time. And yeah, all of them have, you know, I've seen signs of civilian life at them.
And this one that I was at yesterday, the family had just been able to return for the first time to where their father was killed. And one of the daughters, she was 24, she was telling me basically they just feel like the international community only cares about oil prices. So they were like, you know, they don't have a problem with our people being killed if the oil prices are good.
But once the oil prices start going up, then that's when people, you know, start taking action or caring. But the message that they're receiving from that is... that their lives don't matter.
And those strikes you referred to that killed over 300 people, that was 100 strikes in 10 minutes. That's how intense that particular bombardment was by Israel. And perhaps Israel had the sense that, you know, what was coming and maybe they had forewarning from Trump that he was going to order the ceasefire and tell Netanyahu no more attacks on Lebanon, which came into force yesterday.
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