Lebanon needs $250 million a month for displaced, minister says ahead of Paris summit

Lebanon will need $250 million a month to help more than a million people displaced by Israeli attacks, its minister in charge of responding to the crisis says on Tuesday, ahead of a conference on Thursday in Paris to rally support for Lebanon.

Nasser Yassin tells Reuters that the government response, helped by local initiatives and international aid, only covered 20% of the needs of some 1.3 million people uprooted from their homes and sheltering in public buildings or with relatives.

Those needs are likely to grow, as daily waves of airstrikes push more people out of their homes and leave Lebanon’s government scrambling to find ways to house them, Yassin says.

“We need $250 million a month” to cover basic food, water, sanitation and education services for the displaced, he says.

Schools, an old slaughterhouse, a fresh food market, an empty complex – all of them have been turned into collective shelters in recent days. “We’re transforming anything, any public building,” Yassin says. “There is a lot to be done.”

Yassin – whose official mandate as environment minister meant he was working on preventing forest fires before the current conflict broke out a year ago – now spends much of his time at government headquarters with a crisis team, including other Lebanese ministries, the United Nations Development Program and the Lebanese Red Cross.

They are planning for relief operations on a timeline of four to six months – but Yassin hopes the spreading war will end sooner.

“We need to have a ceasefire today, and we need everybody in the international community, for once…to be brave enough to say what’s happening,” he told Reuters, a message he says he would stress in Paris.

“There is a member state of the U.N. waging war against a small nation in the most aggressive manner we’ve ever seen in the history of Lebanon. This should be the message,” he says.