Smoke rises from an airstrike on the village of Abbasiyeh in southern Lebanon
Israeli strikes and mass evacuation orders have seen nearly 700,000 people flee their homes in Lebanon in just over a week, with more than 100,000 fleeing in 24 hours, the UN has said .
‘Lives have been upended on a massive scale,’ said Karolina Lindholm Billing, the representative in Lebanon of UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency.
In just over a week since the new escalation in Lebanon, Israeli air strikes and evacuation warnings to residents of dozens of villages ‘forced families across Lebanon to flee within minutes’, she told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Beirut.
She pointed out that ‘more than 667,000 people in Lebanon have now registered on the (Lebanese) government’s online platform as displaced’.
‘This is an increase of 100,000 in just one day,’ Lindholm Billing said, stressing that this is ‘a faster pace of displacement compared to 2024’, during Israel’s last war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
