Four in five households in Lebanon struggle to afford basic necessities today, with children increasingly going without food, missing school and being pushed into work as conflict compounds years of economic crisis. “I wanted to buy clothes for my children, but I could not. I also wanted to enrol them in school, but I could not afford that either,” said one father of four, cited on Wednesday by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
In an alert on Wednesday, UNICEF said that children go to bed hungry in at least one in five households. A similar number of families do not have enough drinking water either.
“Children and young people in Lebanon are being asked to bear a burden no child should have to carry,” said UNICEF Lebanon Representative Marcoluigi Corsi, highlighting the “profound psychological distress” impacting an estimated 770,000 youngsters.
“Without urgent and sustained action, these pressures are shaping their lives for years to come,” he stressed.
It is nearly six months since a 17 April ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel seeking to end hostilities between Lebanon-based Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli military, linked to the U.S.-Iran war. Airstrikes and demolitions of homes continue, UNICEF noted.
Of the more than one million people displaced within weeks of the escalation, nearly 330,000 have yet to go home, because of continued attacks and widespread destruction in southern Lebanon, “where Israel still occupies a strip of land”.
by UN News – Lebanon: One in five children goes to bed hungry, says UNICEF
