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 said on Tuesday, ahead of a conference on Thursday in Paris to rally support for Lebanon.
Nasser Yassin told Reuters 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 said.
"We need $250 million a month" to cover basic food, water, sanitation and education services for the displaced, he said.
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 said. "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 Programme and the Lebanese Red Cross.