Amid ruin in Lebanon, families find aid

The warehouse was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, along with swaths of this south Lebanese village. So the first doses of relief aid had to be unloaded at the school.

Rolling by a string of destroyed homes and past the cemetery, two trucks from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) arrived in the scalding school parking lot to offload hundreds of kitchen sets.

Staff wearing bibs marked with the red cross squeezed the sets between a mountain of flour, stacks of tinned chicken and beans, and hygiene kits – supplies for 1,000 families for 10 days that would be divided and handed out, door-to-door, by local officials.

"What we receive slows the damage," says Kamal Abu Khalil, deputy mayor of this village six miles south of Tyre, whose 6,000 residents return every day, and stay if they can. "We are grateful, but we need more."

The UN and relief agencies are gearing up a large humanitarian effort to care for the needs of an estimated 700,000 Lebanese returning to ruin, which spreads across scores of villages and towns. According to the UN on Thursday, about $94 million has been committed to the $165 million "flash appeal" for Lebanon.

Though the cease-fire has largely held for 10 days, the ICRC and UN still notify the Israeli military of their convoy routes. The ICRC notification documents indicate that each vehicle is marked on "all sides with a red cross." The chance of renewed conflict is sufficiently high that every UN convoy still requires an armored UN military escort.

"We have security constraints that make it difficult for us ... to move everywhere freely," says Astrid Van Genderen Stort, spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which has been assessing village needs and expects to begin daily convoys by the weekend.

The aid pipeline is improving, after weeks in which an Israeli military naval and air blockade – as well as air strikes against remaining land routes from Syria – cut off supplies. Even convoys approved by Israeli forces were sometimes targeted.

Now, four humanitarian flights a week are arriving, boats are allowed to dock, and trucks are getting in. The government has asked the UN not to extend a declared three-month emergency. The World Food Programme sends out two convoys a day, with thousands of five-day family portions of basic wheat flour; they estimate 350,000 people in need.

"There is an enormous amount of destruction ... I have a lot of flashbacks to Kosovo," says Ms. Stort. "There is an immediate need, because people have lost everything. So they need mattresses, blankets, jerry cans and lanterns, because they don?t have electricity or fuel."

Some families return to rubble; others have been spared. Some families lost everything; others have rich relatives or children with city jobs. The Lebanese government says 90 percent have returned, though the UN estimates no more than 70 percent so far.

Nestled in the foothills just up from the Mediterranean, Al-Qlaileh is one dot on the map of destruction, a microcosm of great need across the south – as well as an illustration of the set of coping mechanisms particular to Lebanon.

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