REFUGEES’ CONDITION GROWING DESPERATE
By Shashank Bengali and Leila Fadel
McClatchy Cairo Bureau

San Jose Mercury News, USA
Aug. 10, 2006

Food, Money, Shelter Critically Scarce

BEIRUT, Lebanon – The living victims of the war in Lebanon — those who
have fled the war zones in the south and in Beirut’s southern suburbs,
and those who have stayed — are facing a humanitarian crisis that
is stretching this country to the breaking point.

More than 700,000 people who have left their homes are now confined
to schools, mosques, public parks or the crowded apartments of friends
and strangers generous enough to offer them shelter.

Bathrooms and kitchens are in short supply in the temporary shelters
set up in Beirut and other cities. Hygiene is suspect. Many children
are developing scabies and other infections, aid workers say.

Many of the thousands squatting in homes are running out of money,
and aid agencies are struggling to find them to deliver mattresses
and blankets.

In the south, the few thousand who remain live under siege. The roads
out of their villages either have been bombed by Israeli forces or
are too dangerous to travel because of battles raging nearby. They
can’t leave, and humanitarian aid can’t reach them.

Water and food are running out in many villages. Relief groups struggle
to operate amid battles and a road network that’s been destroyed by
Israeli airstrikes.

Aid convoys won’t travel without clearance from the Israeli military,
which is slow in coming, if it comes at all. Much of the 500 to 1,000
tons of aid that the United Nations could deliver each day in Lebanon
doesn’t go anywhere.

Asked about the dimensions of the problem, Khaled Mansour of the U.N.

humanitarian operation sounded slightly exasperated: "Major, dire,
horrific — I don’t know."

Tales of struggle, gathered recently throughout the country, provide
a measure of the developing catastrophe and a way of viewing the mass
disaster through the plight of its victims.

On a narrow street in Bourj Hammoud, a mostly Armenian neighborhood
in north Beirut, Jameelee Abbas Zahr, 56, returned to a building that
still bears scars from the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.

She went to the Bourj Hammoud stadium on a recent afternoon after
hearing that people were handing out food. But she found no help there.

"We haven’t gotten even 1,000 Lebanese pounds," she said, a sum equal
to about 75 cents. "No one is helping us."

She, her three daughters and their families fled their homes in
the southern suburbs of Beirut 20 days ago after Israeli warplanes
leveled blocks of buildings. Now they live in a distant relative’s
small apartment.

Eighteen people live in three rooms. The mattresses are lined up wall
to wall each night and then folded up in the morning. They struggle
to eat.

The last of their supplies — some cucumbers, bread, five tomatoes,
sugar and half a bottle of oil — is piled in one room. They do their
laundry in plastic tubs.

The only thing Zahr took from her home was a black-and-white
television, now regularly tuned to the Hezbollah channel, Al-Manar.

But at least they have a place to stay.

"We have it better than others," said Fatma Roumani, one of Zahr’s
daughters.

For three weeks, Mariam Mahmoud al-Hajj, 39, has lived with her
husband and their nine children in the shade of two trees in a Beirut
park. About 800 other people are camping out nearby.

They sleep in the heat and wake in the heat, and the days run
together. They wash in the sinks of the dirty bathrooms set up
for them.

Each morning, Hajj wakes up, washes her children’s clothes by hand
and dries them in a tree. They lost their apartment and everything
they owned in Israeli air raids on the southern suburbs.

Meals are provided by aid groups. It’s almost always bread and cheese.

Six-year-old Amal Assem, Hajj’s youngest daughter, doesn’t have
lice, but the children nearby do. It’s only a matter of time, her
mother said.

They have nowhere else to go.

"We wake up and each day is worse than the last," Hajj said. "I don’t
even have the energy to move from this place to that place."

She pointed to a spot less than a foot away.

In the southern village of Shaqra, Hoda Wizani’s family spent the
first 18 days of the war huddled in a basement.

They survived, she said, only because Hezbollah fighters from the
village dropped in every day to bring them food and information.

Now Wizani lives with 38 relatives in a concrete schoolhouse in the
port town of Sidon, where a Lebanese charity runs a refugee center.

Meals are provided, and there are games for children. Some evenings,
the family steps outside for a walk to feel the sea breeze.

Life is peaceful, Wizani said, but everyone misses Shaqra. It was
no secret that Hezbollah operated there, and they have read in the
newspapers about Israeli attacks on the village.

Shashank Bengali reported from Shaqra, Lebanon; Leila Fadel reported
from Beirut.