GENEVA: UN officials voiced concern on Tuesday that the same methods of warfare used by the Zionist entity that caused high civilian casualties and widespread destruction in Gaza are now being repeated in Lebanon, calling for action to avoid the same "spiral of doom”. Zionist forces have begun a ground invasion in the southwest of Lebanon, escalating a year-long war which has killed over 1,000 people in the past two weeks and displaced over a million people.
In the Gaza Strip, the Zionist entity’s military offensive has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians and displaced 90 percent of the Palestinian territory’s 2.3 million population. "It is in my mind, from the time I awake until the time I sleep, that we could go into the same sort of spiral of doom, and we need to do everything we can to stop that from happening in this particular crisis,” World Food Programme Country Director in Lebanon Matthew Hollingworth said in response to a question about parallels between the two conflicts.
"We need the world to be more impactful and able to make the arguments that this cannot go on,” Hollingworth told a Geneva briefing by video link from Beirut. Fears of a repeat of Gaza’s upheaval are also shared by the Lebanese population and this explains why so many have fled so quickly, Hollingworth said after visiting displacement camps.
A World Health Organization official said at the same briefing that nine hospitals in Lebanon had been shut or partially shut — a pattern that has also occurred in Gaza. Ian Clarke, WHO’s Deputy Incident Manager for Lebanon, warned of disease outbreaks in Lebanon due to crowded conditions in displacement shelters and hospital closures as medics have fled the Zionist entity’s assault.
The UN human rights office has previously said that Zionist forces may have repeatedly violated the laws of war in Gaza. Its spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said on Tuesday that the "same means and methods of warfare” are being used in Lebanon. "The devastation is beyond belief for all people in Lebanon as it is in Gaza. We can’t let this happen again.”
Humanitarians are working to address the soaring needs, but Hollingworth insisted that what was needed was to "de-escalate”. While WFP is currently able to reach around 150,000 people a day, they "need to be reaching, at this point, almost a million people per day”, he said. At the same time, he highlighted that 1,900 hectares of agricultural land had been burned in southern Lebanon over the past year, mainly in the past couple of weeks, while 12,000 hectares of productive farmland had been abandoned. "We have very significant needs moving forward,” Hollingworth said, lamenting that the WFP was facing a $115 million funding gap to cover the towering needs over the next three months. — Agencies