Lebanon

UN to provide $5.4 billion in food aid to crisis-hit Lebanon

Syrian children play soccer near their tented homes at a refugee camp in the town of Bar Elias, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, July 7, 2022. The Lebanese government’s plan to start deporting Syrian refugees has sent waves of fear through vulnerable refugee communities already struggling to survive in their host country. Many refugees say being forced to return to the war shattered country would be a death sentence. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

Crisis-hit Lebanon has secured $5.4 billion in aid over three years from the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced Monday.

The country has been mired since 2019 in a financial crisis dubbed by the World Bank as one of the worst in recent history.

“The WFP executive board has decided in its latest meeting in Rome to allocate $5.4 billion to Lebanon over the next three years,” Mikati told a press conference in Beirut alongside the agency’s representative in Lebanon, Abdallah Alwardat.

According to the premier, the aid money will be “shared equally” by Lebanese citizens and Syrian refugees.

Around two million Syrian refugees are in Lebanon. Nearly 830,000 of them are registered with the United Nations.

WFP programs have supported Syrian refugees in Lebanon since 2012, when large numbers of them began fleeing the war that started a year earlier in their home country.

The WFP “will continue to provide emergency assistance in kind and in cash,” Alwardat said.

The new aid package would support “a million Syrian refugees and a million Lebanese” between 2023 and 2025, he added.