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00:00more on the worsening humanitarian situation in Lebanon. We can cross now to Beirut to speak with
00:05Etty Higgins. She's the Deputy Representative at UNICEF in Lebanon. Good to have you with us, Etty.
00:11Now, the death toll continues to mount. Could you give us an idea about the scale of civilian
00:17casualties since the conflict escalated? Indeed, over the past 12 days alone, there's more than
00:251,000 people have been killed and 6,000 injured, according to the figures from the Ministry of
00:31Health last night. Unfortunately, during this past week, we had one day where there was
00:3850 children alone were killed. So we're really seeing a mounting death toll among children,
00:43and we believe that this might be actually higher, given that many children and their families
00:49remain under the rubble in different parts of the country. The bombardments continued again
00:57last night. And since Friday, we've seen an escalated increase in the conflict around
01:03Beirut, especially in the southern suburbs. So we have seen tens of thousands of people on the move.
01:09And cumulatively this week, we believe that now there is more than 200,000 people
01:16that have moved. But the government this morning is saying that 1 million people have been impacted.
01:21We still see tens of thousands of people who are searching for shelter.
01:26As an emergency measure, the schools have been opened across the country to create temporary
01:34shelters. So now we have over 700 shelters, and over 500 of these are already full. So we're
01:42desperately looking for more places, exactly as your report highlighted, speaking to some of these
01:48civilians, and especially the mothers and children, looking for somewhere safe to go.
01:52It's been a very, very challenging number of days for frontline workers and humanitarian workers,
01:59and indeed, government social services over the past one week trying to provide emergency support
02:05to so many hundreds of thousands of people who are in such desperate need for food, for water,
02:11for shelter, for clothing, blankets, mattresses, absolutely everything. Even on Friday night,
02:17we still had people who were getting evacuation orders at two and three in the morning.
02:23So they were forced to pull their children from their beds to seek safety. So you can imagine
02:29that these families need absolutely everything. So people are in dire needs of supplies.
02:35Are there enough food, water and medical supplies going around at the moment?
02:40Well, of course, given that the conflict has been ongoing for some time now, we had
02:45prepositions and prepared supplies. We had put them across our warehouses in the different
02:51parts of the country. But just the sheer scale and speed of the displacement that we saw over
02:59the past six, seven days has been really something unprecedented, and is depleting the resources
03:06very, very, very quickly and putting services really under strain. So in particular,
03:14I would like to highlight the health situation. UNICEF flew in 100 metric tons of essential
03:20life-saving medical supplies last week, and we're now trying to get in another 25 metric tons
03:27of medical supplies this week. But it's very, very challenging, given the limited
03:32number of aircraft coming into Lebanon at this time. But we desperately need to bring in more
03:37and preposition more and really lack the resources to do so. In addition, we also have the hospitals
03:44that are really flooded with injured patients. We have hospitals that have been damaged, that are
03:51being forced to evacuate their patients because of the areas where they're living are now dangerous.
03:56So we need to provide supplies. Mobile health teams need to support all of these people who
04:02have been displaced and now who are living, some of them spending their third night out in the open
04:07last night. So really a race against the clock to deliver a comprehensive, scaled-up emergency
04:13response. In addition, we have the water situation, where we've seen this week many
04:19water pumping stations have been destroyed, water infrastructure being destroyed. And we have the
04:25towns and cities that have now massively increased pressure on their systems to provide
04:31clean drinking water to millions of people. And in some cases, as UNICEF, we've been supporting the
04:37water infrastructure in the country for a long time. And it's now difficult for us to provide
04:42fuel and to repair these locations due to the nature of the conflict and inability to access
04:51safe routes to go to these locations. So it is very, very challenging.
04:56In addition, this is September. It should be a time of year when children are being welcomed
05:01back to start the new school year. And now instead, they're entering schools as internally
05:06displaced people with absolutely nothing. And their learning has again been interrupted.
05:13And this is coming, unfortunately, on the back of a crisis in Lebanon over the last number of
05:18years of the economic meltdown. And of course, with the Syrian refugee crisis, many refugees,
05:26over 1 million, have been here for more than a decade. So it's putting everything on a cumulative
05:33crisis that is now at risk of really becoming a humanitarian catastrophe that will have
05:39implications far beyond the borders of Lebanon. A humanitarian catastrophe could be at hand.
05:46Edi Huggins from UNICEF in Lebanon, thank you so much.