Israel’s mass forced displacement campaign in Lebanon may soon cause major disease outbreaks, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned as Israel attacks health care centers in the country.
In a press briefing on Tuesday, WHO Deputy Incident Manager for Lebanon Ian Clarke warned of the danger of the crowded conditions in displacement shelters within Lebanon, where officials report an estimated 1.2 million people have been displaced over the course of just a few weeks of Israeli aggression.
“We are facing a situation where there is a much higher risk of disease outbreaks, such as acute watery diarrhea, hepatitis A, and a number of vaccine-preventable diseases,” said Clarke.
Prior to the current escalation, Clarke pointed out, Lebanon’s health system was already weakened, in large part due to the economic fallout of the Beirut port explosion in 2020. As a result, health care access has already been eroded in recent years, leaving the country’s population more vulnerable to disease.
Now, the health system is in even more dire straits as Israel targets health care workers and facilities, carrying over many of its brutal tactics from the Gaza genocide.
As Clarke noted, Israel’s assault has already forced five hospitals to shut down. Four other hospitals have had to partially evacuate, transferring critical dialysis and cancer patients to accommodate for the huge rise in the need for emergency and trauma care, with Israel having killed over 2,000 people and injured at least 9,500 since last October, with many of these casualties coming in recent weeks.
Additionally, the WHO representative said, nearly 100 primary care and other health facilities in southern Lebanon have been forced to close. In total, over the past three weeks of Israel’s escalation, officials in Lebanon have recorded at least 16 Israeli attacks on health care, with at least 65 health care workers killed and 40 injured.
These attacks include an Israeli strike on a hospital in south Lebanon on Friday. Israel’s strike, which hit without warning just outside of the gates of the Marjayoun hospital, killed seven paramedics and caused the doors of the hospital to fly off, according to The Associated Press. Before the strike, the hospital’s director said, widespread fear among the staff was already preventing the hospital from functioning as usual.
Disease outbreak in Lebanon could have devastating consequences. In Gaza, overcrowding due to Israel’s forced displacement caused hundreds of thousands of illnesses among Palestinians just in the first months of the genocide. Now, health care workers have said that everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both, with Gaza health officials reporting over 1 million cases of infectious diseases in March, tens of thousands of cases of diseases like hepatitis B, and a polio epidemic, potentially now staved off due to a humanitarian push to vaccinate the population that Israeli forces had tried to sabotage.
Conditions in Lebanon are ripe for disease: UN officials have reported that the over 900 shelters in Lebanon are already at full capacity, with 20 percent of the population displaced and Israel constantly ordering yet more forced evacuations.
At the same time, humanitarian aid officials have raised concern that there will be a shortage of medical supplies and other crucial aid after Israel bombed the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, rendering the road there unusable.
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