CYPRUS: U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator appeals to the international community to help aid effort in Lebanon

The United Nations' emergency relief coordinator on Saturday (July 22) called on the international community to help the aid effort in Lebanon. Jan Egeland told reporters that at least $100 million was urgently needed to help avert a humanitarian disaster in Lebanon over the coming months. He said he would fly from Cyprus to Beirut aboard a British helicopter early on Sunday (July 23) to assess the situation there and to "urge and beg" international donors to stomp up food, medicine, water and other aid. Egeland described the situation as a major crisis with more than half a million directly affected. "On Monday I will launch from Beirut, an international appeal for urgent humanitarian assistance for the next three months on behalf of the whole U.N. system and several partner humanitarian organisations. This will be an appeal, urging, begging the international community to give us sufficient resources so that we can give enough medical relief, enough shelter material, enough food, enough water and sanitation services for those hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians who have had to flee," Egeland said. He added that the final cost of the relief effort remained unclear. Egeland said he would also travel to Israel on Tuesday to negotiate safe corridors by land, sea and air and would urge both the Jewish state and its Hizbollah enemies to provide safe passage to aid convoys. That would entail repairing the bombed runways at Beirut's Hariri airport and establishing a staging area in Cyprus, where tens of thousands of foreigners have already fled to escape the violence in Lebanon. "At the moment, we are not able to get relief into the country in any quantities and even more importantly, we are not able to distribute it beyond certain few points which we can reach at the moment," Egeland said.

ITN Source | July 23, 2006

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