![[Lebanon] Displacement from the south is increasing, officials say. [Date picture taken: 07/16/2006]](https://assets.thenewhumanitarian.org/s3fs-public/styles/responsive_large_2x/public/images/200671911.jpg.webp?itok=8VvVLIAG "Relief agencies say there is a shortage of children's medical supplies in the south of Lebanon.")
Villagers in south Lebanon have received a much-needed load of food aid from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), but many thousands in the area remain stranded without running water or electricity.
ICRC’s spokesman in south Lebanon Roland Huguenin says the organisation, accompanied by a Lebanese Red Cross ambulance, has successfully delivered two trucks of food aid to villages northeast of Tyre. It was the third such delivery to villages in south Lebanon.
"Many of these people have lived for two weeks with very little food, no access to running water and no electricity. They have no fuel for their generators, so they cannot pump water into tanks," Huguenin says. "We saw craters in the road, wrecks of cars filled with dead bodies, extensive devastation and hundreds of people living terrified in basement shelters."
The convoy reached the town of Bazouriyeh, 10 km east of Tyre, and villages around it, including Jouaiya, Ech Chehabiye and Deir Qanoun en Naher, and delivered some 2,000 packs of food aid as well as medical supplies.
The ICRC has delivered seven convoys of aid from Beirut to Tyre since the conflict between Israel and Hizbullah began on 12 July. However, delivery of aid to isolated south Lebanese villages remains a problem for the ICRC, Huguenin says.
"We send a request every evening to the Israelis and we get a reply by the morning. We now have a negotiation process, but it has taken us a long time to get to this stage and these villages have been isolated for too long."
Rmaich, a Christian village 4 km from the southern border with Israel has swelled from a community of 5,000 to an estimated 15,000 displaced people, surviving on rapidly dwindling supplies, Huguenin says.
The ICRC has launched an appeal for 100 million Swiss Francs (US $81.2 million) for Lebanon, Huguenin says. The agency has started a "major humanitarian operation," including organising more trucks of aid from Syria into Lebanon and renting ships to ferry aid from Cyprus into Tyre port.
hm/ar/ls
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