Aid arrives but Lebanese officials say prepared food is needed

There was public disappointment in the southern city of Tyre after the United Nations managed to get its first relief convoy through a fortnight after Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon began.

"There is no food. We asked for food. Can I eat flour? To the people who brought it we say thank you, but this is not aid,” said Abed Husseini, president of the Tyre municipality.

The ten UN trucks arrived after making a six hour journey south from Beirut, having gained assurances from the Israeli military that they would not be hit by air strikes. In normal circumstances the journey takes two and a half hours but the convoy was forced to take a detour along mountainous routes as main roads have been bombed.

Husseini said many hungry families required immediate nutrition after two weeks without running water or fresh food supplies, and few would be able to bake bread as they had no other ingredients or utensils. The municipal authority is in charge of delivering the aid to some of the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled their homes in the hills near the southern border.

The trucks brought 90 tonnes of wheat flour from the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), as well as five medical kits from the World Health Organization that can treat 50,000 people for three months, said UN spokesman Khaled Mansour, who was travelling with the convoy.

Asked by IRIN why the aid convoy had delivered flour, Mansour said: "…This is only the first convoy. We are meeting with the municipality to agree on distributing the flour to the people who can use it. We expect to send another two convoys by Friday."

Water purification tablets from the UN’s Children’s Fund, UNICEF, were also in the supplies. Two of the UN aid trucks were taken to the Palestinian camp of Rashidiya in the city, where seven Palestinians were injured by an Israeli shell on 24 July.

Sitting with her four children by the port in Tyre, Leila Saad, a mother of four from the village of Yaroon, two miles south of Bint Jbeil which has been the focus of intense fighting between Israeli troops and Hizbullah militants, expressed her desperation with relief efforts.

"We have had no running water and no fresh food since the conflict began," she said. "We have been totally cut off from the world. The rockets were like hail, raining down on us," she said as her frightened children gathered around her.

Saad, who has dual Lebanese and American citizenship, said the US embassy in Beirut had given her a limited time frame when they said the families of her village could leave without being fired on by the Israeli army. Despite the guarantees, Saad said, gunfire and artillery shells struck close to their convoy of cars as they made the perilous journey to Tyre.

In interviews with IRIN on Wednesday local officials described a growing humanitarian crisis in south Lebanon. From a population of 275,000 people across Tyre city and its province of 67 villages, only 80,000 people remain in their homes, said Husseini.

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