00:00:00I mean, civilians who want to return to their villages in southern Lebanon are unable to do so for the
00:00:07time being, at least in some parts of southern Lebanon.
00:00:10And clearly, a huge displacement, more than a million people, is a massive test, isn't it, for Lebanon's social fabric?
00:00:19I mean, it's a fragile social fabric at the best of times.
00:00:22How severely tested has it been? Is it showing any signs of cracks?
00:00:27It's a massive social and humanitarian crisis.
00:00:32Mind you, this is a crisis that's coming after a war in 2023-2024.
00:00:36So this is the second war in 18 months that Lebanon is living.
00:00:40And this comes also on top of an economic collapse that happened in 2019 and that the state has not
00:00:46addressed yet.
00:00:47So the country is on its knees.
00:00:50We barely have the available resources to provide social support to the displaced.
00:00:56We're talking about 20 percent, approximately 20 percent of the population that is displaced.
00:01:02We're looking already at $7 billion of losses in the past five weeks.
00:01:08Just to give you a sense of what this means, the entire budget of Lebanon is $6 billion.
00:01:12So that's already $1 billion above its budget in losses in the past five weeks.
00:01:17The country is unable to sustain economically and financially and at a humanitarian level at all.
00:01:24And we haven't even talked about the fact that you have already 40,000 housing units that have been destroyed
00:01:31in the past five weeks.
00:01:33Mind you, no reconstruction had happened from 2023 and 2024.
00:01:38So this is just adding up one catastrophe after another.
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