The humanitarian crisis in Lebanon has deepened amid the wider Middle East war, with 84 children killed and more than 667,000 people displaced, two UN agencies said yesterday, as lives are upended on a massive scale across the country.

Lebanon was dragged into the US-Israeli attacks on Iran this month when Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah launched rockets and drones into Israel, which has responded with heavy bombardment across the ⁠country.

A total of 486 people have been killed in the war so far and 1,313 injured, of which 259 are children, according to the World Health Organization.

“This is only seven-days conflict, and we are already seeing that almost 100 children that have lost their lives,” said Abdinasir Abubakar, WHO representative in Lebanon.

“One reason why we have a high number of children is that most of the attacks that we see actually is, it’s urban centres, like in Beirut,” he said, adding that Israel’s airstrikes, which it says target Hezbollah infrastructure, are putting civilian lives at risk.

The current rate of displacement in Lebanon is outpacing levels seen during the 2023-24 war between Hezbollah and Israel, the UN Refugee Agency said yesterday. During that conflict, 886,000 people were internally displaced in Lebanon, while tens of thousands of Israelis were evacuated from northern towns near the Lebanese border.

Lebanon’s sharp rise in displacement this week stems from large-scale evacuation orders issued by the Israeli army for southern Lebanon and Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs.