Jaber: Lebanon Gets No Money Despite Repeated Aid Appeals

A fresh wave of Israeli hostility has intensified, bringing with it the wholesale destruction of villages along the border strip and large-scale strikes on communities closer to the Litani River and beyond. The assault has triggered successive waves of displacement. Lebanon, already submerged in its compounding political and economic catastrophes, lacks the fiscal capacity to absorb the cost of displacement, while the bill for reconstruction has reached staggering proportions. Civil society organizations and international relief bodies have not prioritized Lebanon, a situation that portends a deepening humanitarian disaster as the war continues — and an uncertain future for reconstruction funding.

A Worsening Crisis

The fragile ceasefire — which had allowed some southern Lebanese residents to return briefly to their villages — has not held. Bombardment and Israeli threats ordering communities to evacuate have driven out many of those who had begun trickling back to non-border villages. As displacement persists, the humanitarian conditions facing the displaced remain, in the words of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, "fragile." The UNHCR grounds this assessment in the fact that some three million people in Lebanon were already in need of assistance before the current crisis — among them refugees and vulnerable Lebanese communities. The renewed hostilities, which resumed on March 2, have compounded an already dire situation, particularly as humanitarian access has grown increasingly difficult, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). With no resolution in sight, the current escalation is generating a rapid surge in humanitarian needs across multiple sectors, affecting displaced populations, communities still present in conflict-affected areas, and host communities receiving large numbers of arrivals.

Calls Go Unanswered

Conditions in Lebanon, the region, and the world have shifted markedly since 2023 and 2024. Where material and in-kind humanitarian aid once flowed toward Lebanon, scarcity has become the defining feature of this phase. What compounds the concern is the absence of any meaningful international response to repeated appeals.

Finance Minister Yassin Jaber told Al-Modon that those appeals have failed to generate the funding needed to address even the humanitarian fallout of the war. "No one is giving us money," he said, "even though we have requested that some of the loans already approved for Lebanon be redirected toward humanitarian purposes."

The situation is further complicated by the tightening constraints on international humanitarian organizations, particularly UN agencies. "The road has been blocked for the United Nations and its agencies — they have been left without funds," Minister Jaber said. "Even the European Union, which we consider a partner to Lebanon, has made us promises." Promises, he noted, that have not been honored. Lebanon has sought to leverage international gatherings — including the Washington spring meetings — to appeal for assistance, holding bilateral meetings with country representatives on the sidelines. "But outside those meetings," the minister said, "there are no financial flows." The capacity of Gulf states to fill the gap has also been curtailed by pressures arising from the ongoing American-Iranian conflict and its reverberations across the global economy. "The current circumstances are very different from what they were before," Minister Jaber concluded. "The entire world is in crisis, and the equations are complicated."

Shelter Centers at Breaking Point

In the absence of funding, displacement centers bear the most direct consequences of inadequate humanitarian financing. This does not diminish the needs of displaced persons who have the means to rent accommodation privately — the cost of displacement, in all its forms, is immense.

Despite the efforts of the state, international relief organizations, and local civil society groups, the gap between needs and what actually reaches people on the ground remains vast. Economy and Trade Minister Amer Bsat noted that while the 2026 budget had allocated funds for relief, the scale of requirements far exceeded those provisions. External aid, he added, "does not arrive as we request it." In a television interview, Minister Bsat said that what reaches Lebanon today amounts to no more than ten percent of what was received in 2024. Against this backdrop, a major humanitarian catastrophe is taking shape as the conflict continues. "Requirements are extremely costly," the minister said, estimating that Lebanon needs approximately $100 million per month, while "the state's financial architecture is in a critical condition" and efforts to secure support through the United Nations and external partners remain ongoing.

While waiting for the pace of support to increase, sources within Lebanon's Higher Relief Council — the government body responsible for disaster response — told Al-Modon that operations are building on the groundwork laid during the previous war of 2023–2024. "There is some responsiveness from certain parties who are sending aid, and it is being distributed," the sources said, declining to assess whether the volume of assistance is sufficient and preferring instead to focus on distribution efforts. On-the-ground accounts from those managing displacement centers tell a different story.

Officials overseeing schools sheltering displaced persons from across the south — particularly in Tyre and Sidon — describe shortage as the prevailing reality. Speaking to Al-Modon, they were unanimous: during the previous round of hostilities, before the ceasefire, international organizations had provided substantial assistance alongside local associations and individual initiatives. "Today, international organizations are largely absent, in a way that suggests a deliberate decision not to provide aid," they said. Notably, the retreat of international support has coincided with a parallel pullback by local organizations, leaving only scattered individual initiatives to fill the void. UNICEF, however, was singled out for continuing its assistance, albeit at a reduced pace.

By design or default, the displaced are paying the price of a war that grinds on in intermittent rounds. The "complicated equations" the finance minister references reflect a harder truth: the international community does not view Lebanon as a priority. As the American-Iranian conflict reshapes the global economy, governments have turned inward, making domestic concerns paramount — and that calculus is reflected directly in the aid Lebanon continues to await. Reconstruction alone will demand enormous resources, and those who hold them show little appetite for directing funds toward a country that, from the international community's vantage point, has consistently resisted the political and economic reforms demanded of it, stumbled into a miscalculated war, and already absorbed substantial sums that ultimately did not reverse its fortunes.