Israel-Lebanon live: Biden orders Pentagon to ‘adjust’ military in region as Israel launches Beirut airstrikes

The UK is providing £5 million to UNICEF in Lebanon to support humanitarian response efforts and enable UNICEF to distribute supplies to those in need.

The essential humanitarian support comes after further civilian casualties following this week’s air strikes. Thousands more have been displaced or forced to flee their homes.

The package includes essential medical supplies, hygiene kits and fuel for water stations, to help thousands of displaced civilians across Lebanon meet their basic needs.

It will also help emergency teams respond to urgent health and nutrition needs and provide a series of training sessions for key delivery partners and frontline workers to ensure an effective emergency response.

Chains of volunteers spoon rice and vegetables into meal containers while others stir huge pots of boiling rice, as a soup kitchen in Beirut struggles to keep up with demand from displaced people escaping Israeli strikes.

Josephine Abu Abdo, a chef and one of the founders of Nation Station, said the kitchen is serving 700 meals a day and is at maximum capacity, but she then hears 1,000 meals are needed.

“The challenge is that we can’t keep up. We feel like we are just a drop in the ocean,” Abu Abdo said, while a team of volunteers of different ages from all over Lebanon hurriedly packaged up food.

Nation Station was founded to help victims of the devastating 2020 Beirut port explosion, growing from a team of five to a hundred over time. It serves some traditional Lebanese dishes, such as zucchini stuffed with rice and meat, bulgur and tomato, vegetable soup and cabbage salad.

When the Israeli strikes across Lebanon intensified on Monday, forcing around 40,000 into shelters within days, the volunteers cooked more food without any funding, distributing it as an emergency response to the centres housing the displaced.

“We worked from the small savings that we had for the first three days. Then, many people started donating,” Abu Abdo said.

“The donation that we receive will cover us for two or three days. We will see, one day at a time and we will make a decision,” she added.

More than 30,000 people, mainly Syrians, have crossed into Syria from Lebanon in the past 72 hours, the UN refugee agency said on Friday, amid an escalating conflict between Israeli forces and the heavily armed Hezbollah that has left hundreds dead in Lebanon.

Lebanon’s World Health Organisation (WHO) representative has slammed the attacks on healthcare facilities as “unacceptable.”

Posting on X, Abdinasir Abubakar said 27 health workers have been killed and 55 injured by recent Israeli strikes, adding that health care sites “should be protected at all times”.

He wrote: “Attack on health care is on the rise as the crisis in Lebanon continued to escalate in recent days.”

An Israeli strike on Friday killed nine members of a family, including four children and a pregnant mother, in the Lebanese border town of Shebaa, mayor Mohammad Saab told Reuters.

The Philippines says it will evacuate 11,000 citizens from Lebanon the moment Israeli forces cross the border and launch a ground offensive, The Times of Israel has reported.

“A ground invasion will lead to mandatory repatriation,”

Foreign Undersecretary Eduardo de Vega reportedly said at a press conference in Manila: “A ground invasion will lead to mandatory repatriation.” He said the plan would be to move thousands out of the country via the sea without providing further details.

More than 33,000 Filipino citizens were living in Lebanon as of January 2020, according to the Philippines‘ Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).

Nearly 700 people have been killed in Lebanon this week, according to Lebanon’s health ministry the Associated Press reports. About a quarter of them are women and children.

On Monday, about 600 people were killed and almost 2,000 injured from Israeli bombing marking the deadliest single day in Lebanon since the country’s civil war.

An Israeli strike killed nine people from the same family in the southern Lebanese border-town of Shebaa, including four children, on Friday morning mayor Mohammad Saab told Reuters news agency.

Nearly 700 people have been killed in Lebanon this week, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

Hezbollah said it had fired rockets into Israel on Friday at Kiryat Ata near the city of Haifa, around 20 miles from the border, and the city of Tiberias.

The Israeli military said four drones came across the border on Friday and were all intercepted by the military’s defences, adding that several rockets were also intercepted.

As we’ve been reporting, nearly 700 people have died in Lebanon as a result of Israeli attacks this week, according to local officials.

Here are some pictures from inside the country: