Israel displaces, the Lebanese state abandons

On Wednesday, March 4, Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adrahi published a map ordering the mass displacement of everyone living south of the Litani River. The next day, another map ordered the wholesale displacement of Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Bekaa, and villages south of the Zahrani River.

Since September 2024, Israel’s goal in Lebanon has remained the same: to collectively punish Lebanon’s Shi’a population and stoke social-sectarian tensions by overcrowding the areas arbitrarily considered safe.

Much of the current scenario is a rerun of the previous one. Its brutality is no less shocking. But what is most striking is the state’s apathy toward Lebanon’s largest wave of mass displacement since the Civil War.

Last year’s war did not erupt suddenly. It was a brutal escalation of military aggression that began on Oct. 8, 2023. Likewise, the current war is an escalation of Israel’s daily strikes on Lebanon for 15 months. It is also the result of a failed diplomatic process that could neither curb Israeli aggression nor secure a viable status quo. In both cases, war was predictable, and the risk was imminent enough to prepare state contingency plans to mitigate its devastating impact.

Israel not only ordered mass displacement, but it also threw people into a social vacuum of the Lebanese state’s making. The scale of these displacements is unprecedented, but they would not have weighed so heavily on Lebanon’s social fabric had any government — including the current one championing its technocratic expertise — built a robust social protection system providing health care, housing, unemployment benefits, and social assistance. The needs of Lebanese society in peacetime are no different from those in wartime; they are simply accentuated.

Much of the current scenario is a rerun of the previous one. Its brutality is no less shocking. But what is most striking is the state’s apathy toward Lebanon’s largest wave of mass displacement since the Civil War.

Lebanon never truly had a welfare system, and what limited programs it had have been gutted over the years. This was made possible by shifting responsibility to the NGO sector, which is now starved of aid funding.

There is an argument that the Ministry of Social Affairs, or MoSA, should lead the humanitarian response rather than NGOs. It is more cost-effective, accountable, and sustainable. But the capacity to assume this responsibility should have been built before the emergency’s onset, a choice the Salam government ignored. This has severely impeded the ministry’s leadership role, which in turn sowed confusion among humanitarian actors responding to wartime needs.

Lebanon entered this war with a MoSA that was both ill-prepared and deliberately underfunded, and with an NGO sector starved of funding.

The only people who learned from the previous war were grassroots organizers, who drew on the experience and networks they had built last September to mobilize rapidly.

One such organizer is Jad Essayli, a Lebanese-American lawyer who leveraged his expatriate network to disburse thousands of dollars in cash assistance to the displaced.

Essayli recalled seeing a family of 18 displaced from the Bekaa and living out of a van in the cold on the Beirut corniche.

“They were receiving ample food,” he told Raseef22, “but what they needed was a roof over their heads.”

Essayli lamented the state’s lack of interest in housing the displaced: “There is no shortage of housing in Lebanon, but there is a shortage of willingness to help.”

The Social Protection Vacuum

Since the 2019 crisis, government spending on social welfare has dropped by 90 percent, and 72 percent of the meager $1 billion still being spent goes to finance end-of-service indemnities for public-sector workers, particularly the security forces. In effect, Lebanon’s social spending finances the retirement of just 2.5 percent of the population.

This situation has been deliberately engineered through staunch austerity policies to sustain a new Ponzi scheme that pegs the Lebanese lira to the dollar at L.L. 89,500. The government raises regressive taxes, such as VAT and fuel customs, and accumulates the revenue at the Banque du Liban. Removing lira from circulation props up the exchange rate, while lower-income households foot the bill by spending a larger share of their income on daily needs.

This scheme has allowed the government to accumulate the equivalent of $9 billion in lira tax revenues at the central bank. But if it were to spend those funds, the value of those savings would collapse.

The government is squeezing people for money and risks collapsing if it tries to protect them — a political choice that favors bankers and the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

Of the 1.2 million people displaced in 2024, only 15 percent took refuge in state shelters, which offered poor living conditions. Most families had to rely on private rentals or relatives. At the time, the government had a year to prepare. When the displaced returned to their damaged homes, they also financed repairs out of pocket, as no aid or reconstruction campaign was permitted by order of Israel. At the time of writing, more than 1 million of these same people have been displaced again, forced to repeat the cycle of destitution and neglect. Once again, only 12 percent are being housed in state-run shelters.

Cash without protection

When war displaces hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days, cash is the most useful and immediate emergency measure. It allows families to decide whether their most urgent need is rent, medicine, food, transport, or replacing what they left behind. But in Lebanon, even this narrow form of support has become tangled in a system too weak and underfunded to respond to wartime needs.

Three cash-transfer programs are currently running: AMAN, which provides a monthly cash allowance to the poorest Lebanese households; the National Disability Allowance; and the Shock-Responsive Social Safety Net, or SRSN. The latter was activated through MoSA, funded through humanitarian channels, mainly EU and U.K. donors, and operated by the World Food Programme, or WFP, during the September war. The SRSN’s function is to disburse emergency cash assistance to displaced people who qualify.

The needs of Lebanese society in peacetime are no different from those in wartime; they’re simply accentuated.

Longstanding structural problems have impeded this response. MoSA insists on selecting the beneficiaries itself and centralizing decision-making despite its unresolved low capacity. In the middle of an emergency, it is also trying to preserve institutional prerogatives. That is putting a spoke in the wheel of the humanitarian response.

Who’s in and who’s out

The first problem is access. The SRSN is not open to everyone who has been displaced by war. According to researcher Cynthia Saghir, who works on cash-transfer programs in Lebanon, the people who qualified for “Phase 1” of the SRSN were selected from AMAN’s existing social registry based on their area of residence, even though that registry has effectively been closed to new registrations since 2022. This means a family that was not registered among the poorest four years ago cannot qualify for war-related aid today.

More importantly, residents of South Lebanon were less likely to register in 2022 because they feared their data could be leaked to Israel. Fears of Israeli infiltration predate the 2024 war. As Israel criminalizes and wages war on the Shiite population at large, many families fear that any official data they submit could be used to identify, classify, and endanger them. These selection criteria, therefore, become highly exclusionary of displaced people in need of aid.

“Social registries are arbitrary, especially when they rely on digital platforms for registrations, because not every vulnerable person is digitally literate or has access to the necessary tools to register,” Saghir said. A donor source who requested anonymity for their role at international organizations replied, “It’s not ideal, but it is the only data we’ve got since Lebanon has no census.” The same source reported that approximately 48,000 households received cash within five days of the outbreak of the war, thereby depleting SRSN funds and concluding “Phase 1.”

MoSA established an online platform for displaced people to register. In what it described as “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” of the SRSN response, the ministry says it will include 50,000 and 45,000 households, respectively, that did not receive cash assistance in the first phase. Approximately 250,000 households have registered on the platform so far. Moreover, contrary to standard emergency-aid practices, MoSA wants to select and verify eligibility itself within 30 days. Verification is so time-consuming and resource-intensive that it is not usually performed during emergencies.

The donor source confirmed that no financing is currently available for these phases, which makes their implementation highly dependent on the success of MoSA’s appeal for aid. Even if families received support from the SRSN, the value of the cash assistance is $145. This is the second problem. In 2024, the SRSN provided $200 per household per month for two months. Now, the humanitarian source said, the transfer value “has fallen to $145, depending on household size, which is 30 percent of the minimum expenditure basket.”

In Lebanon, even this narrow form of support has become tangled in a system too weak and underfunded to respond to wartime needs.

The minimum monthly amount required for a family of five to survive was estimated at $509 in 2025. This is a conservative estimate of subsistence living in a country whose governments have deliberately deepened the economic crisis and increasingly rely on seasonal inflows of diaspora money. While any cash is better than nothing, these transfers come very close to nothing.

The capacity bottleneck

The third problem is MoSA’s obstruction of the humanitarian response through centralization.

When the war began two weeks ago, MoSA circulated instructions allowing NGOs working on cash assistance to distribute in-kind aid freely, but not cash. Saghir remarked that in-kind assistance is useful for people in collective shelters, where needs such as food, medicine, and hygiene kits can be accounted for. But this model falls short when displaced people are outside those shelters.

“In-kind assistance is much more expensive to distribute than cash; it also does not promote choice or dignity because people know their needs better than humanitarian organizations,” Saghir told Raseef22. “A person who cannot make rent, for example, does not need diapers.”

After a week of ambiguity, MoSA notified NGOs on Thursday, March 12, that they would receive lists of beneficiaries selected by the ministry under “Phase 2” so they could deliver cash to them. MoSA argued it lacks the capacity to remove people already benefiting from AMAN, were NGOs to submit their own beneficiary lists, a process known as de-duplication.

There is no sound basis for requiring de-duplication in the first place. As Saghir put it, “A person qualifying for AMAN is poor, but AMAN only responds to poverty needs, not those that result from displacement. Ideally, they should not be deprived of other forms of cash assistance.”

The donor source confirmed that MoSA is currently operating at roughly 30 percent capacity and is still trying to fill its most senior positions. The depletion of the public sector’s capabilities is often discussed as a tragic fait accompli, rather than as the result of deliberate austerity following the state’s 2017 hiring freeze, and of retirements, resignations, and absenteeism after public-sector wages collapsed in 2019. The Salam government’s yearlong mandate could have reversed this before the onset of war, but it chose to adhere to a strict austerity policy instead. The only time the government sought to adjust wages was by raising regressive taxes, only to temporarily add six months’ worth of wages to the public sector.

How could a ministry function at such low capacity?

“The WFP has been doing a lot of work for MoSA, which granted it disproportionate influence over the ministry and cash-transfer programs,” the humanitarian source shared. WFP’s influence stems from donors’ distrust of state institutions generally. “They preferred to finance the WFP to be the operational branch of MoSA, but they’re phasing it out,” the donor source added.

Saghir points out that a body known as the Cash Working Group was established in November 2024, during the previous war, to coordinate cash assistance among NGOs, MoSA, and existing cash-transfer programs to streamline operations.

“The Cash Working Group has the expertise, the capacity, and actors, but it is not meeting as regularly as it should,” noted the humanitarian source. The donor source said this is because the group has undergone three different iterations and is still establishing its administrative processes.

A state that refuses to protect

The humanitarian NGO sector is already in chaos, squeezed by tighter funding and pressure to do more with less. MoSA’s hope of financing “Phase 2” of the SRSN through appeals for donations is, at best, optimistic. In a telling anecdote of the dire aid situation, on March 10, the Salam government solicited donations from the “people and friends” of Lebanon to its account at the BDL, the same people whose bank deposits have been held hostage since 2019.

It is striking that humanitarian actors, donors and MoSA all behave as if the government’s claim that it is out of funds were true, even as it registered a $1 billion surplus in 2025, is expected to register a similar surplus in 2026.

Of the 25 NGOs working with MoSA, only 13 have funding, which collectively amounts to $1.5 million, according to the donor source. MoSA is currently obstructing the disbursement of this sum while it selects beneficiaries.

The amount at stake is so meager that it would be more efficient to simply let NGOs disburse these funds and help whoever they can. At the same time, MoSA should focus on more consequential priorities: unblocking some of the $9 billion in tax revenues to finance a proper humanitarian response through treasury advances or budget reserves.

Indeed, much of the disarray and mediocrity of the response could have been avoided had the government financed the SRSN through the budget it passed on Jan. 29. It is striking that humanitarian actors, donors and MoSA all behave as if the government’s claim that it is out of funds were true, even as it registered a $1 billion surplus in 2025, is expected to register a similar surplus in 2026, and sits on an even larger fortune that it refuses to spend on protecting people during wartime.

Juxtaposed with Minister Dr. Haneen Sayed’s reassurance on March 6 that “state institutions are operating at the highest level of readiness,” these facts are terrifying. One shudders to think what a lower level of readiness might have wrought.