A Classroom of Children Killed or Injured Every Day in Lebanon

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Returns from Beirut with Urgent Warning: The Crisis Is Moving Faster Than the Response

PC: Ryutaro Tsukata

Eighty-seven children. That is the average number killed or injured every single day since the latest Middle East conflict began — a toll that Ted Chaiban, UNICEF's Deputy Executive Director, put in terms that are almost impossible to absorb: the equivalent of a full classroom, wiped out or wounded, day after day.

"Behind these numbers are parents, grandparents, teachers, brothers and sisters," Chaiban told UN correspondents on Wednesday, just days after returning from a week in Lebanon. "Communities, cities, nations are in shock."

His message was blunt: the humanitarian response is being outpaced by the scale of the crisis, funding gaps are approaching 85%, and there is a real fear the situation will get worse before it gets better.

More than 2,100 children have been killed or injured since the escalation began. By country: 26 children killed in Iran, 118 in Lebanon, four in Israel, and one in Kuwait. These figures, Chaiban stressed, are expected to rise.

In Iran, an estimated 3.2 million people have been displaced, including 864,000 children. In Lebanon, more than one million people are displaced — including 400,000 children, making up nearly one-third of all those forced from their homes. Some 90,000 Syrians have crossed back into Syria since the onset of the conflict, alongside several thousand Lebanese.

All of this is layered on top of a pre-existing crisis: before this war began, 44.8 million children were already living in conflict-affected settings worldwide.

For Lebanon, the current crisis is not a new catastrophe but the latest chapter in an unbroken sequence of them. Children have lived through economic collapse, COVID-19, institutional fragility, and a war just 18 months ago.

For many families Chaiban met, this is the second forced displacement in a year and a half.

"It is another episode in a cycle of disruption that has yet to break," he said.

More than 350 public schools have been converted into shelters, disrupting education for around 100,000 students. Chaiban was careful to note what is lost when schools close: not just learning, but structure, protection, and continuity — the stabilizing forces that children in crisis need most.

At a hospital in Beirut, he met Nure, a 14-year-old being treated for severe injuries after her home was bombed. She told him she had been asleep when the strike hit, waking to find rubble on top of her. Her whole family was injured. "She felt like her heart was pushing her to scream so help would come," Chaiban recounted. "She was pulled from under the rubble and is now recovering. But hundreds of children didn't have the same luck."

At a shelter, he met 15-year-old Fatima, who had fled with her family from the south to the same school where they had taken refuge 18 months ago. The night before Chaiban visited, she had lain awake listening to bombs hitting the southern suburbs of Beirut, worrying about her family, her friends, her future. "What she and many others expressed is what they want to be able to do: go home and get back to school."

Of the more than one million people displaced in Lebanon, only around 130,000 are in the formal shelter network of 600-plus government-designated sites. The rest — the vast majority — are scattered across the country in rented apartments, unfinished buildings, with relatives, or, for the most vulnerable, in tents pitched along the Beirut waterfront and the Corniche.

Chaiban described meeting a father of five who had gone to multiple nonprofits seeking help. He was staying with a friend whose own resources were running out. "When I was back at home, I had a job, I had dignity," the man told Chaiban. "Now I'm just hand-to-mouth."

The Lebanese government, working through the Ministry of Social Affairs, is coordinating a registry of all displaced persons by municipality. The government has also asked UN agencies to help convert a large football stadium into additional shelter capacity for four to five thousand people. For those outside shelters, Chaiban said cash assistance is likely the most practical solution, since needs vary widely depending on individual circumstances.

UNICEF and its partners have reached 151,000 displaced persons across more than 250 shelters with essential non-food items. Water and sanitation support is being provided at 88 of the 600-plus shelters, serving around 46,000 people. High-energy biscuits and ready-to-use food have been pre-positioned to prevent malnutrition among children. Around 13,000 children in shelters have received education and learning materials. Working alongside WFP, UNICEF has conducted humanitarian convoys to reach several thousand families who remained in southern Lebanon.

But the resources are not keeping pace. The UN issued a flash appeal for $308 million. UNICEF's share alone is $48.2 million for a three-month response window. Both the UN and UNICEF face an approximately 85% funding gap. "The scale of the need is increasing faster than available resources — and faster than 18 months ago," Chaiban said.

On US funding, he noted that some previously allocated country-level funds had been repurposed for the current crisis through discussions with the US government, but that new supplementary US funding specific to Lebanon had not yet been announced.

Chaiban closed with three immediate calls:

First, a cessation of hostilities and the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure. "Schools are not targets. Hospitals are not targets. Children are not targets."

Second, safe, rapid, and unimpeded humanitarian access — increasingly difficult as bridges in the south of the country have been destroyed, cutting off routes to communities in need.

Third, urgent financial support to sustain the response.

Asked directly why Israel had not been named in his briefing as the party responsible for the strikes killing children in Lebanon, Chaiban did not deflect. "The children that are killed or wounded in Lebanon are killed because of strikes that come from Israel," he said. "In this war, there have been strikes on several countries coming from different parties. In this case, yes — that is the fact."

When Chaiban left Beirut on Thursday evening, just over one million people were displaced. By the time of his briefing, that figure had climbed to between 1.2 and 1.5 million — between 20 and 25% of Lebanon's entire population.

"Everyone is extremely tense about what may happen next," he said.

He expressed hope that when the guns go silent — as they did 18 months ago — people will return home quickly.

They did last time, even to areas of severe destruction. But he cautioned that the level of destruction in some neighborhoods is already significantly worse than it was in the previous conflict. The path home, for many families, will be harder this time.

"They want to go home," Chaiban said. "And they'll need to be able to return."

Ted Chaiban is the Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF. This article is adapted from his press briefing at UN Headquarters in New York.

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