THE Lebanese government, grappling with a great mass of refugees uprooted by Israeli attacks on south Lebanon, appealed yesterday for international aid for hundreds of thousands of people.
"We are only eating bread and sleeping on the floor. We don't have mattresses," one refugee shouted to two government ministers who toured Beirut schools crowded by thousands of poor Shia Muslim families.
According to government officials, some 400,000 refugees have fled the five day old Israeli blitz. Many filled schools and others overflowed on to pavements.
The scenes at the schools where there have been no classes for a week, are reminiscent of a similar exodus in July 1993 when Israel launched a week long air, land and sea blitz on south Lebanon, killing 130 people and damaging thousands of homes. Some 300,000 people left the south then.
Refugees said Israel has made their lives hell by uprooting them from their homes for the second time in nearly three years. Many said they were separated from other family members in the mass hysteria that followed the Israeli bombardment.
Non government organisations (NGOs) involved in relief work said many of the refugees lacked bare necessities. "The refugees suffer from a grave shortage of milk and clothes for children and a general shortage of mattresses and blankets," said Mr Ali Sirhal, the head of a Beirut based NGO.
UN peacekeeping troops in south Lebanon are swamped by more than 5,000 refugees displaced by the Israeli blitz and are giving up their own food and mattresses to help them.
"We are using jeeps, trucks, even APCs [armoured troops carriers] to reach the people and we are using ambulances for the sick people. So it's all a bit of a mess," a Unifil officer said, adding that some old people were stuck in their villages.
Mairead Carey adds: A Lebanese man living in Ireland last night spoke of his fears for the safety of his 125 year old grand mother - the oldest woman in Lebanon - who lives in a village close to the Israeli border.
Mr Yousfef Dakik and his Irish born wife, Anne Marie, spoke of their distress at the latest Israeli attacks on south Lebanon where Mr Dakik's parents, brother, sister and grandmother live. His sister's home in Beirut was hit during an Israeli raid over the weekend. She and her five children are now searching for emergency accommodation.
Many of his extended family have joined the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming north. Some, however, have had to stay behind in the village of Markaba, three miles from the border between Israel and south Lebanon, to take care of his grandmother, Sickne, who will not leave her home.
Sickne, one of the oldest people in the world, has lived through decades of war and refuses to leave despite the bombings.
Her husband was killed by Israelis in the early 1940s. In the early 1980s, the family home was bombed. Israeli soldiers helped her from the ruins and gave her treatment for her injuries in a hospital in northern Israel.