The talk of a ceasefire in the Middle East changes nothing for Aline Kamakian when she is racing to set up a new kitchen to feed thousands of people made homeless by the war in Lebanon.
Missiles are hitting Beirut while Kamakian and her colleagues at World Central Kitchen, a food charity, prepare to open a kitchen near a new shelter for the displaced in the Lebanese capital.
“It’s a catastrophe,” she tells this masthead, as Israel bombards Lebanon with the biggest wave of airstrikes since the war began last month.
“All the shelters are overcrowded, and there is a need for other places. But you have almost 25 per cent of the Lebanese population displaced. Where do you want to put them?
“Our situation is getting worse and worse. We have a lot of women and kids that are without the minimum of hygiene, security, medicine, food.”
We are speaking by phone at 11am on Wednesday in Beirut (6pm, AEST), when early news reports suggest a devastating attack is underway. The airstrikes continue through the day, with photographers in the city sending out images of buildings on fire and black smoke spreading over the suburbs.
Later, the Lebanese government says 254 people have been killed on Wednesday alone, while another 1100 have been wounded.
There is no respite from the humanitarian crisis despite the ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump.
While Israel has joined the ceasefire with Iran, it says the war in Lebanon is separate and will continue. In a move that puts the broader ceasefire in peril, the Israel Defence Forces say it has struck more than 100 targets in just 10 minutes in its campaign to destroy Hezbollah, the militia aligned with Iran and based in Lebanon.
Iran says this breaches the ceasefire agreement, but Trump says the deal does not include the war in Lebanon. “That’s a separate skirmish,” he says.
Israel blames Hezbollah, which fired rockets into civilian communities in northern Israel on March 2. Hezbollah showed its support for Iran, but stung Israel into retaliating in a way that has caused immense suffering for the people of Lebanon.
This masthead first spoke to Kamakian in early March at a kitchen in Beirut, when the number of displaced people in Lebanon was about half what it is today. Four weeks after that meeting, she agrees to talk over the phone about the intense pressure on this nation of six million people.
“We have a huge danger with food security,” she says.
“World Central Kitchen is multiplying and growing fast and cooking more, but the need is growing much faster than us.”
Kamakian, 56, owned her own restaurant in Beirut until it was bombed six years ago. Now she leads World Central Kitchen in Lebanon. She says this crisis is worse than previous conflicts, such as the fighting with Israel two years ago, and she is struggling with food shortages and high prices.
Kamakian says a kilogram of tomatoes cost $US1.25 before the war and has risen to $US5, or about $7.
With more than 1.2 million people displaced in Lebanon as a result of the Israeli airstrikes, according to the Lebanese government, many people are being turned away from homeless shelters and have no choice but to live on footpaths or in parks.
Despite the challenges, World Central Kitchen reached a milestone on Wednesday. It has now served one million hot meals since March 2 and is making 25,000 hot meals each day.
“What we’re doing is every time the government is opening shelters, we’re creating a kitchen next to it so that we make sure that we deliver hot meals to the shelter from the kitchen within 25 to 30 minutes,” she says.
“This is the way that we can control our quality and the distribution.”
All we want is for people to understand that Lebanon is not Hezbollah.
Aline Kamakian from World Central Kitchen
“We go to the shelter, and we ask who wants to help. First of all, people can make money. They also feel they are active. And it means we are cooking in the same style that they are used to because every village in Lebanon has its own style.
The second thing is we’re creating a bond. It’s a kind of a therapy. You are feeling that you are active, and you are able to help.”
Some food supplies have been blocked for weeks, given the disruption to shipping across the Middle East, and many families have fled productive farmland because it is inside the evacuation zones defined by Israel. The land being evacuated is estimated to make up about 14 per cent of Lebanon.
Kamakian says Lebanon is paying a higher price for the war in the Middle East than other countries, given its size. The calculations show she is right: the death toll from the Israeli strikes on Lebanon since March 2 have now reached more than 1500, out of a population of six million.
The death toll in Iran reached more than 2000 before the ceasefire announcement, out of a population of more than 92 million.
Just when the ceasefire might bring peace to other parts of the Middle East, the war in Lebanon has grown worse.
Kamakian, whose family came to Lebanon from Armenia a century ago, has no time for sectarian divides between Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims or others.
She wants people outside the country to understand that most people in Lebanon want peace and that the international community should be applying more pressure to make that possible.
“All we want is for people to understand that Lebanon is not Hezbollah,” she says.
“I’m a Lebanese person. I’m against Hezbollah and against Israel. I’m Lebanese. This is not a war we want.
David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
