Lebanon (MNN) – On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack against Israel. The ensuing conflict has spilled out of Gaza and into courtrooms, political discourse, and neighboring countries. On October 8, only one day after the conflict broke out, Hezbollah – a militant group and political party operating out of Lebanon – fired a barrage of missiles and tank shells across the Lebanese border and into northern Israel. Israel retaliated with firepower that Heart For Lebanon’s Camille Melki describes as “equal, if not more aggressive.”
The exchange of rocket fire has killed hundreds of people, and hundreds of thousands more have been forced to flee what is quickly becoming a warzone.
“You wonder, what’s the point of this daily cross-border shelling?” Melki says. “Hopefully a ceasefire is reached in a very short time. For now, there has been enough death and destruction on all sides of this conflict… Everybody suffers, especially the innocent.”
As if conflicts and the deaths of civilians weren’t enough, this new crisis is damaging to other problems Lebanon is already facing. For example, the barrages have caused more than $3 billion in damage on Lebanon’s side of the border. While that would be an issue for any country, it’s especially devastating for a country facing a catastrophic economic crisis.
“Our currency in Lebanon has lost 98.5% of its value,” Melki says. “Our currency today is only 1.5% of what it was worth in October 2019.”
Plus, Lebanon’s government has utterly collapsed. “We have a completely destabilized country, because we’ve been without the president for two years, without a sitting governing cabinet, and our parliament is closed, not convening for any legal matters.”
This conflict is yet another obstacle in the way of rebuilding. “We believe that this conflict is going to delay any negotiations among the dividing parties in Lebanon to elect a new president and appoint a new government,” Melki says. “Without doing so, how could we meet the international government pressures… to bring some order to our economy, address matters of corruption, and start bringing up the economy to a level that could be trusted by international agencies and governments to invest in the country of Lebanon?”
And for Heart For Lebanon, all of this gets in the way of providing Christlike service to the people of Lebanon.
“The more people in need, the more people God is calling us to serve, but we have limited resources to do so. That makes things difficult for all of us. We pray that it ends soon because I don’t know how much further the country of Lebanon can go with these multiple crises at the same time.”
Learn more about Heart For Lebanon’s work here.
Header photo courtesy of Unsplash.
