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UN urges Mideast ceasefires to avert 'major regional war'

UN urges Mideast ceasefires to avert 'major regional war'
14 Oct 2024 17:49

Geneva (AFP)

The UN stressed on Monday the urgent need for ceasefires in both Lebanon and Gaza to avert a broader regional conflict with ramifications for the whole world.

"A ceasefire that is sustained by a meaningful peace process ... is the only way to break the cycle of violence, of hatred, of misery," said UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi.

Speaking at the start of the UNHCR refugee agency's annual executive committee meeting in Geneva, he insisted that only a ceasefire could "stem the tide to a major regional war with global implications".

His comments came amid escalating Israeli attacks targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, where more than 1,300 people have been killed and a million displaced since late September, according to Lebanese officials.

The UN high commissioner for refugees, who has just returned from Lebanon and neighbouring Syria, slammed attacks impacting humanitarian workers.

Grandi paid tribute to two UNHCR workers killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon last month, and also highlighted the 226 staff working for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, killed in Gaza in the past year.

"We cannot accept that lives of humanitarians are dismissed as mere collateral damage, or worse, maligned as somehow culpable or complicit," he said.

Despite the attacks, he stressed that the United Nations would "stay and deliver".

Many have crossed to Syria along with Lebanese and others fleeing the Israeli airstrikes.

UNHCR says 276,000 people have crossed the border so far -- 70 percent of them Syrian nationals. Lebanese authorities put the number at over 400,000.

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