For most of its five decades in Lebanon, UNHCR’s operations in Lebanon were relatively modest, centred on helping a few thousand refugees and asylum-seekers annually from elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. As recently as 2010, UNHCR’s Lebanon office was focused primarily on meeting the needs of some 10,000 mostly Iraqi refugees.
When the crisis in neighbouring Syria erupted in early 2011, tens of thousands – and later hundreds of thousands – of refugees were forced to flee across the border into Lebanon.
Syria’s ongoing war, with 6.6 million people displaced internally, and more than five million displaced in the surrounding region and beyond, has made the Middle East the world’s largest producer and host of forced displacement. More than one million Syrian refugees are in Lebanon, giving it the highest per capita proportion of refugees in the world, and placing enormous pressure on the country and its people. Lebanon is now UNHCR’s largest single-country operation, with five offices countrywide.
UNHCR works closely with the Government of Lebanon and numerous other national and international partners in providing protection and assistance to refugees and stateless persons, as well as to Lebanese communities affected by the crisis.