The economic toll of the war with Israel and its related displacement in southern Lebanon has left 22% of Lebanese children going to bed hungry, while 20% have been out of school for a year, UNICEF reported on Wednesday.
Hezbollah’s decision to restart hostilities with Israel on March 2 in response to the targeted elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran led to 1.2 million people being displaced in Lebanon at the height of the conflict, with roughly 340,000 still unable to return to their homes there, the report said. One-third of those unable to return are children, it added.
During the past six months of war, an average of seven children have been killed or wounded per day, UNICEF reported, adding that an estimated 12% of wounded children now live with a disability as a result of the conflict.
Having fled their communities and jobs for safety, 71% of families were found to be struggling to meet their children’s medical needs, triple the figure from six months ago, the report said. About 38% said they did not have access to medicine their children needed, and 31% said their children had not received the healthcare they needed, largely due to the cost of treatment, it said.
About 6% of surveyed households reported that their children had become sick or wounded due to the war, and 34% of those children did not receive the care they needed, UNICEF reported. More than 700,000 people, including 238,000 children, were affected by disruptions to water systems, increasing the risk of preventable infectious diseases spreading.
Children go to bed hungry, child labor rates increase
More than four in five households (82%) said they were also struggling to afford more necessities compared with three months ago, and 22% said their children went to bed hungry in the two weeks prior to the survey, the report said.
Fifty-five percent said they were unable to provide their children with three meals a day, and only 10% of households with children under the age of five said they were able to provide a sufficiently varied diet.
Additionally, 14% of families said at least one of their children had been forced to work, up from 6% in January 2025.
Beyond the immediate deprivation, UNICEF warned that the impact on academic infrastructure was likely to carry long-term consequences. At the height of the conflict, 433 public educational institutions, about a third of Lebanon’s public-school network, were repurposed as shelters, leading to nearly 100,000 children potentially losing access to their classrooms. Additionally, 436 schools were damaged over the course of the war, and 37 were completely destroyed.
Learning institutions lacking, families can't meet needs
Seventy-six percent of families said they had more trouble meeting their children’s educational needs compared with three months ago, 46% said they had to reduce expenses related to education, and 17% said they had to stop their children’s education due an inability to find available schooling.
One out of five households said their children did not attend school last year, and of those who did attend, 29% were said to have been unable to learn fully, often because of difficulty focusing and emotional distress.
“Without urgent and sustained action, an entire generation of children [in Lebanon] and young people risks carrying the scars of this crisis into adulthood,” UNICEF Lebanon representative Marcoluigi Corsi said.