{"id":58336,"date":"2026-04-08T19:41:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T19:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/58336\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T19:41:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T19:41:19","slug":"we-were-not-ready-for-this-lebanons-emergency-system-is-hanging-by-a-thread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/58336\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We Were Not Ready for This\u2019: Lebanon’s Emergency System Is Hanging by a Thread"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last time a government official from Lebanon sat down to think carefully about national digital infrastructure, nobody expected another war with Israel. That\u2019s how it has always gone.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were not ready for this,\u201d says Kamal Shehadi, the Lebanese minister of technology and AI, and minister of the displaced. \u201cI have to admit that we didn\u2019t expect something of this magnitude to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

On March 2, 2026, Israeli evacuation warnings began appearing on phones across southern Lebanon. Days later, similar alerts reached residents of Beirut\u2019s densely populated southern suburbs, urging them to leave as strikes were imminent.<\/p>\n

Within minutes, families were moving. Within days, nearly 1.3 million people<\/a>\u2014nearly 1 in 5 residents of the country\u2014were forcibly displaced<\/a>. Schools that have been turned into shelters were filled past capacity. People slept in cars along the coast road north of Beirut. And somewhere in a government office, a small team started updating a database.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

A woman sits by a tent as displaced families struggle for survival in the streets of Beirut, Lebanon.Murat Sengul; Getty Images<\/p>\n

That platform is currently the closest thing Lebanon has to a real-time view of its own humanitarian crisis. It tracks food packages, fuel supplies, hygiene kits, and medicine. It tells government officials which shelter in which district is running low on blankets. It is, by global standards, modest technology. By Lebanon\u2019s standards, it might be the most functional piece of government software in the country.<\/p>\n

While the US, Israel, and Iran negotiate, Israel has excluded Lebanon from the ongoing two-week ceasefire. Local media have reported up to 100 Israeli air strikes on Lebanon within 10 minutes on April 8, in a clear sign that forced displacement, disruption, and chaos will continue in the nation.<\/p>\n

A Platform Built on Recurring War<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re able to monitor where these commodities are stocked but also what is actually provided to the shelters,\u201d says Shehadi. \u201cWe can track today every single food package that is delivered, and so we have a clear idea of what\u2019s needed.\u201d Flour, sugar, fuel, butane, medicine. The system has a list.<\/p>\n

The Ministry of Social Development runs the shelters. The Ministry of Economy watches the supply lines\u2014\u201cmaking sure that the country is well-stocked and that the imports of key commodities is ongoing,\u201d Shehadi says. Technology stitches it together. The Disaster Relief Management unit, housed in the prime minister\u2019s office and battle tested through the 2024 war and the 2020 Beirut port explosion, runs point.<\/p>\n

What makes the current deployment different from previous crises is coverage and speed. More than 667,000 people registered<\/a> on the government\u2019s online displacement platform in a single week\u2014an increase of 100,000 in one day alone. The government set up mobile registration, verification teams, and financial disbursement pipelines in days. \u201cWe\u2019ve made it very easy for them to sign up,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is a team of volunteers, but also a team of professionals who will check and make sure that this is truly an [internally displaced person].\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last time a government official from Lebanon sat down to think carefully about national digital infrastructure, nobody…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32],"tags":[22595,37,93,49,36],"class_list":["post-58336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lebanon","tag-identity","tag-israel","tag-lebanon","tag-middle-east","tag-war"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116370792942132645","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}