‘We Were Not Ready for This’: Lebanon's Emergency System Is Hanging by a Thread

The last time a government official from Lebanon sat down to think carefully about national digital infrastructure, nobody expected another war with Israel. That’s how it has always gone.

“We were not ready for this,” says Kamal Shehadi, the Lebanese minister of technology and AI, and minister of the displaced. “I have to admit that we didn’t expect something of this magnitude to happen.”

On March 2, 2026, Israeli evacuation warnings began appearing on phones across southern Lebanon. Days later, similar alerts reached residents of Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs, urging them to leave as strikes were imminent.

Within minutes, families were moving. Within days, nearly 1.3 million people—nearly one in five residents of the country—were forcibly displaced. Schools-turned-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.

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’s standards, it might be the most functional piece of government software in the country.

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 airstrikes on Lebanon within 10 minutes on April 8, in a clear sign that forced displacement, disruption, and chaos will continue in the nation.

A Platform Built on Recurring War

“We’re able to monitor where these commodities are stocked, but also what is actually provided to the shelters,” says Shehadi. “We can track today every single food package that is delivered, and so we have a clear idea of what’s needed.” Flour, sugar, fuel, butane, medicine. The system has a list.

The Ministry of Social Development runs the shelters. The Ministry of Economy watches the supply lines—“making sure that the country is well stocked and that the imports of key commodities is ongoing,” Shehadi says. Technology stitches it together. The Disaster Relief Management unit, housed in the prime minister’s office and battle tested through the 2024 war and the 2020 Beirut port explosion, runs point.

What makes the current deployment different from previous crises is coverage and speed. More than 667,000 people registered on the government’s online displacement platform in a single week—an increase of 100,000 in one day alone. The government set up mobile registration, verification teams, and financial disbursement pipelines in days. “We’ve made it very easy for them to sign up,” he says. “There 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].”