The forgotten victims of Lebanon's displacement crisis

Five months into Lebanon's 2026 displacement crisis, a new alert by humanitarian and disability rights organizations warns that persons with disabilities, particularly women and girls, remain among the country's most overlooked and least protected populations.

The Gender and Disability Alert, issued by UN Women Lebanon in partnership with the Lebanese Union for People with Physical Disabilities (LUPD) and Trócaire, with support from the governments of Australia and Finland, paints a picture of a humanitarian system still struggling, after more than a year of recurring conflict, to account for and accommodate its most vulnerable members.

While large numbers have returned home since the conflict began in March 2026, the alert argues that the crisis exposed, and in many cases deepened, structural gaps in Lebanon's social protection and humanitarian architecture that leave persons with disabilities effectively invisible to the systems meant to serve them.

A data gap that obscures the real toll

Perhaps the report's starkest finding is how little is actually known. Lebanese government figures show that 28,754 displaced people hold official disability cards, but humanitarian officials caution that this number captures only a fraction of those affected. Applying the global disability prevalence rate of roughly 15 percent to the broader displaced population suggests the true figure could run as high as 157,000 people, more than five times the officially registered count.

Without disability-disaggregated data, aid organizations say they cannot reliably identify needs, prioritize resources, or ensure equitable access to services, particularly for the large number of displaced people living outside formal shelter systems, where monitoring is weakest and assistance hardest to reach.

Shelters built without access in mind

The alert's assessment of Lebanon's collective shelter network is similarly troubling. Of 77 shelters surveyed for accessibility, only 14 percent were found to be fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Investigators documented a familiar litany of barriers, toilets and bathing facilities that cannot be used by people with mobility impairments, elevators that do not function, sleeping arrangements poorly suited to physical needs, and a chronic shortage of ground-floor accommodation.

Beyond physical infrastructure, advocacy groups recorded cases in which people with disabilities were turned away from shelters outright, placed in unsuitable spaces, or left without any clear pathway to referral services. The report notes that people with intellectual, psychosocial, and communication-related disabilities faced compounding obstacles, as shelter staff frequently lacked the training or awareness to support them. Many displaced people with disabilities, as a result, have instead sought refuge in rented apartments, informal housing, unfinished buildings, or host communities, arrangements that place them further from the reach of humanitarian assistance.

Women and girls bear a disproportionate burden

The alert devotes particular attention to the compounded risks facing women and girls with disabilities, a population it identifies as among the most exposed in the current crisis. Displacement, the report finds, has heightened their vulnerability to gender-based violence, exploitation, and abuse, even as it has simultaneously narrowed their access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, protection services, and complaint mechanisms.

Humanitarian actors also flagged persistent difficulties around menstrual hygiene management for women and girls with physical, intellectual, and multiple disabilities, a basic need that the report says has gone largely unaddressed in shelter planning.

Recommendations for an inclusive response

The report calls on the Lebanese government, humanitarian agencies, and international donors to place disability inclusion at the center of crisis planning rather than treating it as an afterthought. Its recommendations include strengthening disability-disaggregated data collection, retrofitting shelters and evacuation systems for accessibility, expanding flexible cash assistance that can be tailored to individual needs, and mainstreaming accessibility across health, protection, and education services.

The alert further calls for greater recognition and funding for Organizations of Persons with Disabilities, whose outreach, coordination, and monitoring work, it argues, has been essential to identifying gaps that formal systems have missed.

Inclusive Recovery

Taken together, the findings suggest that disability inclusion in Lebanon's humanitarian response remains more aspiration than practice. A genuinely inclusive response is a precondition for protecting the rights and dignity of a population that, by conservative estimates, numbers in the hundreds of thousands. As Lebanon's humanitarian crisis continues, closing the gap between policy commitments and conditions on the ground is crucial to ensuring the protection of persons with disabilities, particularly women and girls with disabilities, who face the deepest risks.