Storm Clouds over Beirut

As I snapped these storm clouds gathering over Hamra, the latest in a strong of bombings took place in the southern suburbs of the city, this time a suicide bomber in a small bus. My Lebanese colleagues watch with growing anxiety as these attacks become more frequent and they wait for a political agreement for establishing the coailition needed to form a government they have been without for almost a year.

However in Hamra, life goes on, and I escaped our office jam packed with two or more people per desk and noise aplenty for some quiet work in a cafe offering free internet connection with every coffee. We are very well fed here. Delicious fatah at every opportunity, wonderful pastries and fresh salads with mint and pomegranate.... in stark contrast to many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees whose savings are gone, jewellery sold, children out of school labouring, and food rations being cut.

If the UK will take just a few hundred of the most complex cases such as severely injured children and their families, and other western countries followed suit, it would free up so much medical and health capacity. The numbers may appear tokenistic, but of the 2.3 million refugees from Syria just 31,000 are in countries other than the five neighbouring Syria.

The numbers have risen dramatically - 150k refugees last January, became 2.3m by December 2013, and is expected to grow to 4.1m by the end of 2014. How on earth can a small country like Lebanon continue to support almost a million refugees, unless countries like the Uk start to take even a few hundred people. This is now the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.