GENEVA, 5 August 2006 — Overnight bombings in Lebanon cut off an “umbilical cord” for relief supplies and halted evacuations from the country to Syria, international and UN agencies said yesterday. Israeli warplanes wrecked four bridges along the coastal highway in the Christian heartland north of Beirut, cutting off practically the last land link with neighboring Syria.

“This was the main supply route for UNHCR, all our supplies come from Syria,” said Jennifer Pagonis, a spokeswoman for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR, backed by other UN relief agencies and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said the humanitarian crisis had deepened after the bombings. “The road was badly damaged ... with the result that we cannot bring assistance from Arida, from Syria, to Beirut,” said Christiane Berthiaume, a spokeswoman for the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). A convoy due to carry medical supplies for 13,000 people from Syria today was also on hold, the World Health Organization said.

A UN team was unable yesterday to evaluate the damage caused by the air raids or to find new secondary routes from Syria to Lebanon because Israeli military forces did not give security clearance, known as “concurrence,” Berthiaume added. “We did not have concurrence to be able to check the road from Beirut to Arida which is really the umbilical cord to bring relief inside Lebanon,” she told reporters. The IOM said the bombings had halted its evacuation of Filipino and Sri Lankan migrant workers from the conflict in Lebanon. A convoy of 720 migrants had been due to travel to Syria yesterday.

In Brussels the European Commission also reacted to the latest development, with a spokesman saying, “We certainly regret what happened, what is happening. We express our concern and we are considering possible ways of first assessing and then trying to take a formal position.” Access to towns and villages in southern Lebanon was also hampered further by the latest fighting, while fuel was running short in mountain areas, relief agencies reported.

However, a nine-truck UN convoy carrying food, water and sanitation equipment was able to head to Jezzine, halfway between Beirut and the Israeli border, yesterday.

The UNHCR warned that aid also needed to be sent to northern Lebanon. “About 800,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon, mainly to the north and they will need assistance,” Pagonis told journalists. About 130,000 of them were in public shelters.

UN agencies were turning to air and sea transport to overcome some of their problems with supplies. A Portuguese air force C-130 cargo plane yesterday started daily flights carrying UN stocks from Brindisi, Italy, to the Lebanese capital Beirut, which would go on for the next four days, Berthiaume said. A small Greek cargo ship was also chartered to ferry supplies between Brindisi and the southern Lebanese port of Tyre, through Cyprus.