Mapping The Displaced: What The US-Israel War On Iran Has Unleashed

When nine-year-old Reine fled her home in Lebanon last week, she took two things that mattered enormously: her lovebirds, Baskout and Baskouteh (‘Biscuit and Biscuette’ in Lebanese Arabic). She has been in a collective shelter with her family ever since, the birds beside her. “They are my best friends,” she tells UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) workers. “I can’t leave them behind. They would be scared of the bombings if I leave them alone.” There is a particular clarity to the logic of children in wartime. They understand, often without being taught, that the only thing worse than fleeing your home is fleeing it alone.

In another Beirut shelter, UNHCR Representative Karolina Lindholm Billing meets a woman in her nineties. She had lost 11 members of her family in the 2024 attacks. Now she is displaced again, staying in the same school that had been turned into a shelter two years before. The same building. A familiar mattress, on the same floor. “Stories like hers,” Karolina says, “illustrate the fear, uncertainty and repeated trauma that families are facing.”  

These are two people among hundreds of thousands. On 2 March 2026, Israeli evacuation warnings went out to residents of more than 53 villages and densely populated areas across Lebanon. Families had minutes to prepare. To gather what belongings they could and leave the place they call home. By the end of that first week, more than 667,000 people – roughly the entire population of Glasgow, Scotland – had registered as displaced on Lebanon’s government platform. Across the border in Iran, an estimated 100,000 people – the equivalent of emptying Ann Arbor in Michigan – had left Tehran in just the first two days of US-Israeli strikes. Latest UNHCR figures estimate that up to 3.2 million Iranians have been temporarily displaced in Iran as conflict intensifies.

The US-Israel War on Iran did not arrive in an empty landscape. Even before a single new strike fell, the Middle East and North Africa hosted upwards of 19 million forcibly displaced people (those driven from their homes by conflict and/or persecution). As of 6 March, UNHCR reported 312,900 additional newly displaced people across the region, with approximately 5,450 Lebanese and Iranian nationals crossing into neighbouring countries. Around 120,000 of Lebanon’s displaced are sheltering in collective sites, 89% of which are already at capacity, while Beirut’s Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, home ground of the Lebanese national football team, is now a makeshift shelter.

By 9 March, more than 78,000 people had crossed from Lebanon into Syria, including almost 8,000 Lebanese nationals. Many Syrians had been planning, carefully, to return home in the coming months. They had waited out years of conflict in Lebanon, and now they were crossing back not by choice but under fire – their return stripped of any meaning.  

While headlines track the exchange of missiles – Iran facing a lethal partnership acting with impunity – the human cost is being written across the country and elsewhere. Military bases and girls’ schools have been struck without consequence. The shockwaves are being absorbed not just by armies, but by the millions more already forced from their homes in a region overly familiar with enormous strain.  

In Afghanistan, an estimated 115,000 people are newly displaced. Many are being pushed there indirectly by what is happening across the border in Iran, where more than 1.5 million Afghans – most already refugees – now find themselves effectively trapped in place: food prices have spiked, access to work and medical care has been severed and movement through the country has become near-impossible. Around 110,000 have already crossed back into Afghanistan since the conflict began – about 1,700 each day. But the country they are returning to is not a place of safety.  

Since the rapid withdrawal of US and allied forces in April 2021, after which the Taliban took control in August 2021, the number of Afghans requiring humanitarian assistance has risen from 14 million to 23.7 million. International funding that once covered three quarters of Afghanistan’s public services has been cut. Thirty four million people now live below the poverty line. Women and girls have been pushed almost entirely out of public life, a situation the UN Human Rights Council has described as “gender apartheid”. Now those that return, the triply displaced, have to do so in a way that is neither voluntary nor dignified, to continue in a spiral of precarity and uncertainty.  

In Iran, the damage goes further still. Strikes on oil refineries and storage depots in Tehran, Alborz and Karaj have released what the World Health Organization described in a Geneva briefing on 10 March as an “acute respiratory risk” to millions: dense plumes of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile compounds so thick that drivers in Tehran were using headlights at 10:30 in the morning. The Iranian Red Crescent issued an urgent warning on 8 March about acid rain following the strikes, capable of causing chemical burns and permanent lung damage. Residents described burning skin and eyes. The UK-based Conflict and Environment Observatory has already catalogued more than 300 environmental incidents from the strikes. Oil runoff from storage sites has entered Tehran’s storm drain networks and is expected to migrate into groundwater aquifers, contaminating both drinking water and agricultural soil for years to come. A strike on Qeshm Island cut water access for around 30 villages.  

These consequences will not end when a ceasefire is signed. They will be lived, quietly and without headlines, for decades. For now, Reine was able to save her lovebirds from the bombs. Nobody can protect them from what the bombs have left behind.  

UNHCR is on the ground in all of these countries, delivering emergency assistance and protection services. Its Lebanon operation alone is currently only 14 percent funded. To support UNHCR’s emergency response in Lebanon and across the region, visit unhcr.org/emergencies