A VAST auditorium being used to house emergency aid in Beirut lay empty last night as relief agencies criticised Britain and other Western countries for their lame response to Lebanon’s worsening refugee crisis.

Lebanese officials told The Times yesterday they expected to have to cope with 1.2 million displaced people — a third of the country’s population — as thousands more families fled their homes at the weekend.

The United Nations will make an urgent appeal today after a warning by Jan Egeland, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, that Lebanon needed $100 million immediately to avoid “a humanitarian catastrophe”.

Fuel and emergency stockpiles of medicine are running low across the country.

At Beirut harbour, frustrated aid workers watched a flotilla of warships and chartered ferries sail in empty to pick up more stranded foreigners, lamenting that these ships could have carried drugs, blankets, tents and generators.

An Italian warship, the San Giorgio, delivered two ambulances, water purifying kits, protein biscuits and other supplies, and a French-chartered ferry Nato ration packs, but both still had acres of unused space on board.

Alexandre Giraud, who works for the French charity Première Urgence, said: “It’s a shame these huge ships come in so lightly loaded. Aid is very, very slow and the coordination on the ground here is a tremendous problem.”

Yesterday Israel rejected an ambitious plan sponsored by the UN to move thousands of tonnes of aid using three sea routes to the ports of Sidon, Tripoli and Beirut, a safe road corridor stretching from Syria in the north to Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, and an air bridge.

Charities are finding it hard to hire truck drivers to carry the aid as they are scared that their convoys will be targeted by Israeli aircraft. The first Red Cross convoy to head to stricken towns in southern Lebanon at the weekend said that it had been fired upon.

Among those waiting on the dockside for the first trickle of aid to arrive was General Yahyeh Raad, the head of Lebanon’s Relief High Commission. “I don’t think the world has realised we need a lot of help and we need it now,” he said. “We have bought what we could on the local market up to now, but supplies are running short.”

Officials believe that fuel will run out in the next two weeks, medicine in the next three weeks and flour and wheat by September.

At an entertainment complex, built next to the city’s docks, wealthy businessmen gathered with Lebanese ministers yesterday to try to speed up the relief operation. In the cavernous hall three in the Beirut Exhibition and Leisure Centre, a few dozen pallets of food and medical aid lay in one small corner, a testament to how little help Lebanon has received.

Yesterday Mr Egeland visited a makeshift refugee camp in Sanayeh Gardens, one of Beirut’s biggest parks, and found that the conditions for the 1,200-plus people forced to sleep outside were squalid.

Many of the families complained that his 20-minute visit did little to ease their immediate suffering.

Hala Salloub, 21, sat on a pile of mattresses in the fierce sunshine shaking her head in despair as her two young children complained of feeling unwell in the scorching heat.

“I don’t know where my husband is,” she said. “He went to collect some more of our family. We left a message we were here so we don’t want to leave before he finds us, but it’s miserable.”

Mrs Salloub felt that Mr Egeland’s appearance would do nothing to ease her plight. The dozens of families crammed alongside her on the parched grass were similarly unimpressed by the aid effort.

The situation has become so desperate that even long-established Palestinian refugee camps are taking in people made homeless by the attacks.

Mr Egeland also visited Dahiyeh, a residential district and reported Hezbollah stronghold, south of Beirut’s city centre, and was stunned by the scale of destruction. The area had been pummelled by six more missile strikes in the first daylight attacks on the capital for several days.

Further south, Abdul-Rahman al-Bizri, the mayor of Sidon, said nothing had reached the city. “We have had no supplies — not from the rest of Lebanon, nor from other nations,” he said. “We are on our own.”

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