UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland has called on Israel and Hizbollah to stop fighting for 72 hours to enable relief workers to evacuate the elderly and disabled from southern Lebanon and allow the delivery of emergency aid supplies.
Aid workers are finding it impossible to get medical supplies and food safely to isolated villages in southern Lebanon due to the Israeli bombardment.
A humanitarian corridor has allowed the United Nations to truck food and basic medical supplies to the southern port of Tyre, but getting safe passage beyond that is another matter.
The Lebanese authorities say up to 600 civilians may have been killed in a 17-day Israeli onslaught, which began after Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas killed eight Israeli soldiers and seized two in a cross-border raid on July 12.
Dozens of air raids struck villages near Tyre today and hundreds of artillery rounds crashed across the border from Israel killing 14 people.
World Food Programme spokesman in Beirut, Robin Lodge, said the UN food aid organisation had been unable to move supplies trucked to Tyre beyond to villages in the south.
Iraeli warplanes hit Red Cross ambulances with six workers, transporting a wounded man, a woman and an 11-year-old, were struck in an attack in Tyre on Sunday.
A Lebanese aid convoy was hit by an Israeli shell today, wounding at least three people, witnesses said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said today some of its convoys in the south had been turned back because of intense fighting and it launched an appeal for 100 million Swiss francs ($81 million) to step its humanitarian work in Lebanon.
"In southern Lebanon, the number one issue today is ensuring the safety of civilians and securing safe access for those engaged in medical and other humanitarian activities," ICRC director of operations Pierre Kraehenbuehl said in a statement.
The UN estimates there are up to 800,000 people in Lebanon displaced by the fighting and bombing. It said there are nearly 600 schools being used as shelters, with between 100 and 1,200 people in each school.
A soldier in the UN force in south Lebanon (UNIFIL), which has been shuttling to border villages in white UN armoured personnel carriers this week, said getting people out was risky.
Speaking under condition of anonymity in Tyre after rescuing people from the border town of Rmeish, he said Israeli strikes often landed very close to the UN vehicles.
He said missions were precarious because Hizbullah fighters profited from the arrival of UN convoys as cover, to bring out launchers and fire rockets at Israel from near the vehicles.
Stokes said contacts with Israel to try and secure safe passage had not been encouraging, meaning access was almost worse than in other war zones, such as Chechnya.
"I've rarely seen people so committed, who are staying in those areas under really impossible conditions. They have no protection whatsoever," he said, adding that Lebanese aid workers were the backbone of the emergency aid effort.
"And they are the ones doing most of the work. It's not the international aid community, that's quite clear."