Number of Syrians who Died of Cold Fleeing to Lebanon Rises to 17

W460

At least 17 Syrians trying to flee to Lebanon have died of extreme cold and a snowstorm on the border since last week, a Lebanese security official said Tuesday.

Lebanon's National News Agency said that "the body of a Syrian refugee woman who had died of the cold" was retrieved on Tuesday in the border region.

The latest find raises the number of such deaths since Friday to 17, the security official told AFP.

The army and civil defense services said Friday that two children and six women were among 10 Syrians whose frozen bodies were found, and the death toll rose over the weekend.

Lebanon, a country of four million, hosts just under a million Syrians who have sought refuge from the war raging in their neighboring homeland since 2011.

Many live in informal tented settlements in the country's east and struggle to stay warm in the winter.

The U.N.'s children's agency UNICEF said on Saturday that it was distributing blankets, warm clothes and heating fuel to refugees.

In 2015, Lebanese authorities introduced new restrictions to curb the number of Syrians entering the country, which shares a rocky 330-kilometer border with Syria with no official demarcation at several points.

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