The international community should work to end the conflict in the Middle East and address the “huge” humanitarian crisis that has engulfed countries in the region, the head of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia department said.

Jihad Azour spoke to AFP in Washington, where the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are currently taking place.

Azour, a former Lebanese finance minister, noted that the most severely affected places, including Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, were facing a “huge humanitarian problem” which has devastated their economies.

“You have massive loss in output, you have a massive destruction in infrastructure, and you have a huge set of needs for additional spending, for shelter, for health and so on,” he said.

“We expect that growth will be negative in those cases, and we expect that the recovery would take longer to materialize,” he added.

“You have massive destruction of infrastructure in a large region, which is the south, and mass destruction of livelihood, because this is an agricultural region that was severely affected,” Azour said, adding that almost 20 percent of Lebanon’s population had been displaced.

“We encourage the international community, we encourage the friends of Lebanon, to provide grants,” he continued, calling on the international community “to put its utmost effort in order to solve the problem, in order to reduce the suffering of people.”