300 Displaced Syrians Return Home from Arsal

Several hundred displaced Syrians in Lebanon have returned home on Wednesday to the Syrian town of Asal al-Ward, the National News Agency said.

Around 300 refuges, the second batch since beginning of 2017, left the al-Nour encampment in the northeastern border town of Arsal to Syria's Asal al-Ward, which lies in the western part of Syria's Qalamoun, NNA said.

They were accompanied by tight security measures, it said.

LBCI said a group of media reporters headed from the Baalbek area towards to the outskirts of Yunin to cover the event.

Humanitarian agencies have recorded a notable trend of spontaneous returns to and within Syria in 2017, with more than 440,000 internally displaced people going back to their homes in the first six months of this year, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said.

In total, 260,000 refugees have gone back to Syria from neighboring countries since 2015.

Lebanon hosts more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees, who amount to more than a quarter of the country's population not to mention undocumented individuals, many of whom live in informal tented settlements.

The Syria refugee influx into Lebanon has strained the country's infrastructure, and has also sparked accusations that refugee camps are harboring militants from the war.

The World Bank says the Syrian crisis has pushed an estimated 200,000 Lebanese into poverty, adding to the nation's one million poor.