More than a million people fleeing Syria's war have registered as refugees in Lebanon, the UN said yesterday, with many now living in misery in a tiny country overstretched by the crisis.

And the number is swelling by the day. At a crowded UNHCR centre in Tripoli, Lebanon's second city, hundreds of Syrian refugees were seen on Thursday queueing to register.

The I IN refugee agency says that every day it registers 2,500 new refugees in Lebanon - more than one person a minute.

According to the UNHCR, refugees from Syria, half of them children, now equal a quarter of Lebanon's resident population, warning that most of them live in poverty and depend on aid for survival.

It branded the one million figure as "a devastating milestone worsened by rapidly depleting resources and a host community stretched to breaking point".

Lebanon has now become the country with "the highest per capita concentration of refugees worldwide," and is "struggling to keep pace", it said in a statement.

The massive crisis is compounded by a spillover of the violence that has ravaged Syria for the past three years, with Lebanon experiencing frequent bombings and clashes even as it grapples with political deadlock and an economic downturn.

Syria's war began as a peaceful uprising demanding political change in Arab Spring-inspired protests, but it morphed into a bloody insurgency after Assad's regime launched a brutal crackdown against dissent.

The conflict has killed more than 150,000 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Fluman Rights, while half of the population is estimated to have fled their homes.