Up to 1 million foreign workers and others trapped in Libya are expected to need emergency aid because of fighting in the North African nation, aid officials said as they sought USD 160 million to deal with the crisis.

UN officials say that amount is only for the next three months and they expect the crisis to go on longer than that.

The UN is also effectively frozen out of sections controlled by leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces and is only seeking humanitarian aid for opposition-controlled areas.

“This appeal is based on a planning scenario projecting up to 400,000 people leaving Libya including the 200,000 who have left to date and another 600,000 people inside Libya expected to need humanitarian aid,” said Valerie Amos, the UN’s humanitarian and emergency coordination chief.

The money is for camp management, food security, nutrition, health care, water, sanitation and hygiene.

Since 20th February, about 213,000 foreign workers have fled to Libya’s borders with Tunisia, Egypt, Niger and now Algeria an estimated 15 percent of Libya’s foreign population and hundreds of thousands more are expected to follow over the next three months, according to Amos and international migration officials.

Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, says about 120,000 people have crossed the border into Tunisia from Libya since the crisis began.

Most of the rest have gone over into Egypt, while a few thousand others fled into Niger and Algeria.

As part of the emergency appeal by 17 UN and other aid organisations, the International Organisation for Migration said Monday it is seeking at least USD 49.2 million to provide food, water, shelter and medical care for up to 65,000 migrant workers caught up in the crisis.

“This still only scratches the surface,” the organisation’s spokeswoman Jemini Pandya, who said there were about 1.5 million foreign migrant workers inside Libya before the fighting began.

There has been a steep dropoff in the number of migrant workers crossing over from Libya in recent days, due to a beefed-up presence by Gadhafi’s forces along the way from Tripoli.

But the officials say thousands of migrants are still arriving daily at Ras Adjir at the Tunisian border, and at Salum on the Egyptian border.

As of Monday, the migration organisation had evacuated 15,000 migrants by air and sea to Egypt, Bangladesh, Ghana, Mali and other countries.

Several hundreds more were evacuated by road from Libya. Some 22,500 migrant workers, mainly Bangladeshis, still need to be evacuated home.

Meanwhile, the U.N. chief, Ban Ki-moon has appealed to Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa to protect human rights and comply with a recent Security Council resolution to end the unabated violence raging in the country for over two weeks.

The Security Council recently unanimously adopted a resolution slapping sanctions on the Libyan regime, which includes a complete arms embargo, an asset freeze and a travel ban on the country’s leadership and an immediate referral to the International Criminal Court.

“The Secretary-General discussed the increasingly troubling humanitarian situation, in particular the plight of migrant workers,” a statement from the U.N. said.

Mr. Ban also called on the authorities to “ensure the safety of all foreign nationals and unhindered access for humanitarian organisations to people in need.”

Mr. Kusa has agreed to the immediate dispatch of a humanitarian assessment team to Tripoli, according to the U.N.

The statement also said that Ban “is deeply concerned about the fighting in western Libya that “threatens even more carnage in the days ahead…. and civilians are bearing the brunt of the violence.”

The Secretary-General has called for “immediate halt to the government’s disproportionate use of force and indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets” and warned that those committing war crimes would be held accountable.

Last week, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, announced that he will investigate war crimes allegedly committed by Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi and his loyalists.

Ban has appointed Abdelilah Al-Khatib, the former foreign minister of Jordan, as his special envoy to Libya, to consult with the Libyan leadership on the humanitarian situation as well as the larger fallout of the ongoing crisis.