" Lebanon’s migrant workers left stranded and homeless by Israeli attacks", 26 September 2024

Among the mass exodus of people trying to flee deadly Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon are migrant domestic workers from countries such as Kenya, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, some of whom feel trapped and unable to get to safety.

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The airstrikes, which have killed 620 people and displaced more than 90,000 in the past week alone

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As people flee their homes and bombs fall, the US, the UK, Türkiye, and China have all urged their citizens to leave Lebanon while there are still limited commercial flights out of Beirut airport, with some countries reportedly setting up evacuation plans.

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Many of Lebanon’s 176,000 migrant domestic workers are also women working in exploitative conditions for extremely low wages that make the cost of a ticket out of the country prohibitive. The majority come from Ethiopia, while others are from Bangladesh, the Philippines, Kenya and elsewhere. At least one domestic worker, a young woman from The Gambia named Anna, was reportedly killed in an airstrike this week on her employer’s home in the south.

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As of July, more than 28,000 of the migrant workers counted by the UN’s migration agency, IOM, were living in parts of south Lebanon and the eastern Beqaa Valley that are being heavily bombed by Israel. Most were women. That doesn’t include nearly 33,000 workers living in Beirut – where walkie talkers and pagers exploded last week, and Israel has bombed.