For the past 10 days, Farah Salka and her team of staff and volunteers at a Lebanese anti-racism organisation have answered thousands of desperate messages from women who have nowhere to hide from the bombs. Before the start of the Israeli airstrikes, Salka’s job as head of Lebanon’s Anti-Racism Movement (Arm) involved advocating and campaigning for the rights of Lebanon’s 400,000 migrant workers.

Now, she and her team have become frontline workers, struggling to find shelter and protection for overseas domestic workers from countries such as Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, who have found themselves abandoned by their Lebanese employers and with no way of getting home.

“To be frank, the situation facing many of the migrant workers we support in Lebanon was horrendous even before the bombing started, but now we are seeing women who have come here to work as domestic workers thrown out on the street like used washing machines, left behind inside houses while their Lebanese employers flee danger, or just dumped on the side of the road to fend for themselves in a war-torn country where many don’t speak the language,” she says.

The past weeks of aerial bombardment by the Israeli government have led to a huge wave of internal displacement in south Lebanon, with 1.2 million people – about 20% of the population – forced to leave their homes and communities and seek shelter elsewhere.

Frontline workers say that as more displaced people have arrived in the capital, Beirut, seeking shelter from bombing in the city’s southern suburbs, hundreds of migrant workers and refugees have been left homeless, with no way of accessing food or sanitation.

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