‘No place to go’: As Israel bombs Lebanon, African migrants feel abandoned

Soreti*, an Ethiopian migrant domestic worker living in Lebanon, says she feels lucky to be alive. She was not home when Israeli air strikes struck buildings in her neighbourhood in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on September 23.

“It was a massacre,” the 34-year-old said from a private home where she and dozens of fellow African migrants, including children, are now sheltering. “They just hit apartment buildings where old people and children live. I’m OK, I think I lost some hearing, though. Children here are scared to sleep from nightmares,” she told Al Jazeera.

Soreti is among an estimated 175,000 to 200,000 foreign domestic workers living in Lebanon, the majority of them women. According to a 2019 Amnesty International report, which cited the Ministry of Labour, at least 75 percent of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon at the time were Ethiopian. They began arriving in the 1980s, and after the end of Lebanon’s civil war flocked to the country in droves throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Most take up low-paid jobs as live-in caregivers and send money to their families back home.

Israel, which has been waging a war on Gaza since October last year, escalated its attacks on Lebanon last month. Its military says the offensive is targeting facilities being used by the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

At least 1,900 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon in the last year, according to the country’s Ministry of Health.

More than one million people have been displaced from their homes, and Soreti said many fellow migrant domestic workers are among them.

“Everybody fled the city towards Beirut or other places where they have relatives. But for migrants, there is no place to go,” she said. “There are others sleeping outdoors with nowhere to go.”

In Lebanon’s third-largest city, Sidon, schools have been converted into makeshift shelters for displaced Lebanese, said Wubayehu Negash, another Ethiopian domestic worker who has lived there for nearly 20 years, and is considering fleeing.

“We haven’t been hit too hard yet. Nearby areas, like Nabatieh and Ghazieh were destroyed. We’re OK, but I feel uneasy about staying,” she told Al Jazeera. “I was here [since the Israelis attacked] in 2006, and this is much worse.”

Smoke rises following the Israeli army’s attack on Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighbourhood on October 3, 2024 [Murat Sengul/Anadolu Agency]

The attacks on Lebanon come several years into a crippling financial crisis that began in 2019 and saw the local currency, the Lebanese pound, lose up to 90 percent of its value. By 2021, three-quarters of Lebanese were living below the poverty line, according to the United Nations.

As the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the crisis, thousands of domestic workers lost their jobs. Many Lebanese employers, unable to pay the salaries of their foreign workers, chose to abandon them on the streets outside of their countries’ embassies in the capital, Beirut, according to Amnesty. Despite this, many migrants elected to stay in Lebanon, citing a lack of prospects in their home countries.

But with the onset of near-daily exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah across Lebanon’s southern border for the past year, embassies in Beirut became increasingly pressed with repatriation requests.

The government of the Philippines – one of the countries many domestic workers arrive from – mobilised and has been repatriating its citizens for much of the year free of charge.

However, the response of African diplomats in Lebanon has been close to absent, according to domestic workers from four African countries Al Jazeera spoke to.

“It’s as if we don’t have embassies here,” said Sophie Ndongo, a migrant domestic worker and Cameroonian community leader in Beirut. “Since the Israelis began bombing Lebanon, I get requests from Cameroonian women for me to help repatriate them. As if I’m the ambassador!”

Cameroon only has an honorary consul in Lebanon.

“Over the past few weeks, we’ve had women flee southern Lebanon and come to Beirut seeking shelter. Others have called me after their employers locked them in their homes, fled the region and left them to die,” Ndongo said.

‘Domestic workers are not viewed as human’

Migrant workers in Lebanon are excluded from protections afforded to workers under the country’s national labour law. Instead, their status is regulated by the “kafala” or sponsorship system, which has been likened by human rights researchers to a modern-day form of slavery.

Under the kafala system, migrants cannot seek legal redress for abuses meted out against them, no matter how grave they are. This has led to rampant abuse of domestic workers over the years, according to Human Rights Watch, and by 2017, Lebanese authorities estimated that two migrant domestic workers were dying weekly, mostly during failed escape attempts or by suicide.

“Unfortunately, domestic workers are not viewed as human beings here,” Ndongo added. “The racism and abuse we suffer in the workplace knows no bounds. It has been like this for decades and I don’t see any signs of improvement.”

A family gathers at a women’s dormitory in the temporary shelter for migrants in Beirut, on October 1, 2024 [Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters]

Under the kafala system, migrant workers often require the intervention of their country’s diplomats to escape an abusive employer or to defend themselves in court.

A number of the consular offices of countries domestic workers in Lebanon hail from are not staffed by diplomats but rather “honorary consuls” – often Lebanese citizens working on a part-time or voluntary basis. Previous Al Jazeera reporting has uncovered the neglect and mistreatment of citizens by such honorary consuls.

As the crisis in Lebanon escalated, Al Jazeera found that the honorary consulate of Kenya and the Ethiopian consular offices were using their social media pages to call on citizens to send personal identification documents on WhatsApp to register citizens for eventual potential repatriation.

But with the cancellation of most flights out of the Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport and the increasing intensity of Israeli attacks, it is unclear if repatriation flights could be scheduled any time soon.

Al Jazeera reached out to the diplomatic offices of the Ethiopian and Kenyan governments in Beirut but did not receive responses.

Kicked out ‘for not being Lebanese’

Sandrine*, a Malagasy national, said she spent two days homeless with nowhere to go after fleeing her home in Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburb, which has been devastated by Israeli air strikes.

“[Madagascar’s honorary consul] issues messages on Facebook wishing us well, but they don’t actually help us,” Sandrine said. “I still remember the blast on the day they killed [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah. It was the most terrifying sound, like a hundred earthquakes. It reduced everything to ashes.”

It’s unclear if migrant domestic workers are among the more than 11,000 casualties tallied by Lebanon’s Health Ministry, although Sandrine says she is certain that many of them must be, judging by the destruction she witnessed.

Two Ethiopian nationals in the city of Tyre told Al Jazeera they were aware of the deaths of two Ethiopian domestic workers who were killed with their employers when their apartment buildings were flattened in air strikes – accounts Al Jazeera has yet to independently confirm. Lebanon’s Health Ministry is not listing the casualties by nationality.

Sandrine said that for those who survive, finding shelter is a challenge, not only because of the severe shortage of accommodation. In Beirut, many homes and schools have been converted into public shelters for displaced people, but all have refused her and other migrants access on account of their documentation, she said. Eventually, she managed to find friends to shelter with.

“They said we lacked documentation, but I think the rule is ‘Lebanese only’.”

A five-year-old child sleeps in the temporary shelter for migrants in Beirut [Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters]

North of the country in the city of Tripoli, Selina*, a Sierra Leonean migrant worker, told Al Jazeera that she was among a group of 70 mostly Sierra Leonean migrants and a few from Bangladesh, who were kicked out of a school shelter for not being Lebanese.

“I fled my neighbourhood because we got the warning from the Israelis that they were going to bomb the area. I joined a group of my community members who like me were displaced from different areas and looking for shelter. There were mothers and infants with us.

“We heard there was a shelter at a school in Tripoli, so we boarded a bus from Beirut and made it there. We got to the school between midnight or two in the morning. Nobody really saw us I think. It was in the morning hours that they noticed we were migrants.

“In the morning, General Security [Lebanese immigration authorities] came and told us that the shelter wasn’t for us. They forced us to leave and called us ‘ajnabi’.” (Arabic for “foreigner,” or “alien”).

Selina said the group eventually made their way back to Beirut, where they were told by police they weren’t welcome on the pavement of the city’s downtown area, despite it being flooded with displaced people.

“We spent five days like this sleeping outdoors. There was heavy rain and bombings each night. Still, people kept calling the police on us. Once I tried reasoning with the police, by saying there were babies with us. I broke down crying.”

Migrant-run organisations and local Lebanese nonprofits have scrambled to find private homes of kind strangers and churches offering to shelter displaced migrant men, women and children.

So far, major humanitarian agencies, including the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), have done little to shoulder the burden and are reaching out to migrant community organisations to tackle the shelter issue, according to three aid workers familiar with the issue and messages seen by Al Jazeera. The IOM’s office in Beirut is yet to respond to Al Jazeera’s emailed inquiry on the matter.

African migrants in Lebanon are facing two unique challenges – the struggle of living under Israeli bombardment, and discrimination because of the color of their skin. pic.twitter.com/IGWx08HrJH

— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 4, 2024

Tsigereda Birhanu, an Ethiopian migrant and humanitarian worker with the Ethiopian migrant-run Egna Legna Besidet organisation, confirmed to Al Jazeera that displaced Africans were indeed being refused entry at shelters, including schools and churches.

She added that her organisation found shelter for 45 of the women in Selina’s group, delivering them food and mattresses as well. Another organisation assisted the remainder of the group.

“Shelter is a big problem here. There is nothing officially arranged for migrants. If it wasn’t for kind individuals, even more would be outside on the street. Winter is coming so it is getting colder here.”

Tsigereda also shared footage of what she said was an abandoned construction site in Beirut being used as a shelter by 60 Bangladeshi migrants displaced from areas of the country targeted by bombings and similarly denied access to public shelter space.

The aid worker said she worries that many of the displaced migrants “have anxiety and heart conditions that are worsening because of the air strikes”. But small organisations like hers cannot provide much assistance.

“We don’t have the means to meet the demand,” she said. “We need food, medicine, clothes for displaced and traumatised people.”

*Names changed to protect the privacy of some undocumented and vulnerable women.