By Omar Bah
The New Arab Newspaper, a London-based Pan-Arab news outlet, has reported the killing of a Gambian migrant in Lebanon by Israel airstrikes.
“This week, at least one domestic worker, a young woman from The Gambia, was killed in an airstrike on her employer’s home in southern Lebanon,” the newspaper reported yesterday.
The newspaper also reported that with airstrikes across Lebanon, including the capital, many migrant workers including Gambians have been abandoned by their employers and left to fend for themselves on the streets of Beirut after being turned back from shelters or excluded from state or charity services, with displaced Lebanese nationals prioritised over foreigners.
Israeli bombing of Lebanon has displaced around one million people.
Some of Lebanon’s 176,000 migrant workers, mostly women who work as domestic helpers, have been left to fend for themselves.
The majority are from Ethiopia, The Gambia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Kenya, and other countries.
Despite being present in Lebanon, their foreign embassies have made no arrangements to repatriate them.
The NGO This Is Lebanon, which works closely with abused migrant workers in Lebanon, told The New Arab it was receiving cases of migrant workers who were “rightfully scared of the situation” and need help with their evacuation.
The streets of downtown Beirut were lined with dozens of migrant workers who were dropped there by organisers as shelters refused to accommodate them.
Some told local media outlets that their employers had fled the country and left them behind in Beirut.
“They think that migrants are not human beings, even in a war situation we are not considered as human nor accepted in the shelters,” a migrant told local media in Lebanon.
