By Madeline Edwards and João Sousa
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.
The airstrikes, which have killed 620 people and displaced more than 90,000 in the past week alone, are the largest and deadliest escalation since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
While the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has been simmering for years, tensions have ramped up since October, when a Hamas attack on Israel killed more than 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages. Israel’s brutal response has reportedly killed more than 41,000 people in Gaza in heavy bombing and ground fighting that the International Court of Justice, the UN’s top court, has said could plausibly include acts of genocide.
In total, around 200,000 people have fled southern Lebanon over the past 11 months due to intermittent cross-border fire, but the past week’s flare-up represents a dramatic escalation.
On 18 September, Israel detonated the first of two waves of explosives-laden pagers and other devices belonging to alleged Hezbollah members, killing 37 and injuring thousands in attacks that Human Rights Watch and others have called a violation of international humanitarian law. Israeli airstrikes followed as Hezbollah sent up its own rockets and missiles in response.
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. But many international airlines have already cancelled their flights.
The bombings have caused chaos and death across all sectors of Lebanese society; among the dead are children and emergency workers. But there is particular concern about migrant domestic workers, who often live with their employers and are forced to surrender their identity documents.
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.
According to a fundraising appeal published by a group of Lebanese grassroots organisations, “migrant workers trapped under the kafala [work sponsorship] system have been abandoned by their employers or even forced to stay behind in south Lebanon, unable to leave and take shelter, while the constant shelling threatens their lives.”
Already working in an abusive system
As people fled the heaviest-hit parts of Lebanon over the last few days, at least one migrant domestic worker told The New Humanitarian that her employers – whose home she lived in – had abandoned her. Other similar stories are circulating in migrant worker and activist circles, but they could not be confirmed in time for publication.
Melissa Wangari, a 29-year-old from Kenya, said her employers not only left her behind in a southern village while it came under Israeli fire, but they also took her passport with them.
Wangari left her young son behind in Nairobi in 2022 to earn money in Lebanon. She came via a work agency, as part of the kafala system, which has been long criticised by migrant and human rights activists as exploitative.
At first, Wangari worked for a family in Beirut, but a month ago her agency transferred her to a family in southern Lebanon. Neither the family nor the agency that arranged her employment told her the name of the village. She said the family there was “very strict”, and they confiscated her passport, a practice commonly reported by migrant worker advocacy groups in Lebanon.
On 23 September, as the sound of bombings grew around them, Wangari said the family left her behind, alone, in their house. “They said to stay, that it would be okay,” she explained.
A Kenyan friend later recruited a Lebanese man to pick Wangari up and drive her to Beirut. She packed only a tiny blue duffel bag with some clothes, and a plastic sack with deodorant, soap, and her phone. Wangari is now sleeping in her friend’s tiny one-room apartment in the Burj Hammoud suburb of Beirut, where the two women share a single bed.
She still has no passport and no way of getting one, and like tens of thousands of others, has been enduring all this through the trauma of escaping the bombing.
The following day, Wangari was sitting in a Burj Hammoud church, her hands covering her face during a prayer session for migrant workers. The congregation, part of an evangelical church originating in Nigeria, caters almost exclusively to Nigerian and Kenyan migrant workers – mostly women but also a few young men. Previously, the church provided food and shelter to migrant workers after their homes were damaged in the August 2020 Beirut port blast. Similar aid efforts are just getting underway.
Nearby, in the storage closet, were bags and suitcases belonging to around 60 other migrant domestic workers. The church’s Nigerian pastor, Joseph Abolade, said the workers had brought them to the church for safekeeping in case they had to flee Lebanon.
A thin mattress was propped up against the wall for Joshua John, a Nigerian construction worker who had fled the village of Baysariat – near the southern city of Tyre – three days earlier and was now sleeping in the church. He said he was hoping to leave Lebanon once he had enough money for a plane ticket.
“I pray that the war that is going on does not escalate,” Abolade said to the sparse room during prayers. “We thank you for counting us among the living!”
Aid response amid chaos
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.
As is the case with all of Lebanon’s population, it is too early to know exactly how many migrant workers have now been forcibly displaced, or how many remain in danger.
“We’re still trying to fully grasp the size of the catastrophe, which is likely bigger than what we know at the moment,” according to an activist from the Anti-Racism Movement (ARM), which advocates for migrant workers in Lebanon. The activist requested anonymity due to the potential risk to the undocumented workers he assists should he share his name publicly.
“We are totally abandoned,” said Viany de Marceau, a former domestic worker from Cameroon who now runs an African fashion business in Beirut and remains an active part of the migrant community via various informal networks. There, multiple stories have emerged in recent days of women seeking urgent help.
But amid a piecemeal, ad hoc disaster response that’s still in its early days, such stories are difficult to confirm or even track down as the women help each other through underground networks.
“It’s always like this – we have someone who is in contact with someone or [who] is in our group, or we share contacts. We assist Africans,” said de Marceau.
But there is a widespread feeling that migrant workers’ embassies are not doing enough to help them. Wangari told The New Humanitarian that the Kenyan consulate had not reached out to her.
Hatem Jaber, an official at the Kenyan consulate, told The New Humanitarian that it was working to evacuate Kenyan women from danger zones in Lebanon to “the appropriate shelters”, though an evacuation out of Lebanon was not in place yet. A circular published online in August – before the recent bombing began – urged Kenyans who wished to leave to sign up for evacuation, and published a hotline for them to call.
Mark Joshua Ponce, an official from the embassy of the Philippines, told The New Humanitarian that it had been running a “voluntary repatriation programme” for its citizens since October. The country’s ambassador to Lebanon told a Manila-based news station that more than 1,000 citizens of the Philippines have applied for this repatriation. The country’s current “Level 3” danger alert for Lebanon bars domestic workers from returning to Lebanon should they evacuate, due to the security situation.
Some are hesitant to leave Lebanon even if they can. Single mother and cleaner Roise Njeri Mwaura, 29, has built a life in Lebanon and given birth to a son, who now attends primary school. The two of them live in a small apartment in a part of Burj Hammoud with neighbours who, like her, are also from Kenya.
If they seek a temporary reprieve from the war, however, and travel back to Mwaura’s home city of Nairobi, her son Steve likely can’t come back with her. He has no official documents proving he’s a public school student in Lebanon, which would help with getting a more permanent Lebanese residency for him. Mwaura’s residency status doesn’t ensure she could bring him back to his school and life in Lebanon, as being born in Lebanon doesn’t confer citizenship or residency.
So, for now, the two of them are staying put, despite the fact that Mwaura described being “terrified” and “nervous” over the growing violence.
Elsewhere in Burj Hammoud, Wangari, without her passport, doesn’t have many options either.
While the bombs fall, the death toll grows, and there are rumours of both a ceasefire and an Israeli ground invasion. Wangari is simply hoping for a new job so she can keep scraping together money to send to her five-year-old son in Nairobi. His name, Jayson, is tattooed across her arm as a reminder of why she is in Lebanon.
She will also need to pay rent on a new apartment. Her friend has already warned that the one-bedroom place where she is sheltering is too small for both of them long-term.
With no documents and a sparse support network of other Kenyans in a country now at war, Wangari is starting her job search, despite the fact that the kafala system legally requires her to work for the employer, or the employment agency, that left her behind.
While she’s trying to get on, Wangari is deeply rattled by the past several days. “I told my family I’m okay just so they don’t get worried,” she said. “They are watching everything that is happening… I’ve never experienced something like this.”
Edited by Annie Slemrod.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
