Migrant domestic workers abandoned in Lebanon as Israel's war expands
Tens of thousands of workers are thought to be surviving in makeshift shelters and on the streets, deserted by their employers during the Israeli escalation.
BEIRUT — The smoke was already rising from the rubble in Dahiyeh, Hezbollah's stronghold in southern Beirut, when Nasima Akter, 38, hurried down the stairs to find the building next door reduced to rubble. “I heard the bombing,” she said. “The ground shook, the sky lit up. I thought I was going to die.”
Minutes later, a second wave of Israeli strikes hit the same area again, slamming the Bangladeshi domestic worker to the floor as she desperately called her Lebanese employers for help. Without a word, they rushed to their car, leaving Akter to fend for herself.
“I was left with nothing,” Akter said, sitting on a mattress in an informal shelter for internally displaced migrant workers in Jounieh, a coastal city about 16 kilometers north of Beirut, the Lebanese capital. “No passport, no clothes, no money. I had to walk an entire day to get here.”
For more than three weeks, Akter, along with 20 other migrants from Bangladesh, have been sharing a room in an old concrete warehouse, a place hard to call home. A large flat pad lies near the door in a tiny shadowed area where a darkened patch of floor appears to absorb the incoming light.
