Evacuate OFWs out of war zone

Over the weekend, the United Nations (UN) issued a warning that foreign domestic workers in Lebanon were being abandoned or locked in their employers’ homes as Lebanese families flee the escalating conflict between Israel and the armed group Hezbollah.

According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), many of the 170,000 foreign domestic workers in Lebanon are women from Ethiopia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines.

“We are receiving increasing reports of migrant domestic workers being abandoned by their Lebanese employers, either left on the streets or in their homes as their employers flee,” Mathieu Luciano, IOM’s head of office in Lebanon, said in a press briefing at the UN headquarters in Geneva.

Luciano said some domestic workers were being locked in to ensure their employers’ homes were being kept, while those abandoned on the streets struggle to get to safety as many of them cannot speak Arabic. He added that the IOM has received more requests from countries to help evacuate their migrant workers from Lebanon, but “this would require significant funding—which we currently do not have.”

The situation is even more precarious for undocumented workers and those working under the “kafala” or sponsorship system, which allows employers to confiscate their passports and other official documents needed if they were to leave the country, Luciano noted.

Race against time

More than 1,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in Lebanon after Israel bombarded Hezbollah strongholds starting Sept. 23, nearly a year after the Palestinian group Hamas launched a bloody surprise attack in Israel.

On Tuesday, Israel said it had begun ground operations in southwest Lebanon against the Iran-backed Hezbollah which is allied with Hamas. The conflict has put the Middle East on edge, with Iran warning Israel against further attacks, and the UN pleading for a diplomatic solution to the brewing regional conflagration.

But with Israel starting its invasion into Lebanon, it is a race against time to keep foreign workers, including some 11,000 Filipinos, out of harm’s way.

The Philippine government cannot afford to continue its seemingly nonchalant way of handling the situation, choosing to implement alert level 3 which calls for voluntary repatriation of OFWs instead of moving them out of the conflict zone immediately.

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said only around 1,000 Filipinos in Lebanon have expressed willingness to be repatriated last month. Deputy Assistant Secretary Marlowe Miranda claimed Filipinos in Beirut don’t want the DFA to raise the alert level to 4, which requires mandatory evacuation, because this would mean they cannot obtain clearance to return to Lebanon.

Lackadaisical attitude

But several OFWs in Lebanon have appealed to President Marcos last month to immediately repatriate them, as they expressed frustration at what they described was slow government response.

The DFA and the Department of Migrant Workers’ usual wait-and-see attitude is risky and could be fatal, given the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Lebanon. Israel remains undeterred by international pressure as it continues to expand its operations against Hamas and Hezbollah to avenge last year’s Oct. 7 unprecedented attack that killed at least 1,200.

Among the fatalities are four Filipinos, all of them caregivers, including Angelyn Peralta Aguirre, 33, from Pangasinan, who chose to stay with her elderly ward in a bomb shelter in Israel as Hamas members barged in to kill them. She was hailed by Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum as an “unimaginable honor in the face of evil.”

It would be a disservice to Aguirre’s memory and those of her three compatriots if more Filipinos were to die in the crossfire in Lebanon because of the Philippine government’s lackadaisical attitude.

Instead of waiting for the OFWs to come to the designated shelters, Philippine officials should move to secure the proper exit clearances and secure alternative land or sea transport for their immediate evacuation as air travel in Lebanon has been disrupted by the airstrikes. Only 111 Filipinos have taken refuge in a shelter in Beirut, a mere tenth of the Filipinos working in Lebanon.

Back in 2015, when the security situation worsened in Libya where at least seven Filipinos were abducted, then freshly appointed Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario flew to Tunisia to personally direct the evacuation of 400 Filipinos across the border from Libya. According to the DFA, Del Rosario—who died in April last year—personally traveled several times to Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Egypt, which resulted in the repatriation of over 24,000 Filipinos from these countries torn by civil strife and other disasters.

No less than this kind of hands-on approach is needed by the government to spare any more Filipino blood in the raging conflict in the Middle East.