Some migrant domestic workers in Lebanon have been locked in homes while their employers flee from Israel’s air strikes, the United Nations said Friday.
The UN’s International Organization for Migration said foreign domestic staff were increasingly being abandoned by the Lebanese families to face heightened danger in the conflict.
The IOM raised the plight of Lebanon’s 170,000 migrant workers, many of whom are women from countries such as 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,” said Mathieu Luciano, the IOM’s head of office in Lebanon.
“They face very limited shelter options,” he told a press briefing in Geneva, via video from Beirut, adding that on Thursday he visited a shelter in the capital housing 64 Sudanese families “who have nowhere else to go.”
He said the IOM was receiving increasing requests from migrants seeking help to go home. Many countries have also sought the agency’s help to evacuate citizens.
However, “this would require significant funding – which we currently do not have,” he added.
Nearly a year after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Israel announced it was shifting its focus to securing its northern border with Lebanon.
Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon have killed more than 1,000 people since September 23, according to the Lebanese health ministry, while hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in a country already mired in economic crisis.
The situation for Lebanon’s migrant workers is precarious, as their legal status is often tied to their employer under the “kafala” sponsorship system governing foreign labor.
Rights groups say the system allows for abuses including the withholding of wages and the confiscation of official documents – which provide workers their only lifeline out of the country.
“We’ve seen in the south that the employers would leave but then would either leave the domestic workers on the streets, wouldn’t relocate with them – or actually even worse, lock the domestic worker in, to make sure that the house is kept while they are seeking safety somewhere else,” he said.
Luciano said those left on the street would struggle to relocate or get to safety, while many cannot speak Arabic.
“Many are undocumented. They don’t have papers. As a result, they are pretty reluctant to seek humanitarian assistance because they fear they will be arrested and may be deported,” he said.
Luciano noted there were “huge issues around mental health” among migrant domestic staff working in Lebanon.
