(Toronto) Jalal Tabaja and more than a dozen members of his extended family, most of them Canadian, felt safe in Lebanon until recently.
Although Israeli forces have exchanged fire with Hezbollah militants across the Israel-Lebanon border for nearly a year, their southern villages and Beirut’s southern neighborhoods have been relatively calm.
Now these areas are the target of massive airstrikes. The region is seeing a marked escalation of hostilities as the anniversary of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7 approaches, which exploded the war in the Gaza Strip.
A tragedy made the Tabajas realize how real the danger was. An Israeli airstrike killed Jalal’s parents, both Canadians, last week.
They are among more than 1,600 people killed in recent weeks, according to data reported Thursday by the United Nations International Organization for Migration. Some 6,000 other people were injured.
As he searched for his parents, Tabaja said the carnage he observed, passing the bodies of the victims in the rubble, was the most horrific thing he had ever seen.
“What is happening to Lebanese civilians is unacceptable,” Tabaja said in a telephone interview, speaking from the Lebanese capital. It’s totally inhumane.”
The rest of Mr. Tabaja’s family decided to flee.
Her brother and niece were able to book a commercial flight from Beirut. But Mr. Tabaja, his sister and their families are asking Ottawa for help to leave.
An official told them they could hope for seats on a flight leaving Sunday, he said, but there has been no confirmation yet. In the meantime, they wait at a hotel in northern Beirut, where things are a little calmer — although he said explosions can be heard throughout the city.
Even there, the situation is “actually quite bad, to be honest,” Mr. Tabaja said. The closer you are to Beirut, the more dangerous it is,” he explained.
Leave the country
Global Affairs Canada has been urging Canadians to leave the country for months, well before the current crisis.
The department said this week it continues to help Canadians, permanent residents and their immediate family members flee as the conflict between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah intensifies.
Nearly 25,000 Canadians are currently in Lebanon, about 5,000 of them have requested help and authorities have contacted more than 2,300 people to offer them flight options organized by the federal government, he said. noted.
“As trade options continue to be affected by the situation, Canadians in Lebanon must leave now and take the first seat offered,” urged Global Affairs Canada in a press release released Thursday.
The situation could worsen at any time and make it very difficult to leave by commercial means. Airspace closures and flight cancellations or diversions are likely.
Global Affairs Canada
Countries like Germany, Japan, France and the United States were evacuating their citizens on charter flights.
Two flights open to Canadians took off Thursday with 275 passengers, less than half the capacity of the planes, the ministry said. Those evacuated included people from “like-minded countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and the United States,” Global Affairs said.
The department added that other flights earlier this week brought more than 300 Canadians to safety and that nearly 900 seats would be available on flights departing between Friday and Sunday.
A deadly conflict
The Israeli army says it has killed 250 Hezbollah members in Lebanon since its ground incursion began Monday evening. Israel said most of the nine Israeli soldiers killed died in close combat with Hezbollah fighters.
The Lebanese government said up to a million people have fled their homes in the country and more than 185,000 have traveled to neighboring Syria. An Israeli airstrike cut off a major highway connecting the two countries on Friday.
Mr. Tabaja, who lived in Ottawa for nearly a decade and has an engineering degree from Carleton University, said he was grateful to the Canadian government for its response.
He noted that the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been in direct communication with his family since the death of his parents.
“They tried to help,” he said. I’m pretty sure they’re doing their best. »
But he said he wishes the government had been better prepared for an evacuation and had done more to ensure Canadians in the country took their warnings seriously.
“I think they should have done a better job or at least tried to reach out to people in different ways,” he said.
Mr. Tabaja said he and his family planned to stay in Qatar or Bahrain once they managed to leave Lebanon, in order to remain closer to their homes and jobs. There is still hope that the violence will subside and they can return, he said.