Twenty-one Thais have been killed in the war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas, the prime minister announced Thursday as he departed for Bangkok, where worried families are waiting for their loved ones injured in the conflict.
Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin confirmed that the death toll of her nationals killed in the Hamas attack on Israel had risen to 21, as she boarded a plane returning from Malaysia to Thailand.
Fourteen Thais are also among the hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
At Bangkok International Airport, fifteen Thais – many of them injured in the clashes – are due to arrive Thursday morning aboard a commercial plane.
Most from the kingdom’s most remote, impoverished territories in the northeast worked in Israel as agricultural laborers for potentially four times as much wages that they could send home to their families back home.
“We don’t have much money so he went to Israel, he’s really a good man,” the wife of Somma Sae-ja, who left for Israel two years ago, told AFP.
At the airport, Nantawan Sae-lee, 30, impatiently awaits her return: “I couldn’t sleep that night, I was so excited and so worried,” she says, because her husband was injured shot in one leg.
Other flights are scheduled to repatriate Thais from Israel on Sunday and Wednesday. More than 5,000 of them are seeking to return, out of some 30,000 who work there, particularly in agriculture, according to the Ministry of Labor.