Bangladeshis in Lebanon: Terrified and displaced

Bangladeshis in Lebanon are passing their days in sheer uncertainty amid a military campaign by Israel.
An estimated 3,000 people from Bangladesh have fled their places of work in the southern part of the Middle Eastern country.
Miraz Mahmud, 26, fled the Navatia region of southern Lebanon with some 30 other Bangladeshis and joined around 220 others at a shelter in the relatively calm Saida region after Israel launched the attack two weeks ago.
“Though there is no attack in the area where I stay now, there is no guarantee that this area will not come under attack,” Miraz told The Daily Star from the shelter yesterday evening. The young man from Noakhali migrated to Lebanon in 2017 and has not visited Bangladesh since then.
The local Bangladeshi community rented the facility where Miraz and others have taken shelter. The evacuees there include 110 women and seven children.
Rabbol Sheikh is one of the Bangladeshis who took the initiative to raise funds from his friends in Lebanon through a Facebook group. The Bangladesh embassy later extended support with rice, oil, and pulses. A Lebanese business community has also helped the evacuees.
“The funds and other kinds of support we have received are not enough to feed them for long,” Rabbol said. It takes around $100 daily to arrange food for the Bangladeshis at the shelter.
According to Babu Saha, another Bangladeshi based in Beirut, the Bangladeshi community in Lebanon has set up many such shelters in comparatively safe places.
He is aware of injuries of at least seven Bangladeshis so far by Israeli strikes. No deaths among the Bangladeshis have been reported yet.
Abdul Karim, president of Lebanon Probashi Bangladeshi Sramik Union in Beirut, said many Bangladeshis want to return home, but many others do not because they think that the war will end. They also spent good amounts of money to migrate to Lebanon.
Miraz is among those who want to return home because they are worried about the war. He urged the Bangladesh government to take immediate steps to repatriate them.
A foreign ministry official said the government is reviewing the options to repatriate them. “We are also discussing the matter with the International Organization for Migration. Fund has also been allocated to feed those living in the shelters,” the official told this correspondent.
Lebanon hosts about 1,00,000 Bangladeshi workers, including the undocumented ones, according to an estimate of the Bangladesh embassy in Beirut.
The Israeli army ordered civilians in 26 border towns in southern Lebanon yesterday to evacuate immediately amid air and ground attacks against what Israel calls Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, the Anadolu Agency of Turkey reported.
At least 1,204 people have been killed and 3,411 injured in the attacks since September 23. Tel Aviv also started a ground invasion of southern Lebanon on October 1.
The military campaign was an escalation in a yearlong conflict between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of Tel Aviv’s brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip that has killed nearly 41,900 people, mostly women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.