Under bombs in Lebanon, Americans feel abandoned
As the Israeli bombing of Lebanon escalates, Karam, an American citizen stranded in Lebanon, says she feels abandoned.
On Monday, Karam called the US embassy in Beirut for help in fleeing the violence.
But the embassy said she needed to find a way out of the country by herself. She compared that response with how the US State Department swiftly chartered special flights and a ship to evacuate American citizens in Israel after Hamas’s October 7 attack last year.
“Americans of Lebanese descent have been treated as lesser US citizens than Israeli US citizens. It is as if we don’t exist,” she told Al Jazeera.
US Muslim group highlights Americans killed in Israeli attacks
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights group, has criticised the US government for failing to address Israel’s killing of Americans in Gaza and now Lebanon.
The condemnation came after American citizen Kamel Jawad was reportedly killed in a recent Israeli air raid on Lebanon.
“Only politics and racism could explain the Biden administration’s disgusting pattern of indifference to Americans of colour killed by the Israeli government – from journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to Aysenur Ezgi Eygi to Kamel Jawad,” CAIR said in a statement.
“Every member of the Biden administration’s foreign policy team should be ashamed of themselves for enabling Israel’s war crimes against American citizens and countless other civilians. We do not expect this feckless and complicit administration to do anything to hold Kemal’s killers accountable, and we are done asking them to treat American Muslims killed overseas like human beings worthy of US protection.”
Israeli bombing in central Beirut threatens to ‘drag’ Lebanon into war
This wasn’t an air raid in the southern suburbs of Beirut. It was in Bashoura, only a kilometre from the prime minister’s office. It’s a middle-class neighbourhood that was hit very hard. We’re hearing that at least six people were killed.
This is the second attack outside the southern suburbs. The attack is worrying as there are no safe places now. This is what people keep telling me.
Israel is keeping up these attacks on Beirut. It calls it going after Hezbollah. But it is now hitting close to the prime minister’s office and that’s a very worrying thought for Lebanon, as the war is no longer confined to Israel-Hezbollah.
People are extremely worried that if Israel keeps hitting and getting closer to the Lebanese government, or civilian or military infrastructure, it will drag Lebanon into this fray.
A man looks at a damaged building at the site of an Israeli raid on central Beirut’s Bashoura neighbourhood in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 3
‘Anxiety, fear’ abound in Beirut as Israeli military attacks without warning: UN official
The UN’s special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said “anxiety and fear are omnipresent” in Beirut following another night of Israeli attacks in the heart of the Lebanese capital.
“Another sleepless night in Beirut. Counting the blasts shaking the city. No warning sirens. Not knowing what’s next. Only that uncertainty lies ahead,” Hennis-Plasschaert said on social media.
“Anxiety and fear are omnipresent,” she said.
Another sleepless night in Beirut. Counting the blasts shaking the city. No warning sirens. Not knowing what’s next. Only that uncertainty lies ahead. Anxiety and fear are omnipresent.
— Jeanine Hennis (@JeanineHennis) October 3, 2024
