In late September 2024, following vague evacuation warnings from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israeli airstrikes targeted the southern suburbs of Beirut, including the neighborhood of Dahieh, where Pavani* from Sri Lanka had lived for six years as a domestic worker for a Lebanese family.
For weeks leading up to the strikes, Israeli drones had been continuously circling over Pavani’s neighborhood. The tension fueled by repeated warnings sparked widespread panic among civilians. These warnings were often delivered via social media, phone calls, or text messages, with as little as 30 minutes’ notice or during nighttime hours. This left migrant workers like Pavani, who are largely non-Arabic speakers, unprepared and exposed to great risk.
One warning stated: “If you are in a building housing weapons for Hezbollah, move away from the village until further notice.”
The airstrikes targeted a densely populated neighborhood that serves as a Hezbollah stronghold; it is also home to many civilian residential buildings. Among those killed was Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, who was hiding in an underground bunker during the attack.
That night in September, Israeli airstrikes heavily damaged Pavani’s building, leaving her homeless. As a Sri Lankan domestic worker recruited through an agency, she had no say in where she lived and after the airstrikes had nowhere to go. Like countless others in her position, she had no autonomy over her living conditions or safety.
The IDF evacuation warnings drew widespread criticism for being vague, and for lacking clear timelines or information about safe routes out. Amnesty International condemned them as legally inadequate and misleading, and in violation of international humanitarian law obligations to minimize civilian harm.
The Lebanese family Pavani had long worked for had disappeared months earlier under the pretense of going on “vacation,” promising to return but never doing so. Before leaving, they confiscated Pavani’s passport, making her escape from the country almost impossible.
During periods of relative calm in Lebanon, tens of thousands of women from South Asia and the Philippines have migrated to the country, primarily for domestic work, often unaware of the oppressive kafala sponsorship system that legally binds them to their employers. Many face exploitation and deliberate isolation from diasporic support networks. They have limited legal recourse against systemic abuses.
Pavani’s repeated attempts to reach the family she worked for following the airstrikes proved futile, forcing her to abandon the severely damaged structure amid fears of additional strikes. Airwars, a conflict monitoring group, described Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon as the “most intense aerial campaign” to take place outside Gaza in the past two decades.
Amid escalating violence, dozens of migrant workers were killed or injured, though precise casualty figures remain unclear within the broader context of the 4,000 total reported deaths and injuries reported. By November, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that approximately 25,000 migrant workers had been displaced from their homes and workplaces because of the conflict.
Nowhere to Run
The day after the Israeli airstrikes, Pavani sought shelter at multiple locations in Beirut but was turned away due to her non-Lebanese status. Despite the creation of over 900 shelters across Lebanon, migrant workers interviewed for this story consistently said they faced systemic discrimination, including repeated denial of entry and expulsion. The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR documented over 1.3 million displaced individuals, which strained shelter capacity.
Pavani, with almost no money or anywhere to go, huddled with other Sri Lankan women she knew, enduring weeks of sleeping outdoors until a local aid organization offered them refuge. As her family’s breadwinner, every time she called her family back home, she forced herself to tell them that everything was fine.
“Those were the most terrifying weeks of my life. We took turns sleeping in fear of being robbed, raped, or kidnapped,” Pavani recalls.
IOM appealed for emergency support for Lebanon’s estimated 176,000 migrants, including female domestic workers, who were forced to flee in search of safety amid the conflict. Due to the amount of undocumented workers in the country, the true number is likely significantly higher.
According to officials at IOM Lebanon, “The war displaced many migrants, leading to severe challenges in shelter, food, and mental health. Exploitation and abuse were heightened, with 70 percent of migrants being women and the kafala system exacerbated (existing) vulnerabilities.”
Lebanese authorities were widely criticized for this practice, though officials have consistently denied allegations of discrimination against foreign domestic workers.
Migrant workers in Lebanon faced similar hardships following the Beirut port explosion and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, when they were abandoned by employers and neglected by authorities. These conditions have been extensively documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Despite repeated pleas, Pavani’s employer refused to provide her with the necessary documentation and continued to withhold her passport, leaving her stranded. Meanwhile, others have faced unaffordable fines for expired residence permits, and undocumented workers have avoided shelters due to fears of detention or imprisonment.
While some migrant workers managed to leave via flights organized by the Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, and Philippine embassies in coordination with IOM, the majority faced insurmountable barriers during the conflict’s peak.
Despite numerous pleas to her consulate, Pavani and hundreds of fellow migrant workers found obtaining emergency documentation and repatriation flights inaccessible. Monthly salaries of $200-400 in Lebanon left plane tickets, which soared into the thousands of dollars due to intense demand, financially out of reach for most migrant workers.
Foreign diplomatic missions attempted to negotiate exit permits and cover costs such as fines and flight expenses on a case-by-case basis, but these efforts achieved limited success due to systemic inefficiencies and inconsistent consular responsiveness complicating evacuation efforts for citizens desperate to leave. The most updated figures on successful evacuations remain unknown.
A Lucrative, Fraudulent Industry
The sponsorship-based kafala system for migrant workers has been deeply entrenched in Lebanon’s labor market since the 1960s. It has been considered a more attractive and liberal option for workers compared to the more conservative and restrictive Gulf where the deplorable conditions for Asian migrant workers are better-known. The system, however, is similar: migrants pay thousands to brokers who promise well-paying jobs, but most are left in heavy debt and in nightmarish situations.
According to Human Rights Watch, “One of the main reasons is that it is a lucrative business for many involved: one study found that the kafala system generates more than 100 million U.S. dollars annually. Recruitment agencies, many of which have been accused of subjecting workers to abuse, forced labor and human trafficking, generate 57.5 million US dollars a year in revenue, according to the same study.”
According to officials at IOM Lebanon, the kafala system in Lebanon and across the Middle East forces migrant workers to, “choose between accepting exploitative working conditions, and wage theft, or falling into irregular status, limiting their access to assistance and increasing the risk of falling victim to human trafficking, sexual exploitation, exploitative working conditions, detention, and deportation.”
“It does create quite an unbalanced power dynamic between the person who is employed and the employer. The lack of legal protections in the system due to the sponsorship creates situations where migrants are entirely reliant on the employer’s goodwill, or not, in terms of freedom of movement, access to services, respecting contractual obligations, which include health insurance, including a ticket home every X amount of years. Often we have seen employers confiscating personal documents, which also had a huge impact during the war,” says IOM.
Those who do have the courage to flee are deemed “runaways” and risk arrest, imprisonment, or deportation. Immigration crackdowns by the Lebanese authorities frequently target migrants who don’t have sponsors, who are called “freelance workers” as they are easy targets. Employers also use the tactic of falsely accusing workers of theft or property damage in retaliation for them leaving.
Throughout Pavani’s time in Lebanon, even before the most recent war, she had endured a series of devastating events: the catastrophic Beirut port explosion, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the country’s economic collapse. She often had wages withheld and carried a heavy debt to the recruitment agency in Sri Lanka that had facilitated her journey to Lebanon. Denied days off, even during illness, she was confined to a small, suffocating room that became a virtual prison and often contemplated suicide after repeated beatings and sexual assault by people the family “rented” her out to against her will to clean their houses.
A study by Human Rights Watch found that “migrant domestic workers in Lebanon were dying at a rate of more than one per week from suicide or in botched escapes.” To make matters worse, many of those who entered the country legally have since lost their legal status and this means they cannot access the healthcare system.
Increasingly desperate after not being paid for months during the pandemic, Pavani was forced to turn to sex work she was introduced to by other migrant women when she was allowed out of the house. Even though she desperately wants to go home, she now fears being disowned by her family because of this.
In Sri Lanka and across South Asia, victims of sexual and psychological violence are often blamed and stigmatized which stops people from speaking out, returning home, or even revealing this information to others in their diaspora who could tell one of their family members back home.
Despite Bans, People Keep Coming
Despite the well-known risks of war, abuse, and deception, scores of Asian migrant workers keep coming to Lebanon seeking a better life. With roiling economic and political instability at home, high demand persists for migrant labor despite Lebanon’s own constant turmoil. Recruitment agencies continue to prey on vulnerable migrants with fraudulent offers.
With a sizable diaspora in Lebanon, established Filipino migrant organizations do their best to warn their fellow citizens of the risks of coming, but it does not deter everyone.
“People still keep falling for these grand promises because of economic desperation at home. The money they earn still often exceeds what they can earn in their home countries,” says Maria* from the Philippines, who has been in Beirut for almost two decades, rarely seeing her family and watching her children grow up through video calls.
“Still, the biggest fear for us is returning home with nothing to show for all of these years spent abroad and having to leave once again,” she says.
According to a report by Amnesty International, “all migrant domestic workers are excluded from the Lebanese Labour Law and are governed instead by the kafala system, which ties the legal residency of the worker to the contractual relationship with the employer. If this employment relationship ends, even in cases of abuse, the worker loses regular migration status. Moreover, the worker cannot change their employer without the latter’s permission. This allows the employer to coerce the worker to accept exploitative working conditions. If a migrant domestic worker refuses such conditions and decides to leave the home of the employer without the latter’s consent, the worker risks losing their residency status and consequently detention and deportation.”
Alarmed by widespread labor abuses and the exclusion of migrant domestic workers from legal protections under the kafala system, countries such as Ethiopia, Nepal, and the Philippines have imposed travel restrictions barring their nationals from domestic work in Lebanon. Despite these bans, workers still keep coming, using indirect routes, which makes their status even more precarious in Lebanon.
Filipino domestic workers arriving in Lebanon post-ban have entered through smuggling or human trafficking routes, leaving them unregistered with the Philippine embassy. Officials typically learn of these cases only when workers seek assistance to address issues with employers or recruiters, and by then there is little that can be done to help them.
According to IOM, while many Lebanese citizens returned home quickly after the airstrikes, some migrants remain displaced and face challenges in finding employment and housing.
“There is the ongoing need for support in terms of shelter, food, hygiene supplies, and psychosocial support. And there is significant importance of regularization options and the need for systemic changes to improve the situation for migrants in Lebanon.”
The conflict is not over. Despite an established ceasefire in November, recent new airstrikes on Beirut and further escalations are again possible in the coming weeks and months. This could put thousands of civilians and migrant workers in peril once again. Thousands still hope to be repatriated, but few legal avenues exist and even fewer workers have the economic means to do so.
“If war breaks out again, I am willing to get on a boat to leave this place,” Pavani says. “It’s unbearable.”
*Names have been changed to protect the people interviewed for this story from reprisals from their employers and the Lebanese government.