After Israel dropped more than 80 bombs, including American-made 2,000-lb bombs, on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut, Hana Bechara, one of 86,000 U.S. citizens who live in Lebanon, decided it was time to leave.
Bechara started to make plans to fly her family to Miami, where her two sisters live. However, flights remained few and expensive, and her family — her husband, parents, grandmother, and uncle — are not U.S. citizens and need visas. Bechara reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, asking for financial support and help with securing visas to travel to the U.S.
Then late Monday night, the boom of another Israeli airstrike jolted Bechara and her husband awake in their home just outside Beirut. After she checked on her dog and calmed her nerves enough to return to bed, a second, larger explosion shook their home.
“I really don’t know how to describe it — it felt like a deep strike, the strength of it,” she said. “My final decision [to leave] was when I realized the pressure on my chest, the pain that I would sometimes feel in my chest is not worth it.”
“We, and the U.S. citizens in Palestine, are being treated differently than other U.S. citizens who are in way less danger than we are.”
As the strikes continue, Bechara said the response from the U.S. has been vague and unhelpful. State Department officials have sent her generic security alerts urging her to contact commercial airlines directly for flights out, while acknowledging that airlines were “at reduced capacity,” according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The embassy held an informational session due to the high volume of calls from Americans looking to flee, Bechara said, during which officials answered urgent questions by restating material from past emails.
The most recent email from the embassy sent Monday said they were unable to assist her family but offered to “help U.S. citizens and immediate family members leave Lebanon very soon” without further elaborating on a timeline or the type of assistance.
“We, and the U.S. citizens in Palestine, are being treated differently than other U.S. citizens who are in way less danger than we are,” Bechara said.
Israeli airstrikes have become a nearly daily occurrence in Lebanon over the past two weeks, continuing the wave of attacks that began with the pager and walkie-talkie bombings in mid-September. More than 1,000 people, including dozens of women and children, have died in the recent attacks. Dozens of health workers have also been killed. An American citizen was killed this week as Israel began its ground invasion. The Lebanese government said 1 million people — nearly a fifth of the country’s population — have been displaced by the violence. The United Nations requested from the international community nearly half a billion dollars in humanitarian aid to deal with the mounting crisis.
In June, the U.S. began sending its soldiers close to Lebanon, preparing to assist with evacuating Americans in the event that the Israeli military intensifies its airstrikes or invades the country. Both concerns have become reality in recent days, and the U.S. has yet to enact an evacuation plan. Instead, on Friday, the embassy announced it would not be evacuating its citizens and that Americans must book and pay for their own flights.
Bechara and many other Americans stuck in Lebanon have contrasted the State Department’s responses to the sense of urgency and level of assistance Americans in Israel received following the October 7 attacks. Within several days of the attacks, the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem offered American citizens prearranged charter flights and boat rides to leave the country.
The U.S. has shown its ability to promptly evacuate its citizens en masse before. In 2011, less than a week after protests erupted at Tahrir Square in Cairo, the U.S. government launched an evacuation plan that evacuated more than 1,900 Americans from Egypt on charter flights to European countries in a matter of days.
Amy Fallas, an American citizen who now lives in Beirut as she finishes her dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had been studying abroad in Cairo during the 2011 evacuations. She and her friends lived several blocks from Tahrir Square. As the demonstrators continued to clash with police, Fallas decided to leave. The U.S. Embassy booked her a charter flight which she boarded with a single bag and a signed promissory note to pay the fee of around $800.
Fallas hoped for the same action from the U.S. today that she saw in 2011. This time, however, she’s been left feeling deserted, noting a lack of options and empathy in the statements coming from the U.S. government.
In 2011, “there were people that picked up the phone when I called and everyone was incredibly supportive, and things were organized,” she recalled. “I have absolutely no faith in that anymore, and so what I would want from the U.S. is some effort to try to restore that trust — because at this point, a lot of us do feel like we were abandoned to figure things out on our own.”
In recent days, she has seen her friends and other members of Lebanon’s expatriate community leave with the support of their respective governments.
The United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, Bulgaria, and Cyprus have all begun to evacuate their citizens on charter flights or government planes. Germany this week flew out its embassy’s nonessential staff, their family members, and some German citizens with medical conditions on a military plane, according to reports.
Fallas tried to book her own flights out of Lebanon, but after she’d purchased a ticket, she kept receiving cancellation notices. After multiple attempts, she found a flight with Middle East Airlines departing Friday for Cairo, where she’ll stay with friends — but she knows others looking to leave are not as fortunate.
“I have heard absolutely nothing from the embassy here except for, ‘Sign this crisis intake form, notify us that you’re in the country, and what your plans are,” she said. “Obviously, that’s not sufficient.”
The State Department declined to comment on why the U.S. has yet to begin an operation to evacuate its citizens and instead sent an excerpt of comments made by department spokesperson Matthew Miller at a recent press conference.
“We’re providing them whatever information we can,” Miller said of the 6,000 American citizens in Lebanon who have registered to receive information about evacuating. “To be clear, not all of those American citizens are seeking assistance with departing. People are just looking for information; they’re looking for options. They are a number of American citizens who live in Lebanon who have lived there for years and do not want to depart the country.”
He said the department is working with airlines to provide more flights with seats dedicated to American citizens. On Thursday, Miller said Middle East Airlines, the only airline flying out of Lebanon, had dedicated 1,200 seats for U.S. citizens on commercial flights with tickets priced at $283. About 250 Americans so far have flown out on commercial flights to Turkey, he said.
Over the weekend, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y, called on the State Department to move faster with its evacuation plan, recognizing that commercial flights out of Lebanon “are next to non-existent.”
“As Israel bombards Lebanon, countless American citizens are trapped with their lives endangered,” he wrote on X.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., said Wednesday in an Instagram video that her office was assisting 148 residents from her district evacuate the country, including U.S. Marine Corps veteran Jad Haidar who was stuck in Lebanon with his wife. Also among those stranded was a young mother who struggled to secure an emergency passport from the embassy for her 5-month-old, Tlaib said. The former Marine was able to book a flight out, but Tlaib decried the fact that she had to “call and beg” the U.S. government to act.
“The @StateDept is leaving Americans behind and failing to protect their own citizens,” she wrote on X.
In 2006, the U.S. led another massive evacuation operation — in Lebanon. As part of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israel bombed Beirut’s international airport and destroyed roads and other transportation infrastructure. In July and August of that year, the State and Defense departments evacuated nearly 15,000 Americans from Lebanon to Cyprus, using helicopters, U.S. military ships, and contracted commercial ships, according to a 2007 congressional report on the effort, which the report credited as “one of the largest overseas evacuations of American citizens in recent history.” After Americans arrived in Cyprus, the Defense Department arranged flights for them to the U.S.
Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the D.C.-based think tank Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, said the 2006 operation shows the U.S. has the capability to protect its citizens amid war, but in this case is choosing not to do so. She criticized the U.S. for sending mixed messages of urging people to leave, but not offering ways to evacuate aside from commercial flights, which are difficult to contact. Middle East Airlines is one of the few commercial airlines still operating, though it has even begun to cancel or alter flights after Iran’s recent missile attack on Israel. She said some have had to resort to going to airline offices in person to book flights.
“Imagine asking people to go to their offices in the middle of a war and while there are constantly neighborhoods being evacuated — it’s not particularly safe to be on the streets,” El-Sadany said. “The urging of the U.S. embassy for American citizens to figure out a way to evacuate themselves commercially is just very rich considering the facts on the ground, and we know from prior experiences that the U.S. can do better.”
El-Sadany believes that the State Department is acting differently today than it has in the past because this time, Israel is operating with full U.S. support.
“ Citizens who are of Arab origin and of the Middle East feel like second-class citizens throughout this war.”
“The U.S. government has certain security and policy objectives that are clearly coming ahead of our obligations to U.S. citizens,” she said. “Frankly, this administration has unfortunately shown time and time again that it values civilian life much less than it should, and certainly that it unfortunately does not treat all of its citizens equally. Citizens who are of Arab origin and of the Middle East feel like second-class citizens throughout this war, their voices have not been taken into account, their lives have not mattered as much. We have the infamous example of President Biden discounting the death toll count of Palestinians early on in the war and that has only been consistent.”
On Tuesday, Hajj Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a U.S. citizen, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in his hometown of Nabatieh, one of southern Lebanon’s largest cities. Jawad, also a resident of Tlaib’s Michigan district, had been visiting Lebanon to take care of his elderly mother and in his last days stayed near the hospital in Nabatieh to help the elderly, wounded, and those who couldn’t afford to flee, his family said in a statement. He had donated food, mattresses, and anonymously paid off others’ debts.
The terror of Israeli bombs has overwhelmed everyday life in Lebanon.
Bechara’s husband was working out at a gym inside a hotel where dozens of families displaced from southern Lebanon were seeking refuge when Israel’s sweeping strike on a residential block of a Beirut suburb demolished a number of buildings, killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and an unknown number of civilians. The blasts were so loud that he saw the displaced parents, thinking the hotel was under attack, pick up their children and run for cover.
“Being in this situation, any sound, if your neighbors drop a bottle of water on the floor, if someone closes their gate really loud, we all are just very jumpy the whole time,” Bechara said.
Fallas has also suffered similar post-traumatic stress. She recalled sonic booms from Israeli jets earlier in the summer that felt “like your backyard was being bombed.” Since the recent bombings, sudden noises make her nervous. “You’re just kind of perpetually on alert now,” she said.
While on a walk to get water on Wednesday, a motorcycle sped by. Its engine roared and almost prompted Fallas to scream.
She said she started to consider leaving after the pager attack on September 17 when thousands of the devices exploded in Beirut and across Lebanon. While the bombings largely targeted members of Hezbollah, the devices exploded in homes and public spaces such as grocery stores, killing at least 45 people and injuring more than 3,500 others.
During the attack, Fallas and her friend had been riding in a cab through Beirut. Ambulance after ambulance sped by. Some people on the streets stood bloodied with injuries. Her phone buzzed with texts as friends shared the news.
Since then, she hasn’t been able to sleep well. She often stays awake as late as 4 a.m., either roused by Israeli bombs or anxiously awaiting the next one. At times, when a strike happens, she’ll hop on the phone with her friend and describe what they heard and are seeing, scrolling through social media to try and figure out what happened. They also console each other and offer reassurance. Others in her circle, including people who grew up in Lebanon, have also extended support, telling her how they’ve survived previous conflicts or offering their homes outside of Beirut in case things continue to escalate.
“They’re the ones providing me more support, more than my own government, and they are going to bear the burden of this violence.”
“The Lebanese people have been more reassuring to me and and have provided more for my welfare and my safety — because obviously they’ve gone through things like this, multiple generations have experienced war and instability — and they’re the ones providing me more support, more than my own government, and they are going to bear the burden of this violence,” Fallas said.
Fallas’s family, who live in Washington D.C., has been checking in on her daily, fearful for her safety. Her mother’s family immigrated from El Salvador fleeing the civil war, during which the U.S. sent the country’s government billions in military aid. She noted the irony of fleeing another U.S.-backed war.
She said the U.S. has an obligation to help its citizens flee Lebanon, especially because of the unconditional military aid sent to Israel, allowing it to wage a regional war that has stretched from Gaza to the West Bank, to Yemen, Lebanon, and even Syria.
Finally, Bechara was able to book a flight out of Lebanon for her and her family earlier this week. They will be flying to neighboring Jordan, where her mother’s family grew up and have a home.
Her family’s history is full of displacement and movement. Bechara was born in the U.S. but grew up in Kuwait where her parents had met. Her father’s family was forced to leave Palestine in 1948 amid the Nakba, and fled to Lebanon, where her father was born and raised. In 2011, Bechara moved to Lebanon for university and hasn’t left since. She’s worked at an orphanage and now serves as a program manager at a nonprofit that teaches coding, robotics, and STEM courses.
“Billions of dollars are being spent on weapons. They can afford to support the few of us who are in Lebanon.”
While she acknowledged immigrating to the U.S. would be difficult, regardless of the war, she had expected the U.S. government to offer more assistance in making sure they’re safe amid the fighting.
“Billions of dollars are being spent on weapons,” Bechara said. “They can afford to support the few of us who are in Lebanon.”
She’s relieved that she was able to find a flight — but the earliest one she could book doesn’t leave for another two weeks. She’s nervous that Iran’s recent missile attack into Israel could serve as pretext for even further escalation of the violence in Lebanon. “A lot can happen in one day,” she said.