US arranges flights to bring Americans out of Lebanon as others seek escape

[October 04, 2024]  By ELLEN KNICKMEYER, MATTHEW LEE and JOEY CAPPELLETTI

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S.-arranged flights have brought about 250 Americans and their relatives out of Lebanon this week during escalated fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, while thousands of others still there face airstrikes and diminishing commercial flights.

In Washington, senior State Department and White House officials met Thursday with two top Arab American officials to discuss U.S. efforts to help American citizens leave Lebanon. The two leaders also separately met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security.

Michigan state Rep. Alabas Farhat and Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, used the White House meeting to "really drive home a lot of important points about the issues our community members are facing on the ground and a lot of the logistical problems that they’re encountering with it when it comes to this evacuation,” Ayoub said.

Some officials and community leaders in Michigan, home to the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, are calling on the U.S. to start an evacuation. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said that was not being considered right now.

“The U.S. military is, of course, on the ready and has a whole wide range of plans. Should we need to evacuate American citizens out of Lebanon, we absolutely can,” Singh told reporters. She added, “We haven’t been called to do that.”

Israel has stepped up airstrikes and launched a ground incursion into southern Lebanon targeting Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant leaders. Iran on Tuesday fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel, stoking fears that the escalating attacks, including an Israeli response, will explode into an all-out regional war.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas, another Iranian-backed militant group, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, triggering the war in Gaza.

Other countries, from Greece to the United Kingdom, Japan and Colombia, have arranged flights or sent military planes to ferry out their citizens.

A U.S. family was mourning Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a resident of metro Detroit’s Dearborn area, who was killed in southern Lebanon on Tuesday after they say he stayed to help civilians too old, infirm or poor to flee.

He had been on the phone with his daughter Tuesday when the impact of a strike knocked him off his feet, his daughter, Nadine Kamel Jawad, said in a statement.

“He simply got up, found his phone, and told me he needed to finish praying in case another strike hit him,” she said.

The State Department has been telling Americans for almost a year not to travel to Lebanon and advising Americans to leave the country on commercial flights for months. It also has made clear that government-run evacuations are rare, while offering emergency loans to aid travel out of Lebanon.

Some Americans said their relatives who are U.S. citizens or green-card holders have been struggling for days or weeks to get seats on flights out of Lebanon. They say limits on withdrawing money from banks due to Lebanon’s longstanding economic collapse and intermittent electricity and internet have made it difficult.

A Greek military transport aircraft carrying Greek and Cypriot citizens evacuated from Lebanon, is seen behind an MEA airlines, after it landed at Larnaca airport, Cyprus, on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer based in Washington, said she paid $5,000 to get a female relative on the last seat of a flight out of Beirut on Saturday.

“She was on her way to the airport” when Israeli began one of its first days of intensified bombing, Abou-Chedid said Thursday.

Jenna Shami, a Lebanese American in Dearborn, Michigan, described American citizens and green-card holders in her family struggling to contact the U.S. Embassy after airstrikes forced some from their lodgings in Lebanon.

The family had tried for weeks to get seats on commercial flights out, facing increasing ticket prices and cancellations, she said.

The U.S. Embassy offered loans for charter flights, but Americans on their own could find no planes to hire, she said.

Shami and another family, of a Lebanese American military veteran from Texas, said their loved ones had just gotten tickets for upcoming flights and that they were hopeful.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the U.S. would continue to organize flights as long the security situation in Lebanon is dire and there is demand.

Miller said Lebanon’s flag carrier, Middle East Airlines, also had set aside about 1,400 seats on flights for Americans over the past week. Several hundred had taken them, he said.

Miller could not speak to the cost of the airline's flights, over which the U.S. government has no regulatory oversight, but said the maximum fare that would be charged for a U.S.-organized contract flight would be $283 per person.

More than 6,000 American citizens have contacted the U.S. Embassy in Beirut seeking information about departing the country over the past week.

Not all of those have actually sought assistance in leaving, and Miller said the department understood that some Americans, many of them dual U.S.-Lebanese nationals and longtime residents of the country, may choose to stay.

Miller said the embassy is prepared to offer temporary loans to Americans who choose to remain in Lebanon but want to relocate to a potentially safer area of the country. The embassy also would provide emergency loans to Americans who wish to leave on the U.S.-contracted flights.
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Cappelletti contributed from Saginaw, Michigan. AP reporters Tara Copp and Lolita C. Baldor contributed from Washington.

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