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

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

2024-10-04 23:38 Last Updated At：23:41

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S.-arranged flights have brought about 350 Americans and their immediate 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.

Israel has opened a pounding air campaign deep into Lebanon and a ground incursion in the country's south targeting the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group. Iran on Tuesday fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel, leaving the region bracing for any Israeli retaliation and fearing 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.

As Israeli bombardments targeting senior Hezbollah leaders shook southern neighborhoods in Lebanon's capital last week, “We could still see, hear and feel everything” despite fleeing to the mountains outside Beirut, said Nicolette Hutcherson, a longtime humanitarian volunteer living in Lebanon with her husband and three children.

The only seats Hutcherson's family could find on commercial carriers were for flights weeks away and for thousands of dollars, she said. Ultimately, Hutcherson and her young children joined crowds heading to Lebanon's Mediterranean marinas, finding spots on pleasure boats turned evacuation ships for the nine-hour ride to Cyprus.

Her husband was able to find a single seat out on a plane days later to join them.

Another American family was mourning Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a resident of metro Detroit’s Dearborn area, who was killed in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. Family members said 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 them 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 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. Limits on withdrawing money from banks due to Lebanon’s longstanding economic collapse and intermittent electricity and internet have made it difficult, they said.

Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer based in Washington, 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.

By Thursday, some Americans said their loved ones had been able to secure tickets for upcoming flights and 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.

Cappelletti reported from Saginaw, Michigan. AP reporters Tara Copp and Lolita C. Baldor contributed from Washington.

One year in, war casts a shadow over every aspect of life in Israel

2024-10-05 13:04 Last Updated At：13:11

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — At a busy Tel Aviv entertainment district, diners spill into outdoor seating and clink glasses as music fills the air. There’s laughter, there’s life. But all around the patrons, staring down from lampposts and shop windows, are pictures of hostages held in Gaza, stark reminders that Israel is at war and forever scarred by the deadliest attack in its history.

As Israel's war with Hamas reaches its one-year mark, it can seem on the surface that much of life in the country has returned to normal. But with many still reeling from Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, hostages remaining in captivity and a new front of warwith Hezbollah in the north, many Israelis feel depressed, despondent and angry as the war stretches into its second year.

Uncertainty over the future has cast a pall over virtually every part of daily life, even as people try to maintain a sense of normalcy.

“The conversation about the situation is always there," said activist Zeev Engelmayer, whose daily postcard project featuring illustrations of hostages or Israel's new reality has become a fixture at anti-war protests. "Even those who are sitting in coffee shops, they’re talking about it, in every single situation I see it. It’s impossible to get away from it. It has entered into every vibration of our life.”

Hamas' attack in which some 1,200 people were killed and 250 kidnapped shattered Israelis’ sense of security and stability in their homeland.

Many have been rattled by the war's evolution. Nearly 100 hostages remain in Gaza, with less than 70 believed to be alive. Israelis have experienced attacks — missiles from Iran and Hezbollah, explosive drones from Yemen, fatal shootings and stabbings — as the region braces for further escalation.

They've watched as Israel is accused of committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza and becomes increasingly isolated internationally.

“I’m almost 80 — we grew up in this country with a feeling that we have short wars, and we win them quickly,” said Israeli historian Tom Segev, who described new feelings of utter hopelessness. “We’re not used to a long war.”

Israelis have long harbored a sense that their country, born of the Holocaust's ashes and surviving a panoply of regional threats, is a success story, Segev said. They've strived, he added, for a normality akin to that of European and North American people, though their reality for decades has been anything but.

“I think that history is going backward,” he said of the past year. “Everything we have achieved on our way to becoming a normal state isn’t happening.”

Reminders are everywhere. At a Hebrew University graduation in Jerusalem, a large yellow ribbon was placed in front of the stage. A graduate who didn't attend because his brother was killed in Gaza the previous day was honored.

Israel's longstanding internal divisions briefly eased in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack, but have only intensified since. Weekly protests calling for a cease-fire deal that would free hostages are attended mostly by secular Jewish Israelis who oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

According to a September poll by Jerusalem-based think tank Israel Democracy Institute, 61 percent of right-wing Jewish Israelis — Netanyahu's base — support the war continuing.

Occupied with their own trauma, most Israelis paid scant attention to the ongoing destruction in Gaza, even as the Health Ministry there put the Palestinian death toll at more than 41,000. Israeli media have reported little on the devastation. Israelis calling for a cease-fire are driven overwhelmingly by the hostages' plight.

Many Israelis are furious at leaders and the military for not preventing Hamas’ attack. Tens of thousands of people are expected at an alternative ceremony marking one year since then, as a statement against the government's official commemoration. The state ceremony is being prerecorded without a live audience, in part because of fears of heckling and disruptions.

“The thing we lost on Oct. 7 — and we haven’t gotten it back — is our feeling of security,” Muli Segev, executive producer of "Eretz Nehederet," a popular sketch comedy show. “Despite everything, we have been able to create a life here that’s pretty open and Western.

"Especially in Tel Aviv, we go about our lives, and we don’t think about the fact that our lives are really just pauses between wars and between explosions of violence."

In the war's early months, the show's sketches were gentler, focusing on what united Israeli society, such as the massive civilian volunteer response. Over time, they featured more pointed satire, including a reimagining of negotiations if the hostages were Israeli politicians' children — released in less than two hours.

Parts of life have rebounded — beaches full of people, bustling cafes, concerts and sports back on schedules. But residents also check for the nearest bomb shelter, deal with school cancellations when violence flares up, and avoid domestic travel hubs that are now off-limits. Heartbreaking news arrives regularly, including the deaths of six hostages in August.

“It’s a nightmare; we’re just getting used to it,” said Maya Brandwine, a 33-year-old graphic designer who witnessed the Jaffa shooting that killed seven on Tuesday. “I have so little hope. I’m sure the situation will only get worse.”

Dror Rotches, a 47-year-old graphic designer, said from a Tel Aviv coffee shop: “We try to go out when we can, meet friends and try to forget for a few hours. Then we go home and keep slogging through the mud.”

Others simply can't return home. More than 60,000 from Israel's northern border with Lebanon are displaced. Thousands from the southern towns ransacked Oct. 7 are in temporary housing. Tens of thousands of reserve soldiers are serving their second or third tour of duty, straining their families and jobs.

“As the war goes on and on and we can’t see the end, there’s also a type of very large worry over the future, and, for some, if there is even a future here,” Muli Segev said.

Cafe Otef seems like any of Tel Aviv's ubiquitous coffee shops: Patrons laugh and sip specialty coffee beside a playground; light rock music plays. But next to the sandwiches and cakes are chocolates made from the recipes of Dvir Karp, who was killed in the Oct. 7 attack, and cheeses from Kibbutz Be’eri, where more than 100 died and 30 were taken hostage. Totes and T-shirts for sale declare “We shall thrive again.”

The cafe, named for the region next to the Gaza border, is run by residents of Re'im, one of the kibbutzes struck. It's the second shop in the new chain, each aiming to support people of a southern Israeli town where lives were upended.

“The war still continues for almost a year, and I feel that if we won’t live, we will die,” said Reut Karp, cafe owner and Dvir's ex-wife. She lives with most of her kibbutz in temporary housing nearby.

The cafe gives her purpose as her community deals with trauma and the uncertainty of returning home. While it's strange to see people flowing through the doors, going about life as normal, she and the staff have found comfort in the routine.

“We must take ourselves out of bed and continue to live and to work and to have the hope," Karp said. "Because without this hope, we don’t have anything.”