An Australian mother and her four children have been left homeless on the streets of Beirut and have appealed to the Albanian government to take them home after Israel launched devastating bombing raids on southern Lebanon.
Fiona Ollaik and her four children, originally from Werribee, southwest of Melbourne, narrowly escaped disaster when they became aware that Israel had attacked their apartment building as part of widespread attacks in southern Beirut.
They quickly fled the unit and found themselves wandering aimlessly through the streets of the Lebanese capital.
“We don’t know where to go and nothing is open,” Ms Ollaik told 7News.
‘The children are shocked. We’re terrified. We don’t sleep.
“We really want the Australian government to get us out of here as quickly as possible.”
Asked about the family’s predicament, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reiterated the government’s call over the past two months for Australians to leave Lebanon as soon as possible.
‘Come home. There are still commercial opportunities available,” Albanese said.
‘What we do is look at all the measures at our disposal. We reiterate the call for Australians in Lebanon to come home.”
“We don’t know where to go and nothing is open,” Ms Ollaik told 7News of her family’s predicament in Beirut. ‘The children are shocked. We’re terrified. We don’t sleep
However, it is clear that the options for leaving for those stuck in the country are limited as few flights are offered at prohibitive costs.
Thousands more Australians are believed to be currently in Lebanon.
The government could be forced to organize emergency charter flights to rescue them if the conflict escalates.
Meanwhile, Australian officials are trying to help stranded people organize safe passage, and Ms Ollaik says she and her children are “waiting for a miracle”.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that up to a million people have already been displaced from their homes as a result of Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon.
The scale of the Israeli army’s attacks escalated in the second half of September, after a year of low-level conflict between Israel and Hezbollah following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.
Hezbollah has fired projectiles into Israel over the past year in a tactic aimed at easing pressure on Hamas as it was under attack in Gaza.
Rescue teams search for victims after an Israeli airstrike hit two adjacent buildings, in the Ain el-Delb neighborhood east of the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon
Last week, a massive attack took place in the area of Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Lebanon near a refugee camp. killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and an unknown number of civilians after it razed several residential buildings.
In recent days, the Israeli army has launched “limited, localized and targeted ground attacks” on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, significantly escalating the conflict.
According to the Ministry of Health, more than a thousand people have been killed in Lebanon in the past two weeks.
In Australia, thousands of people took to the streets in Sydney and Melbourne, some waving Hezbollah flags and portraits of Nasrallah in a protest that was widely condemned by politicians and police.