An Australian mother and her four children have been left homeless on the streets of Beirut pleading for the Albanese government to get them home after Israel launched devastating bombing raids on southern Lebanon.
Fiona Ollaik and her four children originally from Werribee, south-west of Melbourne, narrowly escaped disaster when they became aware Israel had targeted their apartment block as part of widespread attacks in Beirut’s south.
They quickly fled the unit only to find themselves aimlessly wandering the streets of the Lebanese capital.
‘We don’t know where to go and nothing’s open,’ Ms Ollaik told 7News.
‘The kids are horrified. We’re terrified. We’re not sleeping.
‘We really want the Australian government to get us out of here ASAP.’
Asked about the family’s predicament, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeated the government’s call of the past two months for Australians to leave Lebanon at the earliest opportunity.
‘Come home. There are still commercial opportunities available,’ Mr Albanese said.
‘What we are doing is looking at all the measures available at our disposal. We repeat the call for Australians in Lebanon to come home.’
‘We don’t know where to go and nothing’s open,’ Ms Ollaik told 7News of her family’s predicament in Beirut. ‘The kids are horrified. We’re terrified. We’re not sleeping’
It’s understood, however, that options to leave for those trapped in the country are limited, with few flights on offer at prohibitive cost.
Thousands more Australians are believed to be currently in Lebanon.
The government could be forced to organise emergency charter flights to rescue them as the conflict escalates.
Meanwhile Australian officials are trying to help those stranded to organise safe passage out and Ms Ollaik says she andher children are ‘waiting for a miracle’.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates up to one million people are already displaced from their homes as a result of the Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon.
The scale of the Israeli military’s attacks escalated in the second half of September after a year of low-level conflict between Israel and Hezbollah following the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7 last year.
Hezbollah has fired projectiles at Israel in the past year in a tactic designed to relieve pressure on Hamas while it was under attack in Gaza.
Rescue teams search for victims after an Israeli airstrike hit two adjacent buildings, in Ain el-Delb neighbourhood east of the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon
Last week a huge attack in the area of Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Lebanon close to a refugee camp, killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and an unknown number of civilians after it flattened several residential buildings.
In recent days the Israeli military has commenced ‘limited, localised and targeted ground raids’ against Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, in a significant escalation of the conflict.
More than 1,000 people have been killed in Lebanon in the past two weeks, according to the country’s Health Ministry.
In Australia thousands of people took to the streets of Sydney and Melbourne, some waving Hezbollah flags and carrying portraits of Nasrallah in a protest widely condemned by politicians and the police.
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