Bangladesh announces killing of a worker in Israeli airstrike in Lebanon

The Bangladeshi Foreign Ministry has reported the killing of one of its citizens, a worker, in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. 

The ministry noted that continued Israeli bombardment is complicating efforts to repatriate Bangladeshi nationals.

According to estimates from Dhaka, between 70,000 and 100,000 Bangladeshi citizens work in Lebanon. Last month, the first flights organized by the Bangladeshi government, in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration, brought dozens of Bangladeshi citizens home from Beirut.

In a statement, Bangladesh’s Ambassador to Lebanon, Javed Tanveer Khan, identified the deceased as Mohammad Nizam, 31, who was killed on Saturday afternoon in a strike while stopping at a café on his way to work in Beirut.

Nizam’s older brother, Mohammad Jalal Uddin, told AFP that his brother had lived in Beirut for over a decade and was not among the approximately 1,800 Bangladeshi nationals who had applied for evacuation.

“We want to bury him in our ancestral homeland, and we are currently waiting for the government’s response,” Jalal Uddin said.

However, senior Bangladeshi Foreign Ministry official Shah Mohammad Tanvir Mansur stated that organizing a flight to Beirut will be challenging. “Amid the ongoing conflict, there are hardly any flights from Lebanon to Bangladesh,” he explained. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to bring home our citizens who have requested to return.”

 

AFP