William Christou
The Guardian / October 5, 2024
Demand is high amid Israeli bombardment but prohibitive cost and visa requirements mean it is not an option for most.
Beirut – The Princess 2010 yacht is an impressive specimen of a boat. Before the war, its gleaming white hull could be seen cruising Lebanon’s coastline, revellers making sure they enjoyed every inch of the 24-metre-long vessel they each paid $600 to ride.
Since Israel started an intense bombing campaign across wide swathes of Lebanon on 23 September, the Princess has been making a very different type of journey. The $1.3m craft has been ferrying families from Beirut to Cyprus, bottles of champagne replaced by hastily packed suitcases.
“The trips are fully booked, we have done about 30 trips on our two boats since the bombing started [on 23 September],” said Khailil Bechara, a broker who works with ship captains to transport people to Cyprus.
At $1,800 a head, a seat on a boat bound for Cyprus is not cheap. But demand is high as people desperately try to find any route out of Lebanon.
Israel’s military campaign has killed nearly 2,000 people and wounded more than 9,000 since fighting between it and Hezbollah started on 8 October last year, with most of those casualties incurred since 23 September. More than 1 million people have been displaced since then, Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said on Thursday.
Huge explosions shook the sky in the vicinity of Beirut’s main airport in the early hours of Friday. Although the airport is still open, only Lebanon’s national flag carrier, Middle East Airlines, will fly there. People have been fighting for the few seats left on departing flights, while embassies have been chartering private flights for their nationals. On Friday, Greece sent a C-130 military transport plane to Beirut to evacuate 60 Greek and Cypriot citizens.
Some private jets will no longer touch down in the airport, the owner of a private plane told The Guardian. They said their plane was grounded in Paphos airport in Cyprus for insurance purposes.
Instagram is full of sponsored content advertising boats to people who want to flee Lebanon by any means possible. Some boats resemble those that for years have departed from the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli towards Cyprus or Italy, overloaded with Syrian refugees hoping for a better life.
“Lots of people have been asking for these trips … Even though the airport is still open, people who have money are willing to pay,” Bechara said. The boats he worked with held up to 15 people, were insured and were fully compliant with safety standards, he added.
Most Lebanese people cannot afford a space on luxury yachts, and many do not have the visa required to land on Cyprus;s shores.
Sahar Sourani, a 33-year-old Lebanese woman who works for an international NGO, has been trying to figure out a way to get her parents and brother’s family out of the country. Her family left Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, after an Israeli airstrike levelled a nearby residential building on 20 September, killing 45 people.
Sourani’s family cannot travel via boat to Cyprus due to its prohibitive cost and the visa requirements. They planned to travel to the border with Syria and take a bus through Syria to Amman, Jordan, where they would then board a flight to Muscat, Oman, where her sister lives.
The Lebanese government has said that more than 300,000 people have crossed from Lebanon into Syria over the last 10 days to escape Israel’s bombing campaign. On Friday morning, however, they woke up to news that Masnaa, the main border crossing to Syria, had been bombed by Israel, after the Israeli military claimed that Hezbollah was using it to smuggle weapons into Lebanon.
Sourani immediately called a travel agency, who managed to book her parents on separate flights, a little over a week from now. They could not travel on the same flight due to a lack of availability seats.
“I’m afraid that the airport is going to close before they get to leave. I’ve been checking the calendar and counting the days. Things are getting crazier every day,” Sourani said. She herself will not leave, as she is waiting to see whether or not fighting affects her neighbourhood in Achrafieh, east Beirut.
“I never imagined or accepted to leave Lebanon fleeing. I might have left here because I found a better opportunity elsewhere, this is life. But being forced to leave, no one would accept this,” Sourani said.
For those who have managed to leave Lebanon, their journeys were fraught with difficulty. Rasha Jabr, a 39-year-old consultant working in the humanitarian field, was struggling to find any place on a flight for her and her daughter, who was supposed to start university in Germany next week.
Her husband advised her to pack her things and go to the airport every day at 6am to wait on standby in case someone did not show up to their flight. Eventually, through an enterprising travel agent, she managed to find a seats on a plane heading to the United Arab Emirates.
As she put her bags in the car to head to the airport on Thursday night, bombing began near her house in Choueifat, a neighbourhood close to the southern suburbs of Beirut. “As we were putting out stuff in the car, black dust was falling all over us because of the chemicals in the missiles,” Jabr said.
Israel was carrying out some of the most intensive strikes since the beginning of the war, in what it said were strikes targeting Hashem Safieddine, the presumed successor of the late secretary general of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by the Israeli military killed last week.
“I was in the airport as they were bombing, just thinking, will they bomb the plane? Will they bomb the airport?” Jabr said. With smoke from Israeli bombing visible from the airport, her plane took off and she made it to the UAE. “I am more fortunate than others because I have the option, because I have the residency in Dubai, but I have a feeling of hidden guilt, and that’s not something we can process easily,” Jabr said.
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist
