Invisible in War: The Exclusion of Migrant Workers from Humanitarian Protection in Lebanon

I remember walking on the glass-covered streets of Beirut in August 2020 in the wake of the largest non-nuclear explosion in recent history and seeing the army checking ID cards to make sure the aid they were distributing was only going to Lebanese recipients. For the authorities, people from other nationalities did not deserve the government’s aid even if they had been injured or lost their homes and livelihoods.  In the weeks that followed, as the state broadcasted the names and faces of those killed in the Beirut port explosion, many migrant workers remained unidentified and excluded from the authorities’ official list of victims.

This episode is unfortunately not the exception in Lebanon’s treatment of migrant workers, particularly in times of crisis. Since the start of the current war in October 2023, horror stories about migrant domestic workers began surfacing. Families in neighborhoods targeted by Israel sometimes locked their resident employees inside their homes and abandoned them without food or their legal documents. Others left their employees on the streets without paying their salaries, often with nothing but the clothes they were wearing.

The supposed ceasefire with Israel that was agreed upon in November 2024 collapsed in late February 2026, marked by mass evacuation orders that forcibly displaced more than one million people, including 48,000 migrant workers. Migrant workers are mostly women from South Asia and Africa, who come to Lebanon under the Kafala system for work.

“If I stay back, I fail my community”

Excluded from humanitarian relief efforts coordinated by the state and by international and local organizations, migrant workers organized and coordinated their own emergency responses. They provided shelter by inviting abandoned workers into their own homes, preparing meals for the displaced, providing referrals to services, and sharing evacuation orders and emergency information through their own social media groups and channels and in various languages.

In September 2024, many displaced migrant workers evacuated to a government-run shelter in Tripoli. But when the municipality expelled them to make room for displaced Lebanese families, many were forced to return southward to Beirut. Mariam, a community leader from West Africa, was called at midnight to help. That night, Mariam slept on the street with other community members, “not because [she] was displaced, but because no one was organizing or taking responsibility.”

In 2026, when the ceasefire collapsed and the Lebanese state once again activated emergency response mechanisms, official policy stated that collective shelters were open to everyone, including migrant workers. Yet formal inclusion on paper did not translate into protection or equal treatment in reality. According to Mariam, many migrant workers were not willing to repeat their experience of 2024 and refused to return to government-run shelters because they had “lost trust.” Those who sought refuge there often found themselves marginalized, receiving food parcels last and having their tents placed closest to the bathrooms.

The gap between formal humanitarian policy and migrants’ lived experiences meant that many ultimately sought and provided shelter informally inside overcrowded apartments. Mariam opened up her home to 27 other women. “I was thinking, it’s war. We’re going to be okay because we’re all from the same country.” But with that many people in one house, they had to sleep in shifts. Mariam described problems, fights, noise. She rapidly found herself burnt out as she received phone calls through the night from people in need, as well as urgent medical cases. Her phone became so full of voice notes that it stopped working properly. “I want to give up, but I cannot. If I stay back, I fail my community.”

Under-resourced and unpaid, community organizers have carried out relief work to compensate for migrant workers’ exclusion from formal services. Their grassroots networks became substitute humanitarian infrastructures to make up for the failure of the official system to meet their needs. “Honestly it’s the job of humanitarian agencies - they have resources, budgets, mental health support to deal with everything they go through, and better benefits,” explains Dara, policy and communications manager at Migrant Workers’ Action. The migrant organizers “don’t get salaries. They do humanitarian work seven days a week without a paid job, and some of them will struggle to pay rent at the end of the month.”

“They break us down and make us compete with each other”

Even when organizations do provide support to migrants, their practices can become harmful or extractive. Dara assesses organizations’ involvement as “sometimes improving the situation, and sometimes worsening it.” Practices of hypervisibility, where staff and volunteers are required to wear branded vests while distributing aid to migrant communities, have caused hostility toward migrant volunteers and even contributed to rent increases, as some landlords wrongly assume they are receiving salaries from humanitarian organizations. Other organizations engage in extractive practices, taking pictures of beneficiaries as they receive aid as evidence that it is being distributed to “real persons”. But when these photos are published without beneficiaries’ informed consent, they fuel local perceptions that migrants are well taken care of.

Another common practice is the collection of migrants’ personal information and needs assessments through community focal points, for the sake of planning  aid distributions that never materialized. When assistance fails to arrive, focal points are often accused by their own communities of withholding or stealing aid. Some organizations with emergency funding for migrant organizing ask community groups to apply for emergency support, then publicly announce which groups receive funding. “They make us compete with each other,” says Mariam. She explains that some groups have better connections with Lebanese or Arab activists who can help them draft proposals and apply for funding. And groups that receive funding once are more likely to receive it again, creating entrenched inequalities between commonly resourced and chronically underfunded groups.

Despite severe funding cuts that have affected humanitarian work across the board, Mariam estimates that in 2026 migrant communities are better organized than they were in 2024. But they still have to take massive risks to support one another. Due to the lack of responsiveness and coordination from some INGOs whose mandate is humanitarian and emergency relief, migrant communities have been forced to deliver food to beneficiaries in actively targeted areas such as Beirut’s suburbs, putting their own lives in peril. While INGOs have trained drivers, security focal points, and visible humanitarian logos on their vehicles that afford them some degree of protection, Dara explains that if “a private car with a migrant in it [were targeted, it] wouldn't even make it in the local news.”

In fact, the number of migrants killed during Israeli airstrikes remains uncertain. While all individuals killed in airstrikes are registered by the Ministry of Public Health, nationalities are categorized  as Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinians and others, making it hard to ascertain the number of migrant workers killed. Dara estimates the number to be “at least several dozen.”

Systemic racism

The exclusion of migrants from humanitarian efforts is not exceptional but structural. Racist laws and policies, including the infamous institutionalization of modern-day slavery in the Kafala system, have permeated humanitarian aid mechanisms, in addition to racist attitudes among staff and the general population. Migrants in Lebanon are systemically exploited, excluded from labor law protections, and blocked from accessing justice and redress. They also fall outside the humanitarian categories of “refugees” and “displaced populations,” through which humanitarian actors define their mandates and determine who qualifies as a beneficiary of aid and protection. As a result, migrants are often excluded from humanitarian budgeting, programming, and coordination mechanisms.

The war did not create these structures of exclusion, it merely exposed and intensified systems that have long governed migrant workers’ life in Lebanon. Yet it also revealed the extent to which migrant communities have been forced to build their own infrastructures of survival and care in the absence of meaningful protection. As Dara puts it, “Lebanon will have to have a reckoning with its racism.” But the exclusion of migrants during the war also reflects broader exclusionary politics that shape whose suffering is rendered visible, whose displacement is considered legitimate, and who is treated as disposable during moments of crisis. That reckoning will be long coming in a country where even displaced citizens are being relocated from their place of refuge at the Beirut waterfront, in order not to offend tourists’ “sensibilities”.

After the war, these structures of exclusion will remain. Most migrants will have lost their jobs with former employers, and many of the houses where they previously worked will have been destroyed. They will nevertheless remain tied to their sponsor under the Kafala system and will have to continue navigating racist and exploitative labor conditions with little to no support from outside their own communities.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.