Hussein Hachem hugged his injured daughter as she arrived in Senegal on a flight repatriating citizens escaping the escalating conflict in Lebanon. His 14-year-old son was not with her – killed, he said, when their home was bombed.
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As Israeli forces pounded southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs in a broadening offensive against Hezbollah, Hachem’s daughter Mariam, 11, who had suffered a broken foot, was among 117 Senegalese flown to Dakar on a government-organised flight.
“I lost everything. I lost my son. I lost my house. All my dreams,” he said, speaking amid emotional scenes outside the Leopold Sedar Senghor International Airport, where families were reunited with loved ones late on Saturday.
“We have a 14-and-a-half-year-old son who just disappeared like that. 10 minutes before, I was talking to him. ‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Dad, you’re going to come get me?’ I told him ‘yes’ … 10 minutes later, they called me: ‘there’s no more house, no more son’.”
Senegal has a significant Lebanese diaspora community, and has historical ties to both Lebanon and Palestine.
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“The Senegalese government, of course, is condemning the Israeli army’s bombardment in Lebanon, the bombardment of civilians … the destruction of infrastructure,” the country’s foreign minister, Yassine Fall, said on Saturday evening.
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