By Portia Crowe and Ngouda Dione
DAKAR (Reuters) – Hussein Hachem hugged his injured daughter as she arrived in Senegal on a flight repatriating residents escaping the escalating battle in Lebanon. His 14-year-old son was not together with her – killed, he mentioned, when their dwelling was bombed.
As Israeli forces pounded southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs in a broadening offensive towards Hezbollah, Hachem’s daughter Mariam, 11, who had suffered a damaged foot, was amongst 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 mentioned, talking amid emotional scenes outdoors the Leopold Sedar Senghor Worldwide Airport, the place households had been reunited with family members late on Saturday.
“We have a 14-and-a-half-year-old son who just disappeared like that. Ten minutes before, I was talking to him. ‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Dad, you’re going to come get me?’ I told him ‘yes’ … Ten minutes later, they called me: ‘there’s no more house, no more son’.”
Senegal has a big Lebanese diaspora group, and has historic ties to each Lebanon and Palestine.
“The Senegalese government, of course, is condemning the Israeli army’s bombardment in Lebanon, the bombardment of civilians… the destruction of infrastructure,” the nation’s international minister, Yassine Fall, mentioned in an interview with Reuters on Saturday night.
She mentioned there had been about 1,000 Senegalese nationals in Lebanon however that some had left by their very own means earlier than the repatriation flight.
Fall additionally highlighted her nation’s longstanding relationship with the Palestinian individuals, courting again to 1975 when Senegal chaired the United Nations Committee for the Train of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian Individuals.
“We are very, very disappointed to see the world watching a genocide happen under our eyes, children being killed, children being shot in the head, hospitals being bombarded, sick people not being able to be evacuated, people in refugee camps that are not fighting, that are civilians, being maimed and killed,” she mentioned in reference to the warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
“So Senegal, with other countries, we are really side by side condemning this and calling it what it is: it is a genocide.”
Israel has strongly rejected accusations of genocide, together with in a case introduced by South Africa on the World Court docket.
It says it’s appearing in self-defence after an Oct. 7, 2023, assault by Palestinian Hamas militants. The Hamas assault killed 1,200 individuals with about 250 additionally taken as hostage, in keeping with Israeli tallies, and triggered a battle that has since unfold from Gaza to Lebanon.
Earlier on Saturday, demonstrators marched via Dakar to protest towards Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon and name for a ceasefire within the widening Center East battle.