By Deutsche Welle
09 Oct 2024, 02:14 AM EDT
A Chilean Air Force flight landed in Santiago with 50 Chilean citizens, 10 Peruvians and 7 Argentines on board, in a first humanitarian evacuation from Lebanon due to the war between Israel and the Islamist movement Hezbollah.
The flight, which arrived around noon (5:00 p.m. CET) at the Santiago international airport, had “the objective of evacuating Chileans who were in Lebanon, a country affected by the conflict in the Middle East,” the Chilean Foreign Ministry reported in a statement. release.
Among the 67 evacuees there were also 10 Peruvians and 7 Argentines, who will soon travel to their countries of origin.
Humanitarian cargo sent to Beirut
The Chilean air force flight carried humanitarian cargo to Beirut, mainly medicines and other medical supplies.
After almost a year of cross-border crossfire, the Israeli army began bombing southern and eastern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut on September 23, in response to attacks by the Lebanese Hezbollah movement.
Since October last year, more than 2,000 people have died in Lebanon and more than a thousand of them since September 23, according to an AFP count based on official figures. More than a million people have been forced to move.
The war in Gaza continues
Israel is waging this offensive in parallel to its attacks on the Gaza Strip, governed by the Islamist group Hamas, considered terrorist by the EU and the United States, which began after the unprecedented attack on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil that caused the death of 1,206 people, most of them civilians.
More than 41,965 Palestinians have died in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which the UN considers reliable.
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