The Lebanese government is caught in a difficult situation between Israel and the Islamic army Hezbollah. It’s been 5 days since Israel started bombing Lebanon. They are targeting Lebanese infrastructure (airports, ports, roads, etc…) that they believe the Hezbollah are using to get arms from Syria and Iran. The bad thing is that civilian casualties can’t be avoided since these infrastructures are located in densely populated areas. Israel is also enforcing a naval blockade so that on vessel can go in and out of Lebanon.

My mom works for the Philippine Embassy and they are in full alert right now. As of the moment, there is no way to evacuate our OFW’s and the embassy workers out of the country. To protect our OFW’s they relocated them into a Church for safety. Yesterday, my Mom, brother and my cousin left their place to relocate to Jounieh (city north of Beirut) to join other people in the embassy. They said that probably they won’t have internet access there so our communication will be limited to cellphone texts.

Then late last night, my Dad and I were watching CNN and BBC to get the latest updates. The headline at that time was that Jounieh was bombed. We began to worry about them. My Dad texted them to check their safety and we only got a reply early this morning. Thank God they are OK! To tell the truth, I was not really worried about their situation there until last night.

Please pray for the safety of my family and all our countrymen that are caught in the violence in the Middle East. I hope that the situation will not worsen and go back to normal as soon as possible.