The U.S. has facilitated the flights of around 250 Americans out of Lebanon amid ongoing fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and heightened tensions across the Middle East.
Senior officials from the State Department and the White House met Thursday with two prominent Arab American leaders to discuss U.S. efforts to assist American citizens in leaving Lebanon. The Arab American leaders also held separate meetings with officials from the Department of Homeland Security.
Michigan state Rep. Alabas Farhat and Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, used their meeting at the White House to highlight critical concerns facing their community. Ayoub said that they used the meeting to "really drive home a lot of important points about the issues our community members are facing on the ground and a lot of the logistical problems that they're encountering with it when it comes to this evacuation."
In Michigan, which has the largest Arab American population in the country, several officials and community leaders have urged the U.S. to initiate a military evacuation. However, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh stated that such a move is not currently being considered.
"The U.S. military is, of course, on the ready and has a whole wide range of plans. Should we need to evacuate American citizens out of Lebanon, we absolutely can," Singh said while speaking to reporters this week.
Israel has intensified airstrikes and launched a ground offensive in southern Lebanon, targeting leaders of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group. Meanwhile, Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel on Tuesday, heightening concerns that the escalating conflict could spiral into a full-scale regional war.
Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire across the Lebanon border nearly every day since Oct. 7 last year, when Hamas, another Iranian-backed militant group, launched an attack on Israel killing over 1,200 people, which sparked the current conflict in Gaza.
Countries including Greece, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Colombia have organized flights or deployed military aircraft to evacuate their citizens from the region.
Meanwhile, a family in Dearborn, Michigan, is mourning the loss of Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a metro Detroit resident killed in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. Relatives say he chose to stay behind to assist civilians who were too elderly, sick, or impoverished to escape. Kamel Ahmad Jawad was on the phone with his daughter when the force of a strike knocked him to the ground, his daughter, Nadine Kamel Jawad, said in a statement.
"He simply got up, found his phone, and told me he needed to finish praying in case another strike hit him," she said.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the U.S. will keep organizing evacuation flights for as long as the security situation in Lebanon remains critical and there is sufficient demand. Over the past week, more than 6,000 American citizens have reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut for information on how to leave the country.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press
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