The Lebanese army rescued nearly 200 mainly Syrian migrants on Saturday after their boat left Lebanon sank, killing a child and a woman, the army and relatives of survivors said.
"
Three naval forces boats, accompanied by a boat from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (FINUL) arrived at the scene of the sinking off Selaata
", in the north of the country, the army said on Twitter. .
"
Staff proceeded to rescue the approximately 200 people
", who were trying to "
illegally leave Lebanese territorial waters
", she added.
However, "
a woman and a child died
," a source within the security services told AFP.
According to an AFP correspondent at the port of Tripoli, the main city in the north and among the poorest in Lebanon, men, women and children, mostly Syrians, but also around fifty Lebanese, were on board.
Dozens of relatives were massed at the port, like Younès Jomaa, settled in Lebanon but originally from Idleb in northwestern Syria.
"
I was planning to leave with my brother, but I couldn't raise enough money
," he told AFP, adding that his brother had "got
into debt to leave
".
“
We can no longer live in this country, nor in Syria
”, where the war has killed around half a million people since 2011, he says again.
“
We die in this country, we will try every day to go to sea
,” adds Ahmed Yassine, a Syrian whose sister and brother-in-law are among the rescued migrants.
“
If I had had the money myself, I would have gone with them
”.
At the end of September, a boat that left Lebanon was shipwrecked off Syria, killing a hundred people, one of the deadliest tolls in the eastern Mediterranean.
Lebanon hosts more than a million Syrian refugees and has been sinking for three years into a serious economic crisis.
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For so long, illegal immigration has mainly concerned Syrians and Palestinians, since 2020 Lebanon has seen an increase in the number of departures, in particular of Lebanese, in search of a better life in Europe, in particular on the island of Cyprus, to 175 kilometers from the Lebanese coast.
According to the UN, at least 38 boats carrying more than 1,500 people illegally left or attempted to leave Lebanon by sea between January and November 2021.
