Volunteers risk lives to retrieve pets from bombed-out south Beirut
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A volunteer from the Animals Lebanon charity arriving at a shelter carrying a cat abandoned by its owners in Beirut on Oct 3.
PHOTO: AFP
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Beirut – After Israeli bombardment forced them to flee their homes in haste, displaced Lebanese have been asking volunteers to enter their bombed-out neighbourhoods to retrieve their pets.
Ms Maggie Shaarawi, vice-president of the Animals Lebanon charity, is one of the rescuers.
“A lot of people had to evacuate their homes in a hurry. In most cases, cats stressed by bombing hide,” she said, adding that this made it impossible to scoop them up quickly.
“Our goal is to just enter, rescue and leave,” she said.
On Oct 3, Ms Shaarawi and two others helped a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs retrieve her eight traumatised cats.
Through a video call, the worried woman in a white headscarf guided them to the living room where she had herded Fifi, Leo, Blacky, Teddy, Tanda, Ziki, Kitty and Masha as she left.
“We were able to find them all,” Ms Shaarawi said triumphantly.
Doing their best to hurry, they managed to entice the petrified felines out from under a green velvet sofa and gently lift each of them into a holding crate.
“Luckily, we got them out, because (then) most of that area was destroyed,” she said.
A strike hit the suburbs as they were preparing to go to another home.
“It’s the first time we had a hit very close to us. We’re lucky to have left alive,” Ms Shaarawi said.
An activist holding an animal cage amid the rubble of a building damaged during Israeli strikes as she looks for abandoned cats in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Oct 3.
PHOTO: AFP
‘Just waiting for their owners’
Israel has sharply intensified its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since Sept 23, killing more than 1,000 people and pushing more than a million more to flee their homes, according to Lebanese figures.
Many of the displaced have taken their pets with them.
A teenager was seen clutching a ginger cat to his chest as he fled his southern village this week.
Some people have even ignored evacuation warnings to stay with their pets, Ms Shaarawi said.
“So far, we’ve retrieved from the Beirut suburbs around 120 animals, and from the south another 60,” she said.
Despite their close call with the Israeli air strike, Ms Shaarawi and her team were back in the southern suburbs on Oct 4 to try to retrieve more pets.
“Cats turn into tigers when they’re scared,” she said.
Activists from the Animals Lebanon NGO risk their lives to rescue cats abandoned by their owners.
PHOTO: AFP
Parking their car on the outskirts of the heavily bombarded Hezbollah bastion, they briefly zipped in on mopeds.
“The war is traumatising for both animals and people. They’re being bombed every day, and they don’t know what’s happening,” she said.
“They’re just waiting for their owners to come back.”
Sometimes the team does not get to the pets in time.
On a mission to retrieve three cats on Oct 3, they found one of them dead, its limbs stiff and its fluffy white coat caked in dust.
The other two were nowhere to be found, but Ms Shaarawi said she was sure they did not survive. “The house was totally destroyed.” AFP
