BEIRUT: In a bustling district of the Lebanese capital, a government inspector issues a fine to the manager of a popular restaurant for hiring 17 Syrian refugees without work permits.
In a country brimming with foreign workers, the labor ministry is clamping down on businesses employing foreigners without the required papers.
But activists have condemned the crackdown, saying it is a pretext to pressure Syrian refugees to return to their war-torn homeland.
After a long argument with the inspectors, restaurant manager Younes Younes reluctantly accepts the $3,300 fine.
“I can’t just replace the Syrian guy who’s been preparing my shawarma sandwiches here for years,” he said.
“Finding Lebanese employees is not easy because they ask for higher salaries,” he told AFP.
“We’ve looked for Lebanese to hire... but we haven’t found anyone.”
On a nearby restaurant window in the Hamra neighborhood, a sign reads: “Lebanese employees wanted.”
“None available,” someone has scribbled over it in red.
Lebanon, a small country of just four million people, says it hosts 1.5 million Syrians — just under 1 million of them registered refugees — as well as other foreign workers.
Across the country, Egyptians fill up cars at petrol stations, Filipinos and Ethiopians clean homes, and Syrians work in restaurants or in the fields.
Due to poor state oversight, employers in Lebanon often hire foreign workers without employment permits, complaining that the process of acquiring one is long and complicated.
Not registering a worker also avoids having to pay social security.
The labor ministry says it is now looking to change this.
It has erected controversial billboards across the country in recent weeks, urging employers to hire citizens.
Last month, it gave business owners a one-month deadline to settle the paperwork of their foreign staff, and has started to address violations in recent weeks.
But experts and analysts question the motives behind the latest measures.
“There’s a clear strategy to exert increasing pressure on Syrians” to go back, said Nasser Yassin of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs.
Layla, a 20 year-old Syrian hairdresser, said she was forced to leave her job at a Beirut salon along with four Syrian colleagues because they did not have work permits.
“They gave us 48 hours’ notice,” she said.
She too believes that the government’s latest measures are meant to persuade Syrians to return home, but said that this is not likely to happen.
Instead, refugees will likely seek other illegal forms of employment to make a living, she added.
Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups have accused the Lebanese government of using various methods to put “illegitimate pressure” on Syrian refugees to go home.
“They include ramped up arrests and deportations, closing of shops and confiscation or destruction of unlicensed vehicles,” HRW said.
They came “on top of other longstanding restrictions, including curfews and evictions, and barriers to refugee education, legal residency and work authorization,” the group said.
Earlier this year, Lebanese authorities gave Syrians living in the eastern region of Arsal until July 1 to demolish shelters made of anything but timber and plastic sheeting.
There has been mounting political pressure for the Syrians to be sent home, with some politicians blaming them for the country’s economic woes.
For more than a year, Beirut has been organizing “voluntary” returns.
Last month, Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil called on employers to give priority to Lebanese over foreign labor, including Syrians.
His statement drew criticism from activists who accused him of hate speech, but many in Lebanon have defended the minister.
“We now wish we were refugees in Lebanon,” said Nohad, a 50-year-old housewife.
“Syrians are receiving monthly assistance, free education and health care that Lebanese don’t get,” she told AFP.
Marlene Attallah, a labor ministry official, said the latest measures were designed to protect Lebanese jobs.
“There are thousands of Lebanese looking for job opportunities,” she said during an inspection tour.
“The campaign concerns all undocumented foreign workers, and not one particular nationality.”
Yassin, the researcher, acknowledged the “tremendous pressure” Syrian refugees place on the country, but also stressed contribution they made to the economy by renting houses and shops.
The latest measures are unlikely to encourage Syrians to go home, he said.
Instead, “they will probably become poorer, and turn into groups constantly on the run.”
Lebanon ups pressure on Syrian refugees to return
Lebanon ups pressure on Syrian refugees to return

- Experts and analysts question the motives behind the latest measures
- “We now wish we were refugees in Lebanon”
Israeli ultra-orthodox party leaves Netanyahu’s government due to dispute over military conscription bill

TEL AVIV: Israel’s ultra-orthodox party Degel HaTorah said in a statement its Knesset members have resigned from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government due to a dispute over failure to draft a bill to exempt Yeshiva students from military service.
More than 100 migrants freed in Libya after being held captive by gang, officials say

- As of December 2024, around 825,000 migrants from 47 countries were recorded in Libya, according to UN data released in May
BENGHAZI: More than 100 migrants, including five women, have been freed from captivity after being held for ransom by a gang in eastern Libya, the country’s attorney general said on Monday.
“A criminal group involved in organizing the smuggling of migrants, depriving them of their freedom, trafficking them, and torturing them to force their families to pay ransoms for their release,” a statement from the attorney general said.
Libya has become a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe via the dangerous route across the desert and over the Mediterranean following the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
Many migrants desperate to make the crossing have fallen into the hands of traffickers. The freed migrants had been held in Ajdabiya, some 160 km (100 miles) from Libya’s second city Benghazi.
Five suspected traffickers from Libya, Sudan and Egypt, have been arrested, officials said.
The attorney general and Ajdabiya security directorate posted pictures of the migrants on their Facebook pages which they said had been retrieved from the suspects’ mobile phones.
They showed migrants with hands and legs cuffed with signs that they had been beaten.
In February, at least 28 bodies were recovered from a mass grave in the desert north of Kufra city. Officials said a gang had subjected the migrants to torture and inhumane treatment.
That followed another 19 bodies being found in a mass grave in the Jikharra area, also in southeastern Libya, a security directorate said, blaming a known smuggling network.
As of December 2024, around 825,000 migrants from 47 countries were recorded in Libya, according to UN data released in May.
Last week, the EU migration commissioner and ministers from Italy, Malta and Greece met with the internationally recognized prime minister of the national unity government, Abdulhamid Dbeibah, and discussed the migration crisis.
Mediators working to bridge gaps in faltering Gaza truce talks

- Hamas’s top negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya, and the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad held a “consultative meeting” in Doha on Sunday evening to “coordinate visions and positions,” a Palestinian source with knowledge of the talks told AFP
- US President Donald Trump said he was still hopeful of securing a truce deal, telling reporters on Sunday night: “We are talking and hopefully we’re going to get that straightened out over the next week”
GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Stuttering Gaza ceasefire talks entered a second week on Monday, with meditators seeking to close the gap between Israel and Hamas, as more than 20 people were killed across the Palestinian territory.
The indirect negotiations in Qatar appear deadlocked after both sides blamed the other for blocking a deal for the release of hostages and a 60-day ceasefire after 21 months of fighting.
An official with knowledge of the talks said they were “ongoing” in Doha on Monday, telling AFP: “Discussions are currently focused on the proposed maps for the deployment of Israeli forces within Gaza.”
“Mediators are actively exploring innovative mechanisms to bridge the remaining gaps and maintain momentum in the negotiations,” the source added on condition of anonymity.
Hamas accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who wants to see the Palestinian militant group destroyed — of being the main obstacle.
“Netanyahu is skilled at sabotaging one round of negotiations after another, and is unwilling to reach any agreement,” the group wrote on Telegram.
In Gaza, the civil defense agency said at least 22 people were killed Monday in the latest Israeli strikes in and around Gaza City and in Khan Yunis in the south.
An Israeli military statement said troops had destroyed “buildings and terrorist infrastructure” used by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants in Gaza City’s Shujaiya and Zeitun areas.
The Al-Quds Brigades — the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas — released footage on Monday that it said showed its fighters firing missiles at an Israeli army command and control center near Shujaiya.
The military later on Monday said three soldiers — aged 19, 20 and 21 — “fell during combat in the northern Gaza Strip” and died in hospital on Monday. Another from the same battalion was severely injured.
US President Donald Trump said he was still hopeful of securing a truce deal, telling reporters on Sunday night: “We are talking and hopefully we’re going to get that straightened out over the next week.”
Hamas’s top negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya, and the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad held a “consultative meeting” in Doha on Sunday evening to “coordinate visions and positions,” a Palestinian source with knowledge of the talks told AFP.
“Egyptian, Qatari and American mediators continue their efforts that make Israel present a modified withdrawal map that would be acceptable,” they added.
On Saturday, the same source said Hamas rejected Israeli proposals to keep troops in more than 40 percent of Gaza, as well as plans to move Palestinians into an enclave on the border with Egypt.
A senior Israeli political official countered by accusing Hamas of inflexibility and trying to deliberately scupper the talks by “clinging to positions that prevent the mediators from advancing an agreement.”
Netanyahu has said he would be ready to enter talks for a more lasting ceasefire once a deal for a temporary truce is agreed, but only when Hamas lays down its arms.
He is under pressure to wrap up the war, with military casualties rising and with public frustration mounting at both the continued captivity of the hostages taken on October 7 and a perceived lack of progress in the conflict.
Politically, Netanyahu’s fragile governing coalition is holding, for now, but he denies being beholden to a minority of far-right ministers in prolonging an increasingly unpopular conflict.
He also faces a backlash over the feasibility, cost and ethics of a plan to build a so-called “humanitarian city” from scratch in southern Gaza to house Palestinians if and when a ceasefire takes hold.
Israel’s security establishment is reported to be unhappy with the plan, which the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert have described as a “concentration camp.”
“If they (Palestinians) will be deported there into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing,” Olmert was quoted as saying by The Guardian newspaper late on Sunday.
Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
A total of 251 hostages were taken that day, of whom 49 are still being held, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s military reprisals have killed 58,386 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
Paramilitary attack kills 48 in central Sudan village: war monitor

- Over 4 million refugees have fled Sudan’s more than two-year civil war to seven neighboring countries where shelter conditions are widely viewed as inadequate due to chronic funding shortages
PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed 48 civilians in an attack on a village in the center of the war-torn country, a monitoring group reported Monday.
The Emergency Lawyers, a group that has documented atrocities throughout the two-year conflict between the regular army and the RSF, reported civilians were killed en masse Sunday when paramilitary fighters stormed the village of Um Garfa in North Kordofan state, razing houses and looting property.
Two drones fell in Khurmala oilfield in Iraqi Kurdistan, counter-terrorism service says

- An investigation into the incident was launched in coordination with security forces in Kurdistan
BAGHDAD: Two drones fell in the Khurmala oilfield in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iraqi Kurdistan’s counter-terrorism service said in a statement on Monday.
Khurmala oilfield is located near the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil.
The Iraqi Security Media Cell, an official body responsible for disseminating security information, said in a statement that no casualties were reported and only material damage was recorded.
An investigation into the incident was launched in coordination with security forces in Kurdistan, it added.