International exodus continues at Beirut airport

CGTN Europe

Citizens from around the world continue to flee Lebanon after a dramatic escalation in the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese armed movement Hezbollah.  Evangelo Sipsas is at Beirut International airport to witness the exodus as he too tries to book a ticket to leave Lebanon.

Transcript

00:00We are here at the International Airport in Beirut. Overnight there has been some

00:07strikes and during the morning today and that's why there has been a number of

00:12booths that have been set up from different countries that are evacuating their

00:17citizens. It's really big, there's a number of booths. There's

00:21Australia over there, here we have the Netherlands, we have Belgium, Spain and

00:27all the way on the other side at the end of the building are a Brazilian booth

00:33that documents people from Brazil or dual citizenships that are heading

00:37there. The situation looks like this pretty much. It is quite crowded, there's

00:42a lot of people that are fleeing. You can see it's quite busy, it was even busier

00:48before and we're expecting more traffic to come, more people to come because

00:54more planes are going to be arriving in the next short period of time so a lot

00:59of people will be leaving. This has been going on for the past over a week now, a

01:04number of people leaving. There were the Canadians earlier, Chinese nationals that

01:08have been evacuated but also American citizens, French, the UK, a number of

01:15people, Greeks, Cypriots. So it is taking place constantly and as you can

01:19see here every corner of the airport looks like this. There's a number of

01:23little booths with their flags, with the representatives from the embassy or from

01:28the forces of the country that are documenting people that are going in and

01:32going out. This is what the scene looks like right now at the International

01:38Airport in Beirut. People leaving, flights are fully booked. I tried to get a flight

01:43myself and I had to wait until the end of this week because everything was

01:48fully booked. I was lucky because someone cancelled so you can understand how the

01:51situation is a little bit chaotic. People are trying to leave, people want to leave.

01:56It is a little bit of a mess but things are flowing pretty steady and decent

02:02here at the International Airport in Beirut.

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