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Lebanese Cabinet Agrees New Repatriation Plan

Lebanese Cabinet Agrees New Repatriation Plan
folder_openMiddle East... access_time3 years ago
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By Staff, Agencies

The Lebanese Cabinet convened Thursday and decided a new repatriation plan due to many obstacles.

Speaking after Lebanese Cabinet’s session at Baabda Palace, Information Minister Manal Abdel Samad said that Prime Minister Hassan Diab originally said that expats would have to wait until Lebanon’s coronavirus lockdown measures were eased.

This is provisionally scheduled to take place on April 12, but epidemiologists say the lifting of lockdown measures, including the reopening of the country’s borders, is likely to be pushed back much further.

Abdel Samad said the government had encountered “a lot of obstacles in the way of the measures that we put forward to guarantee the health of the returnees.”

She explained that the Cabinet had envisaged sending Lebanese medical teams to test the returnees in their countries of departure. Those countries, however, are not allowing the entry of the Lebanese medical staff and their equipment.

Cabinet has now agreed upon a modified mechanism to repatriate the expats, which accommodates only 25 percent of the original number of planned returnees. This works out at around 2,500 people.

In the new plan, returnees will be tested upon arrival at Rafik Hariri International Airport. “In light of these test results, we will determine the fate of [the returnee] – whether to send them to a hospital or quarantine them for 14 days,” Abdel Samad said.

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