AFP, BEIRUT

After Israeli bombardments forced them flee their homes, displaced Lebanese have been asking volunteers to enter their bombed out neighborhoods to retrieve their pets.

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,” making it impossible to scoop them up quickly, she said. “Our goal is to just enter, rescue and leave.”

A volunteer from Animals Lebanon arrives at a shelter carrying a cat abandoned by its owners who fled during Israeli strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Thursday.

Photo: AFP

On Thursday, Shaarawi and two others helped a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs retrieve her eight traumatized 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,” Shaarawi said triumphantly.

A woman holds her cat in front of a destroyed building at the site of an Israeli airstrike in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh on Wednesday.

Photo: AP

Doing their best to hurry, they enticed 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,” Shaarawi said.

Israel has sharply intensified its airstrikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since Sept. 23, killing more than 1,000 people and pushing more than 1 million more to flee their homes, Lebanese figures showed.

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, 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 airstrike, Shaarawi and her team were back in the southern suburbs on Friday to try to retrieve more pets.

“Cats turn into tigers when they’re scared,” she said.

Parking their car on the outskirts of the heavily bombarded Hezbollah bastion, they briefly zipped in on mopeds.

“The war is traumatizing 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.”

On a mission to retrieve three cats on Thursday, 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 Shaarawi said she was sure they did not survive.

“The house was totally destroyed,” she said.