British mother tells of ‘biggest relief’ as son boards plane out of Lebanon

The mother of a British teacher in Beirut has described her son’s escape from Lebanon as the “biggest relief” after days of “jitters” amid escalating violence.

Nicola Peters, 54, from Highgate in north London is mother to Charlie Peters, 24, who works in a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon’s capital and has fled the country as fighting continues between Hezbollah and Israel.

He boarded a delayed Middle East Airlines (MEA) flight from Beirut to Amman in Jordan on Wednesday and hopes to arrive in London Heathrow at 3.30pm on Thursday after Foreign Secretary David Lammy urged British nationals in Lebanon to leave “while commercial options still remain”.

Speaking just before her son’s flight to Amman, Ms Peters told the PA news agency: “Once he’s out of Lebanese airspace, I think that is, for me, the biggest relief factor.

“I’ve spent three days with the jitters and the jumps and not wanting really to look at the news, but also having to look at the news, and that’s really tricky.

“All those stages of, ‘are you at the airport? Have you got your boarding pass? Are you at gate?’ Because you’re waiting for that sort of news to come through the airport is shot.”

“What Charlie was really keen to do is that he did not want to be evacuated,” explained Ms Peters, who trains menopausal women in weightlifting.

“He was like, ‘we’re edging towards emergency evacuation here. I don’t want to be somebody who’s left it to the point where that’s my only option.

“‘I either stay here or the British taxpayer has to get me home’.

“And that was his big thing is, ‘I have to get a commercial flight out’. Probably this week is the last week.”

However, Nicola Peters feels the scale of attacks on this occasion “feels different” and may prevent her son from returning to Lebanon in the future.

“I think as soon as he felt it was safe to (return to Lebanon), he would go back, but I think this time feels different. It feels really, really different,” she said.

“Before it was a Palestinian, Hamas war in Gaza, then it crept into the West Bank, and you can just see that it’s just swelling, and it’s now reaching that point in Lebanon where I just cannot see the Israelis stopping.

“This feels as though Lebanon are being dragged into something. It can’t even get back on its feet. It’s economically broken and this is just going to set it back years.”

Ms Peters said her son’s decision to leave Lebanon was difficult describing his close attachment to teaching for Alsama, a Lebanese charity which provides teaching to refugee children with a focus on empowering women and girls.

“What you have to understand for these people who work in these sort of refugee camp systems is you’re leaving people behind who have no choice,” she explained.

“He’s worked there for two years, there’s a big emotional attachment to these kids about abandoning them because they have no choice … and actually having that choice to leave becomes really problematic.”