'We don't want to die'

Over 1000 people killed and hundreds of thousands more flee their homes.

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When an Israeli air strike killed her employer and destroyed nearly everything she owned in southern Lebanon, it also crushed Fatima Samuella Tholley's hopes of returning home to Sierra Leone to escape the spiralling violence.

With a change of clothes stuffed into a plastic bag, the 27-year-old housekeeper said she and her cousin made their way to the capital Beirut in an ambulance.

Bewildered and terrified, the pair were thrust into the chaos of the bombarded city - unfamiliar to them apart from the airport where they had arrived months before.

"We don't know today if we will live or not, only God knows," said Tholley, breaking down in tears.

"I have nothing... no passport, no documents," she said.

The cousins have spent days sheltering in the cramped storage room of an empty apartment, which they said was offered to them by a man they had met on their journey.

With no access to TV news and unable to communicate in French or Arabic, they could only watch from their window as the city was pounded by strikes.