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Every night Maram cries for her father. “‘Dad, Dad, Dad’, all the time she is screaming,” the two-year-old’s mother, Fatima Zhour, says. “She misses her father, and she can’t understand why she cannot see him.”

Maram hasn’t seen her father, Yasser al Moussawi, in six months, since she and her mother, who is an Australian citizen, left Lebanon for Sydney.

Moussawi is stranded in Lebanon, driven from his home in Beirut after it was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, and unable to reunite with his family. While waiting for his partner visa to be assessed, he has unsuccessfully applied three times for a visitor visa .

“I am absolutely devastated. I am not eating, not sleeping,” Australian-born Zhour tells the Guardian. “I am always on my phone, calling in the middle of the night to know that he is still alive, checking news of what has happened in the war.”

Lebanese citizens with partners and children in Australia say they are being refused visitor visas, even as weeks of bombardment have devastated homes across the country and damaged Lebanon’s fragile economy.

Displaced from home by the war, Moussawi spends an hour-and-a-half each way driving to work – in itself a risk because of the unreliable ceasefire in place, and foreign troops on the ground.

Against the advice of her extended family, Zhour says she is contemplating returning to Lebanon to reunite her family.

“Without my family together, I don’t know what is my future,” she says. “My daughter misses her father, and I wish to be reunited with my husband. I am frightened, and I don’t want to put my child’s life at risk, but we need to be together.”

During the Covid pandemic, the Australian government changed legislation to allow partners of Australian citizens who had made partner visa applications offshore to travel to Australia on visitor visas, and have their partner visa application assessed while in the country.

Senior registered migration agent with Borderless Migration in Sydney, Fatima El-Kheir, told the Guardian it used to be a straightforward process. But since the current US-Israeli war in the Middle East began, she says many of her clients who have applied for visitor visas from Lebanon have been rejected.

“A client of mine in south Lebanon received a visitor visa refusal just hours after significant escalation in the region,” she says. “One hundred airstrikes targeted the region. More than 250 [people were] killed. More than 1,200 injured. She has already been displaced from her home more than once.”

Other migration agents have reported similar refusals, and they say that in times of crisis or conflict, some countries are put on unofficial “blacklists” from which it is almost impossible – regardless of compelling circumstances – to have a visa application approved.

In the wake of US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February, militant group Hezbollah – backed by Iran – resumed rocket strikes on Israel.

Israel responded with massive bombardment of southern Lebanon and the capital Beirut, and launched a ground invasion, which it says targeted Hezbollah. More than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon, and more than 1 million people displaced, roughly 20% of the country’s population.

A fragile ceasefire has held despite repeated violations, with the US president announcing on Friday it would be extended another three weeks.

El-Kheir says cases of visitor visa applications from countries such as Lebanon raise significant questions about the operation of Australia’s avowedly non-discriminatory migration system.

“How are compelling and rapidly changing humanitarian circumstances being weighed in temporary visa decisions?” she asks.

“This is not about one decision, but about consistency, transparency, and the role of discretion in genuinely complex situations … what if this person did end up killed while waiting for a visa?”

El-Kheir says the rejection letters read like “cut-and paste” refusals, with identical language and grounds being offered, such as that people were not genuine visitors and would not return home – a moot point for an applicant with a pending partner visa.

She says it feels discriminatory because applications from other countries are being approved.

“It is heartbreaking having to tell their Australian family members that the application has been refused, that they can’t be reunited, even as this conflict goes on.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs told the Guardian the Australian government was “monitoring the situation in Lebanon closely” and that people intending to travel to Australia from the country were not limited to a single visa pathway.

The Covid-era changes to policy, and subsequently legislation, allowing for partner visas lodged offshore to be granted to people in Australia, were confirmed by the spokesperson.

“Each case is assessed on its merits, taking into account the individual circumstances of the case and the most current and relevant country of origin information,” the spokesperson said.

In March, the Australian government imposed an arrival control determination for Iranian nationals, banning Iranian passport holders from entering Australia on a tourist visa, arguing they were unlikely to return to a country at war. Critics condemned the action as a “breathtaking moral failure”, but the home affairs minister Tony Burke said “decisions about permanent stays in Australia should be deliberate decisions of the government, not a random consequence of who had booked a holiday”.

In Sydney, Fatima Zhour says she waits for news from the conflict zone, and hopes to be reunited with her husband, and for him being able to hold his baby girl again.

“This is all I can do. I have to do it for my daughter.”