According to rights groups on the ground, the struggle to find them through the chaos and identify their bodies amongst the victims was made harder by the fact that the over 250,000 foreign labourers living in Lebanon are subject to the country's sponsorship system, or kafala.
The kafala system has been compared to a form of modern day slavery and allows employers to confiscate the documents of their employees, making it more difficult for their presence to be monitored by the government, which has failed to identify many of the dead bodies of workers at Beirut's hospitals.