President Rodrigo Duterte led on Tuesday the send-off ceremony of two Navy vessels to fetch the Filipinos in the Middle East amid the escalating tensions between the United States and Iran.

The Naval Task Group (NTG) 82 comprising around 400 sailors and marines headed by its commander, Captain Edward Ike De Sagon, boarded BRP Davao del Sur and BRP Ramon Alcaraz, which will sail to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 25 days with lay over in Sri Lanka for refueling and replishment.

They left Port Area around 5 pm, a Navy spokesperson said.

“This is a sacred mission and it is really to safeguard the lives of the Filipino people. I tasked you this duty with a prayer and with a hope that you will carry out your mission successfully and that everybody will be safe,” Duterte said.

“Do not worry, I will be with you and if need I will also go there,” he said.

“I trust that you will exert all efforts and work hand in hand with the Secretary of the Department of National Defense to encourage affected Filipinos in the Middle East to return to the Philippines or be evacuated to safer grounds,” he added.

Aside from the two Navy ships, a Philippine Coast Guard ship has also been on a standby in Malta.

There are more than two million Filipinos in the Middle East and about 1,600 in Iraq where the Philippine government declared Alert Level 4, which entails mandatory evacuation. Celerina Monte-Robina Asido/DMS

BATANGAS CITY  – President Rodrigo Duterte advised on Tuesday the families displaced by the Taal Volcano eruption not to return to their homes yet.

Duterte visited some 3,500 evacuees from Lemery, Taal, Agoncillo, and San Nicolas, some of the municipalities in Batangas greatly affected by the volcano eruption, temporarily being served at Batangas Sports Complex gym.

“Nobody is allowed to go back until such time that you are safe,” he said in a speech.

He said that the national government has given P130 million to the local government of Batangas to assist the victims of the eruption.

He vowed that the government would help the displaced families to “immediately” go back to normal lives.

“All the government agencies are here…we are workers of government and we serve the people,” he said.

Families displaced by the Taal Voĺcano eruption should be “realistic” that it is not still safe to return to their homes and the danger of hazardous explosion is still there, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology ( Phivolcs) said on Tuesday.

In a press briefing in Malacañang, Department of Science and Technology Undersecretary and Phivolcs head Renato Solidum said the volcano’s alert level is still at 4.

“Just think if (the eruption) continues at Alert Level 5, devastation,” he said, noting that if one would be in the danger zone, he or she might find hard time to immediately go to a safer area.

“So, we should be realistic that this kind of activity is not a joke. We can go back to what happened in Pinatubo, just to give us some background of what happened before,” he said referring to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, killing hundreds of people and leaving around 200,000 people homeless.

Solidum said the situation at the volcano would not just subside overnight.

“So we have to make sure that people understand and of course the government, that this is not an activity that will just be in a short while. Even the lowering of the alert and the condition of the volcano will not be sudden,” Solidum explained.

Batangas Governor Hermilando Mandanas said there were around 30,000 evacuees in the province.

He said the number could still increase and about 80 percent of the evacuees were staying in the houses of their relatives.

Mandanas could not say if those living in the island, a danger zone, could still be allowed to return or they would be relocated.

Meanwhile, Department of Health Assistant Secretary Maria Francia Laxamana said eating fish catch from the Taal Lake is now prohibited.

“So, definitely we have already the advisory not to buy (fish) from Taal and Batangas because we cannot expect that they are safe,” she said.

As to the N95 masks, she said those living in Metro Manila and Central Luzon, which were affected also by ashfall, should not compete with the residents living near the volcano in purchasing the masks.

“The N95, it is really prescribed to (the residents) we have evacuated in areas within the 14-kilometer radius, so they are in the first line who should use N95,” she said.

She said other people affected by ashfall, such as in Metro Manila and Region 3, could instead use regular surgical masks.

“That’s why it’s sad to say that we ran out of stocks, those who should be given N95 were the ones who were not able to get,” she said. Celerina Monte/DMS