BEIRUT — The Israeli military issued evacuation orders for entire neighborhoods of Beirut’s southern suburbs, sparking pandemonium as hundreds of thousands of people joined a panicked exodus out towards Lebanon’s north.
On Thursday afternoon, the Israeli military’s Arabic- language spokesman told residents of the Dahieh — the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital — to “save your lives and evacuate your homes immediately.”
The evacuation order was unprecedented in scale, encompassing a 6-square-mile, densely populated residential area with hundreds of thousands of people. Minutes later, motorists filled the roads, with cars, trucks, scooters, motorcycles — anything with wheels — jostling in a flurry of honking and shouting in a bid to get out to the highways.
Gaggles of residents gathered at a media vantage point in the nearby hills, many of them keeping one eye on Dahieh for sign of an attack and another on their phone for updates on social media.
“Dahieh? There’s not going to be a Dahieh any more,” said one young man as he talked to a family member on the phone.
Another man shouted on the phone, exhorting a family member to leave and that he would go in and take his stead.
“You come here and I’ll go in your place. If I die, I die,” he said.
The latest round of Israeli-Hezbollah conflict was triggered by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, now in its sixth day. Hezbollah, a predominantly Shiite Islamist group, launched attacks on Israeli targets in retaliation for the attacks on its longtime ally and supporter.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a hardline figure in the government who has long called for Arab expulsion, tweeted on X on Thursday that the Dahieh “will look like Khan [Yunis],” a reference to the Gaza city all but razed by the Israeli military’s operations against Hamas.
Smotrich added that while Israelis are returning to areas of northern Israeli “to flourish and thrive,” the government had “issued evacuation notices to the residents of southern Lebanon and the Dahieh neighborhood.”
“Hezbollah made a mistake, and it will pay dearly for it,” he wrote. “We are cutting off the head of the octopus in Iran, and in parallel, we are also severing the arm of Hezbollah.”
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