Israel offensive leaves quarter of Lebanon under evacuation orders

Around a quarter of Lebanese territory is now under evacuation orders since Israel began its ground offensive in the country, according to the United Nations, with the Israeli military on Thursday warning residents of southern Lebanon against returning home as it intensifies its campaign against Hezbollah.

Israel’s orders to evacuate areas in Lebanon, which have been issued almost daily since its military launched a ground offensive in the country early last week, are in place for over 100 villages and urban neighborhoods across southern Lebanon, according to a U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report this week. As many as a million people have been displaced due to the evacuation orders and fighting, according to the Lebanese government.

The Israeli military said that its evacuation orders are meant to minimize harm to civilians in areas where Hezbollah operates.

Israel issues evacuation notices through its Arabic-language spokesman, who has urged residents of the south to go north of the Awali river, about halfway between the Israeli border and Beirut.

“You should refrain from heading south, anyone who heads south is putting his life in danger,” said the spokesman, Avichay Adraee, in a post on X on Thursday.

Lebanon, which has a population of more than five million people, is similar in size to the state of Connecticut. Displaced Lebanese people have been taking shelter in hundreds of public schools across the country, scrambling to find rented apartments and sleeping in the street. A tent camp for displaced people has been slowly expanding in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, a plaza at the center of the capital near the Lebanese parliament.

Israel has said that its ground operation is limited in geographic scope and intensity, and aimed at pushing Hezbollah back from its border and allowing for the return of tens of thousands of displaced Israelis. But the expanding evacuation notices and airstrikes have emptied parts of the country and created a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon with no clear exit strategy for either side.

Hezbollah, which began launching rockets at Israel on Oct. 8 last year in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, has continued to fire at northern Israel daily despite taking a hard hit after the killing of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and other senior commanders in the U.S.-designated terrorist group. Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza after a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 last year killed around 1,200 people and saw approximately 250 people taken hostage.

Fifty-three Israelis have been killed from rockets and other projectiles fired from Lebanon into Israel since Oct. 8 last year, according to Israel. On Wednesday, a civilian couple was killed in a rocket attack in the city of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.

More than 2,100 people have been killed in Lebanon since the fighting began last year, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. It wasn’t clear how many were combatants.

Israel has struck Lebanon more than 9,500 times by air, drone, missile and artillery from October last year to last week, according to the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data.

The Israeli military struck over 110 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon since early Wednesday, according to the Israeli military, including what it said were weapons-storage facilities and other militant infrastructure in the southern suburbs of Beirut overnight.

The war has heaped more stress on Lebanon, which is also in the grip of an economic crisis. Starved of funds and weakened by years of corruption and political deadlock, the country’s institutions are ill-equipped to handle the current crisis.

“It’s weakening Hezbollah, for sure, but it’s contributing to the destabilization of the region, the destabilization of Lebanon,” said Alaa Sayeg, a Lebanese politician and Beirut-based board member of the Middle East Democracy Center, a Washington think tank.

Sahar Ali, a 39-year-old medic working with cancer patients who had been living in Beirut’s southern suburbs, fled her home when the Israeli bombing intensified in late September and fled first to a school, ultimately taking shelter at a Beirut nightclub called SkyBar that opened its doors to fleeing civilians.

“We left under fire,” she said, sitting on the club’s black dance floor surrounded by her children and mother-in-law, who also fled the bombing. Outside, in front of the glass walls of the bar, other displaced people hung their laundry on the metal rebar of an abandoned building next door and sat on the sidewalk smoking waterpipes. “There’s no response from the state,” she said.

Write to Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com and Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com