BEIRUT\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The Israeli military issued evacuation orders for entire neighborhoods of Beirut\u2019s southern suburbs, sparking pandemonium as hundreds of thousands of people joined a panicked exodus out toward Lebanon\u2019s north.<\/p>\n
On Thursday afternoon, the Israeli military\u2019s Arabic-language spokesman told residents of the Dahieh \u2014 the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital \u2014 to \u201csave your lives and evacuate your homes immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 anything with wheels \u2014 jostling in a flurry of honking and shouting in a bid to get out to the highways.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDahieh? There\u2019s not going to be a Dahieh any more,\u201d said one young man as he talked to a family member on the phone.<\/p>\n
Another man shouted on the phone, exhorting a family member to leave and that he would go in and take his stead.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou come here and I\u2019ll go in your place. If I die, I die,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The latest round of Israeli-Hezbollah conflict was triggered by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran<\/a>, now in its sixth day. Hezbollah, a predominantly Shiite Islamist group<\/a>, launched attacks on Israeli targets in retaliation for the attacks on its longtime ally and supporter.<\/p>\n Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a hard-line figure in the government who has long called for Arab expulsion, tweeted on X on Thursday that the Dahieh \u201cwill look like Khan [Yunis],\u201d a reference to the Gaza city all but razed by the Israeli military\u2019s operations against Hamas.<\/p>\n Smotrich added that while Israelis are returning to areas of northern Israel \u201cto flourish and thrive,\u201d the government had \u201cissued evacuation notices to the residents of southern Lebanon and the Dahieh neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHezbollah made a mistake, and it will pay dearly for it,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe are cutting off the head of the octopus in Iran, and in parallel, we are also severing the arm of Hezbollah.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BEIRUT\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The Israeli military issued evacuation orders for entire neighborhoods of Beirut\u2019s southern suburbs, sparking pandemonium as hundreds of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[84,3604,2136,100,3606,72,93,396,3605,3603,3608,2606,2968,3607,3602],"class_list":{"0":"post-5297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lebanon","8":"tag-attack","9":"tag-beirut-suburb","10":"tag-dahieh","11":"tag-hezbollah","12":"tag-hundred","13":"tag-israeli-military","14":"tag-lebanon","15":"tag-people","16":"tag-phone","17":"tag-resident","18":"tag-residential-area","19":"tag-southern-suburb","20":"tag-thousand","21":"tag-thursday-afternoon","22":"tag-unprecedented-israeli-evacuation-order"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116177751439840594","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}