Security personnel inspect the wreckage of a vehicle hit by a targeted airstrike without warning on a busy road in the centre of Sidon, Lebanon, on Wednesday.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Israel delivered sweeping new evacuation orders to southern Lebanon overnight on Wednesday, turning built-up areas into ghost towns and terrifying the few residents who chose not to leave.
In the southern seaside town of Aadloun, about 17 kilometres north of Tyre, the family of Abdul Rahmen Humadi, 32, a farm worker from Syria, no longer had any neighbours; they had fled north in recent days, joining the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons who were told to leave for their safety.
“Four days ago, we left for Sidon,” Mr. Humadi said, referring to the large coastal city halfway between Beirut and Tyre. “But we couldn’t find shelter. My wife and I and our six children spent one night in a park, under blankets. We had no food or water and did not feel safe, so we came back.”
Mr. Humadi went to Lebanon in 2012 to escape the Syrian civil war and now finds himself back in, or near, the front lines of another war, one that pits Israel against Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militia. He says that 80 per cent of the residents who lived near their house have escaped to Beirut or Tripoli.
“I’m scared about the Israeli attacks because I have children,” he said.
The latest evacuation alert appeared on residents’ phones in southern Lebanon early Wednesday morning. It extended the no-go zone to well north of the Litani River, which runs east-west across Lebanon, about 25 kilometres from the Israeli border.
The evacuation zone now covers almost 15 per cent of Lebanon.
Southern Lebanon and central and south Beirut came under renewed attack by Israel overnight, after a Hezbollah rocket volley into northern Israel. Reportedly, some 100 rockets were fired.
Abdul Rahman Humadi, a farm worker from Syria, poses with his wife, Mastoura, and his son Ali, 10 months, in their home in the mostly evacuated town of Aadloun in southern Lebanon.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
In Beirut, Israel hit four buildings overnight and at dawn, killing at least 12 people, the Lebanese Health Ministry said. An entire 10-storey building in the centre was flattened, an indication that the attacks may no longer focus almost exclusively on South Beirut, which Israel considers a Hezbollah stronghold.
Israel did not specifically identify the Lebanese targets it hit. Early on Wednesday, the Israel Defence Forces said only that “following the civilian evacuation in the area of Tyre in southern Lebanon, and in response to rocket fire toward the state of Israel, the IDF has begun striking Hezbollah terror targets.”
A building collapses after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's Bashoura neighbourhood.FADEL ITANI/AFP/Getty Images
The Israeli military said it would destroy bridges across the Litani River to prevent Hezbollah from sending weapons from the north to fighters in the south. Journalists on Wednesday were turned back from the southeastern town of Marjayoun, near Khiam, the site of reported heavy fighting between Israeli troops, equipped with tanks, and Hezbollah.
In the centre of Sidon, an apparent assassination missile attack at 9:32 a.m. local time on Wednesday destroyed several cars and killed two people, one of them a paramedic, the health ministry said.
A man walks over rubble at the site of an Israeli airstrike in the Bachoura area.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
A man walks past a vehicle damaged by a targeted airstrike in the coastal city of Sidon.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail heard the missile strike and arrived on the scene minutes later. Several cars were shattered as well as most of the windows in the six-storey building within metres of the attack. The Globe saw an uninjured man collapsing in agony after realizing he had lost his friend in a destroyed car. He was carried away from the scene by several paramedics.
“I was in my house when we heard four missiles hit,” said Abou Hamza, a witness to the attack. “One of the dead was a civil defence guy.”
A medic comforts a distressed civil defense worker who has just lost a friend and colleague in an air strike in Sidon.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Nearby, displaced people were filling a small park. A Syrian father, Souleiman El Houssein, who was living in a tent with his family, complained about discrimination. They had been living in a Palestinian refugee camp in Tyre since leaving Syria in 2015.
“They ordered us to evacuate from Tyre and sent us to a school in Sidon, then they pushed us out of the school and into this park to make room for the Lebanese,” he said.
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Towns and villages to the immediate south of Sidon were emptying out this week. Ali Kahlife, mayor of Sarafand, a seaside town about 20 kilometres beyond Sidon, said the population had dropped to 15,000 from 45,000 in recent days.
Israeli soldiers conduct an operation in a southern Lebanese village along the border, as seen from the Upper Galilee in northern Israel on March 18.JALAA MAREY/AFP/Getty Images
He said that some of the residents who fled north were kind enough to offer their apartments to displaced people who could not afford accommodation in Beirut and other northern towns and cities. “I am afraid for the refugees here,” he said. “The number of displaced people is overwhelming cities everywhere in Lebanon.”
The International Organization for Migration said five days ago that nearly one million Lebanese had been displaced by the war. The number is probably far higher now, given the expanded Israeli evacuation orders and steady missile attacks. On Wednesday, the Disaster Risk Management unit of Lebanon’s Council of Ministers reported 968 Lebanese dead and 2,432 wounded since March 2, when Israeli forces renewed their attacks on southern Lebanon in response to Hezbollah missile launches into Israel.