Last week, Israel imposed massive evacuation orders including a lot of heavily populated parts of eastern Lebanon, including an evacuation of the entire ancient city of Baalbek. People started fleeing, and within hours, the missiles started hitting the city and surrounding areas.
But where do the people go? With airstrikes having already damaged the border crossings into Syria, most people are having to go to towns and villages outside the evacuation zones. But are they any safer there?
Not so far they aren’t, as in recent Israeli airstrikes into eastern Lebanon, more are hitting areas outside the evacuation zones than the zones themselves. On Friday, 14 airstrikes were reported in eastern Lebanon, and fully 10 of them were outside of the designated zones.
That’s a big problem, because again, the zones included a lot of the most densely populated areas. The small towns and villages people are fleeing into are having enough problems trying to absorb all these people without also coming under attack themselves.
This isn’t an issue just in eastern Lebanon, of course. Yesterday, Israel carried out another attack on the town of Haret Saida, in the country’s southwest. It was the third time they’d attacked the town this week though it too is outside the evacuation zone. Haret Saida reportedly had taken in some 17,000 people from the surrounding area because it was conspicuously outside the zones for cities in the coastal area.
Over 3,000 people have been killed across Lebanon in the ongoing Israeli invasion, and at least 1.2 million people have been displaced by the evacuation orders, which cover more than a quarter of Lebanon’s population.
Inside and outside the zones, the attacks seem to be killing more civilians than combatants, and there is growing international criticism of Israel’s air war. In eastern Lebanon too, despite Israel emphasizing that they are targeting Hezbollah strongholds, the casualties are heavily civilian, and included a number of children.
Reports out of Baalbek suggest that about a third of the city’s 100,000 people stayed behind, most because they had nowhere to go. Since the areas outside the city don’t seem safer, those broad evacuation orders may be viewed skeptically by many in the future.
