Israel orders more than 500,000 people to evacuate Beirut’s southern suburbs

Original article by William Christou in Beirut

The Israeli military has ordered the entire population of Beirut’s southern suburbs to evacuate, as it continued to bomb Lebanon and Iran, while Tehran launched retaliatory strikes against Israel and US bases across the region.

An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson told all residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs – more than 500,000 people – to “save your lives and evacuate your homes immediately”, before Israel launched airstrikes on what he described as Hezbollah targets. The area covered by the order included several hospitals and government ministries.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump claimed that he should be involved in choosing Iran’s next supreme leader to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war.

Trump said Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the late supreme leader – the country’s head of state and commander-in-chief – would be an “unacceptable” choice.

“We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future,” Trump told Reuters. “We don’t have to go back every five years and do this again and again … somebody that’s going to be great for the people, great for the country.”

Iran expanded its campaign of strikes, firing more ballistic missiles towards Israel, striking an airport in Azerbaijan, and raising fears that the conflict – now affecting 14 countries across the Middle East and beyond – could spread further.

Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said on Thursday that the decision to assassinate the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was taken in November, far predating the breakdown in the nuclear programme negotiations that Donald Trump claimed led to the US launching a preemptive strike on Iran.

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Katz said that Netanyahu and his top ministers had made the decision to kill Khamenei because they believed that as long as he led Iran he would seek the destruction of Israel.

The original timeline was for Israel to target Khamenei in the middle of 2026, but Netanyahu moved it up the schedule after riots broke out in Iran, Katz said. Khamenei was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday, the first day of the war.

The claim could bolster critics of Trump, who say that Israel had dragged the US into a large war in the Middle East with Iran. Secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said earlier that the US launched the strike on Iran because it expected to be targeted after the Israeli attack.

Katz has also said that Khamenei’s successors will be “unequivocal targets for elimination”.

Thursday’s sweeping evacuation order for southern Beirut was unprecedented in its scale: even during the 13-month war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024, no evacuation order so broad was issued.

The order provoked panic in Beirut as people tried to flee the affected areas. Traffic was at a standstill throughout the city and thousands of people resorted to walking, with women pushing strollers holding infants through bumper-to-bumper traffic. Families made appeals for rescue services to help extract elderly people who could not leave their homes on their own.

The Israeli military spokesperson provided pre-approved routes north and east which it said people should use to flee – a tactic reminiscent of evacuation orders Israel issued in Gaza. The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, threatened in a post on X that “the southern suburbs of Beirut will become like Khan Younis”, a section of southern Gaza that has been almost entirely destroyed by Israeli bombs.

Rights groups have condemned such sweeping evacuation orders in the past, saying they amount to forced displacement – a war crime – and warning that non-able-bodied residents may not be able to comply.

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At least 102 people have been killed and 638 injured in Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes, Lebanon’s ministry of health reported. The war, now in its sixth day, has also killed at least 1,230 people in Iran and about a dozen people in Israel. Six US soldiers have been killed.

The evacuation order was issued just a day after the Israeli military ordered all residents to flee the area south of the Litani River, which compromises about 10% of the country.

Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters were fighting in south Lebanon, according to UN peacekeepers in the area, as Israel continued its retaliatory campaign against the pro-Iran force that launched missiles into Israel on Monday.

Despite the escalating nature of the conflict, the US gave an optimistic assessment of its campaign so far, with various officials giving differing goalposts and timelines for the war in Iran.

The US and Israel continued their bombardment of Iran, hitting key ballistic missile launchers, weapons caches and security installations on Thursday.

Israel’s military also warned residents in eastern parts of Tehran to evacuate, while Iranian media reported blasts across the capital. “Today is worse than yesterday,” one resident of the city told Reuters. “We have nowhere to go. It is like a warzone. Help us.”

Sri Lanka said its navy had recovered at least 87 bodies after a US submarine sank an Iranian warship, IRIS Dena, on Wednesday. Thirty-two sailors were rescued out of a total crew of almost 130. The country reported that another Iranian ship had arrived in its waters, without reporting further details.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, reacted with fury to the US’s sinking of Dena, accusing it of carrying out an “atrocity of sea”.

“Mark my words: The US will come to bitterly regret [the] precedent it has set,” Araghchi said in a post on X, while a senior Iranian cleric called for the exacting of “Trump’s blood” on state TV.

Iran’s retaliatory campaign of strikes has hit targets as far afield as Cyprus and created the world’s largest travel disruption since Covid as countries shut down their airspaces, and caused oil prices to spike.

Gulf countries reported more incoming Iranian projectiles throughout the day, which Iran said were targeted at US bases and personnel stationed there. A drone was shot down near Al Dhafra airbase in the United Arab Emirates, wounding six people when shrapnel fell. Qatar said there was a missile attack on the capital, Doha, and Saudi Arabia announced it had destroyed a drone. A tanker was attacked off the coast of Kuwait but it was unclear if the ship was damaged.

In Azerbaijan, a drone strike wounded four people near an airport in Nakhchivan, in an area bordering Iran, while another drone fell close to a school. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, said Iran had committed a “groundless act of terror and aggression” and said the military was prepared to retaliate.

Tehran denied the claims, with the general staff of the Iranian armed forces denouncing the allegations as baseless.

Iran also targeted the headquarters of Iranian Kurdish forces northern Iraq as it increased its strikes on Kurdish forces in Iran and Iraq. The attacks came as the US and Israel pressed forward with an apparent plan to help thousands of Kurdish fighters to push into Iran as part of a ground operation.