With one text message, Israel made half a million people homeless, leaving the city’s southern suburbs a ghost town
The ding of half a million phones, a pause and a collective gasp: in an instant, more than 500,000 people had just been declared homeless.
Shooting in the air, panicked phone calls and honking filled the streets of Beirut as people began to flee. Thousands abandoned their cars and began the slow march to the sea, desperate to escape the Israeli bombs which they knew would soon fall on their homes – whether they were in them or not.
The Israeli army issued its largest, most sweeping displacement order yet, ordering the immediate evacuation of the southern suburbs of Beirut – an area the size of lower Manhattan. By Friday, the usually vibrant area was a ghost town, the throngs of people replaced by rubble and fires from Israeli bombing.
It was one more chunk of Lebanon declared off-limits by the Israelis. The entire country south of the Litani river, roughly 10% of Lebanon, had already been put under a displacement order the day before. Family WhatsApp chats were filled with the infamous blue maps issued by the Israeli military spokesperson over X, more and more towns and neighbourhoods shaded in red by the hour.
