The Israel Defense Forces issued on Thursday morning a sweeping evacuation order requiring all civilians south of Lebanon's Zahrani River to leave for shelters north of the line within seventy-two hours, the broadest forced-displacement directive of the three-month campaign. The area covered by the order contains roughly three hundred villages and towns and represents about fourteen per cent of Lebanese national territory, according to mapping released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Israeli engineering units overnight destroyed the four main road bridges over the Litani River, including the Akiya, Qasmiya and Khardali crossings, in what an IDF spokesperson described as an operation to "deny terror logistics" and to "create a clearer combat zone." Lebanese state media reported that the Litani strikes had cut the south from the rest of the country and that displaced families had begun crossing the river on foot through shallows further inland.
Aid agencies described conditions as catastrophic. The United Nations Refugee Agency said that since March, over a million people, nearly a fifth of Lebanon's population, had been displaced; the Norwegian Refugee Council called the new order "an absolute catastrophe" and said it was scaling down operations south of the Litani because of safety constraints. Most of Tyre, Lebanon's fourth-largest city, falls inside the new evacuation zone after Wednesday's narrower order for the coastal city itself.
Casualties from Wednesday's strikes have continued to rise. Lebanon's health ministry reported on Thursday that at least thirty-one people had been killed and forty wounded across southern and eastern Lebanon in the previous twenty-four hours, including in strikes on the Beqaa Valley and on a displacement convoy heading north on the coastal road. The total death toll since the campaign began in early March now stands above 3,100, according to ministry figures cited by Al Jazeera.
Hezbollah's response has so far been more restrained than during the 2024 round. The group claimed two short-range rocket launches at northern Israeli positions on Thursday afternoon but has not resumed sustained barrages, a calibration analysts attribute to its weakened command structure and to ongoing Iranian pressure to avoid pulling Tehran more deeply into the war at a moment when the US-Iran ceasefire framework is in active negotiation in Muscat.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned the displacement order in a televised address from Baabda and called for an emergency UN Security Council session. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said the destruction of the Litani bridges constituted "a deliberate strangulation of the south" and asked the international community for emergency humanitarian corridors. France, which has historically taken the lead on Lebanon at the Security Council, requested consultations for Friday.
Inside the displacement zone, Lebanese officials said local authorities had run out of fuel, medical supplies, and reception capacity. The city of Saida, which sits just north of the Zahrani line and has absorbed earlier waves of displacement, said its schools and mosques were already at full occupancy. UNRWA reported that twelve Palestinian refugee camps inside the evacuation zone were among the worst-affected populations and had been told by Israeli officers to walk north on foot.
The diplomatic tracks have largely failed to slow the campaign. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Thursday that Israel's southern Lebanon operations were "an issue for Iran and Israel," not part of the parallel Iran framework being negotiated in Muscat. Iran's deputy foreign minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi separately said Iran considered the Lebanon situation an "inseparable" part of any final understanding, language that diplomats said had been a sticking point in the Iran talks earlier in the week.