The Israeli military issued an unprecedented forced displacement order on Wednesday morning for all 200,000 residents of Tyre, a UNESCO world heritage city on Lebanon's southern coast, before launching airstrikes that the IDF said targeted Hezbollah command nodes inside the city limits and across the surrounding villages. The evacuation warning, posted by spokesman Avichay Adraee on social media in Arabic, was the first of its kind for Tyre since the original 1982 invasion and signalled a sharp expansion of the campaign Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday would "crush" the Iran-backed movement.
Lebanon's public health ministry reported by Wednesday afternoon that thirty-one people had been killed and forty wounded since Tuesday night across the south and east, with strikes reaching as far north as the Bekaa Valley town of Mashghara, which was hit twice on Monday. Civil defence teams in Tyre had been pulling bodies from collapsed buildings in the city's southern neighbourhoods within two hours of the warning, and Lebanese army roadblocks turned back civilian convoys trying to reach the city to retrieve relatives.
The displacement order covered the nearby Palestinian refugee camps of Rashidieh, Burj Shemali and al-Buss, where roughly twenty-five thousand people live in conditions UNRWA has described as already on the edge of crisis. UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said the agency had lost contact with two of its three medical posts inside Rashidieh after the strikes began. Caretaker Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati called the order "a war crime in waiting" and asked the UN Security Council for an emergency session.
The IDF said the strikes around Tyre targeted what it called a Hezbollah brigade headquarters built underneath a residential block in the al-Bass neighbourhood and a longer-range rocket workshop in the eastern suburb of Maaroub. Israeli officials briefed Israeli reporters that intelligence collected over the past three weeks showed Hezbollah had shifted command-and-control infrastructure into Tyre after losing forward positions further south last month, an assessment that has not been independently verified.
Hezbollah said in a statement that it fired a barrage of explosive drones at northern Israel late on Wednesday morning in retaliation. The Israeli military acknowledged "several" drone impacts in the Galilee panhandle but reported no casualties. Sirens sounded as far south as Acre for the first time since March, and Israel's home front command extended shelter-in-place orders along the Lebanese border until further notice.
The Lebanon front is one of the central sticking points in the parallel US-Iran negotiations on a framework to end the wider war. Iranian negotiators have insisted that any ceasefire memorandum must also cover Israeli operations against Hezbollah, while US officials have so far refused to fold the Lebanon track into the Iran deal. Tehran called the Tyre evacuation order "an open attempt to sabotage the talks," and Hezbollah secretary-general Naim Qassem repeated his demand for "an immediate cessation of aggression" before any wider settlement.
Aid agencies were scrambling on Wednesday afternoon to set up reception sites further north in Saida and Beirut. The UN refugee agency said it had already registered 84,000 people displaced from the south since Saturday, the largest single-week outflow since the 2024 ceasefire collapsed. France, which still has roughly seven hundred troops stationed in Lebanon as part of UNIFIL, said it was reinforcing its medical airlift capacity at Beirut's Rafik Hariri airport.