While Israel's calls to evacuate the inhabitants of south Lebanon and the Bekaa are real, false information has been circulating over the past two days concerning similar warnings sent to other regions.

This is particularly true of an image that has been circulating on social networks since Tuesday evening, showing a TV screen on which a journalist from the Lebanese channel MTV appears, under which a written banner calls on “the inhabitants of Fanar, Jdeideh and Dekwaneh,” neighborhoods north of Beirut, to leave.

This is a “fabricated photo,” and the information is untrue, said the channel.

On Wednesday, the Saudi channel Al-Hadath reported that leaflets had been dropped on the Beirut-Damascus highway near the town of Kahaleh, urging residents to leave the area “within two hours.” Contacted by L'Orient-Le Jour, the municipality declared that these were “lies.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, Sama Habib, denied in a call with L'Orient-Le Jour that she was behind an alarmist statement issued on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) urging people to stay at home, in anticipation of attacks on Beirut's southern suburbs. The text called on the population to avoid bridges, airports, ports, army bases, highways and Electricite du Liban (EDL) infrastructure in several regions, as well as the Ras Beirut lighthouse. This statement “does not come from USAID or the American Embassy,” said Habib.

Since Monday, Israel has been regularly calling on residents of certain areas of Lebanon, mainly in the south and the Bekaa, to leave their homes if they are located near buildings where Hezbollah weapons are stored. These appeals are made in messages addressed to the inhabitants of the targeted regions, as well as in leaflets. So far, however, they have focused on these two areas.

In a final episode on Wednesday, the State Security Directorate in south Lebanon said it investigated messages received by residents of two buildings in Haret Saida (Saida), attributed to Israel and calling on them to leave their homes within two hours in anticipation of scheduled bombardments on their neighborhood, and concluded that they were false, according to a statement.

This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.