A car where displaced people are sleeping, parked in a downtown Beirut parking lot, March 5, 2026. (Credit: Tea Ziade/L'Orient-Le Jour)
It took only a few minutes for the roads in and around Beirut to fill with cars after the mass evacuation threat issued Thursday afternoon by Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army's Arabic-language spokesperson.For the first time in two years, tens of thousands of residents from four entire neighborhoods of Beirut's southern suburbs were ordered to leave, threatened with imminent strikes.Fleeing, by any means. Sahar*, her mother, and her siblings left on foot. "I was so anxious, I was so scared," says the young woman in her twenties, a resident of Ghobeiry, nervously tapping her leg in Martyrs' Square.During the last war, when the southern suburb endured daily strikes and lived to the rhythm of evacuation notices signaling buildings and their surroundings, the family stayed home. But this time, it's different: the...
It took only a few minutes for the roads in and around Beirut to fill with cars after the mass evacuation threat issued Thursday afternoon by Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army's Arabic-language spokesperson.For the first time in two years, tens of thousands of residents from four entire neighborhoods of Beirut's southern suburbs were ordered to leave, threatened with imminent strikes.Fleeing, by any means. Sahar*, her mother, and her siblings left on foot. "I was so anxious, I was so scared," says the young woman in her twenties, a resident of Ghobeiry, nervously tapping her leg in Martyrs' Square.During the last war, when the southern suburb endured daily strikes and lived to the rhythm of evacuation notices signaling buildings and their surroundings, the family stayed home. But this time, it's different: the...
