Tens of thousands of people fled southern Lebanon this week after the Israeli military issued mass displacement orders and intensified airstrikes, forcing families onto blocked roads in pre-dawn darkness and emptying wide areas south of the Litani River.
Mustafa Arout, a 78-year-old mukhtar from Mais al-Jabal near the border, left before sunrise on Tuesday as evacuation instructions spread across the south and bombs hit nearby.
He had hoped to wait for traffic to ease, but instead joined a slow, packed exodus moving north without clear destinations.
‘We don’t know where to go,’ Arout said by phone while still in the car.
The trip to Saida took 12 hours, he said, a drive that would normally take two.
Friends offered the family somewhere to stay in Deir al-Zahrani, northeast of Saida.
That plan offered little security. Like Mais al-Jabal, Deir al-Zahrani was among more than 80 villages ordered to evacuate.
On Wednesday, the Israeli military broadened its orders, telling all residents in Lebanon south of the Litani River to leave.
The order was circulated with a map shading the entire southern region red and pointing north.
Lebanon’s National News Agency said nearly 60,000 people were displaced in the previous 24 hours alone, on top of the tens of thousands who had already fled since Monday.
The escalation followed a Hezbollah barrage of missiles and drones at the Mishmar al-Karmel missile defence site in northern Israel overnight on Sunday.
Hezbollah said it was retaliating for Israel’s killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and for ongoing Israeli operations in Lebanon.
Israel responded with heavy bombardment across southern Lebanon and Beirut. Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said at least 50 people were killed and 335 wounded.
Arout said two young relatives were among the dead.
Two-year-old Haidar and four-year-old Ruqaya, children of his cousin Ali Arout, were killed when Israel bombed the house where they were staying on Monday evening as the family prepared to flee again. Ali’s wife and baby daughter were injured.
The children had already been displaced once. Their home in Al-Sultanieh, about 10 miles west of Mais al-Jabal, was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in 2024, and the family had been staying elsewhere since then.
UNICEF reported that at least seven children were killed in Lebanon within the first 24 hours of the renewed attacks.
‘It was a home for displaced people. They weren’t building rockets,’ Arout said.
‘Where are the European nations with their great morals? Where is the conscience of humanity?’
Hezbollah’s barrage was described in the report as its first major violation of the November 2024 ceasefire.
Over that same period, the United Nations has recorded near-daily Israeli strikes in Lebanon, with more than 340 people killed and more than 15,000 ceasefire violations.
The report said Israel also established five military positions and two buffer zones inside Lebanon.
The cross-border conflict began on 8 October 2023, one day after Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza, when Hezbollah started firing rockets and artillery at Israeli forces. Israel struck southern Lebanon, and attacks continued for months.
In September 2024, Israel escalated by detonating thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon, killing dozens and injuring thousands.
Israel then carried out heavy airstrikes and assassinations of senior Hezbollah commanders, culminating in the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, followed by a ground invasion in October 2024.
The report said large areas of southern and eastern Lebanon were destroyed, with more than 3,800 killed and over 1.2 million forcibly displaced.
After the ceasefire, Arout was among about 600 families who returned to Mais al-Jabal. Before the war, the town had around 30,000 residents.
He said people came back to shattered neighbourhoods and ruined farmland, and found two schools destroyed.
Arout said the ceasefire did not bring safety. Residents faced routine night incursions, assassination operations and constant drone surveillance, and villagers were targeted while trying to rebuild homes or farm close to the border.
He said those conditions pushed him to support Hezbollah’s decision to fight again.
‘We are lovers of life, we don’t like death,’ he said. ‘But a good, dignified life, not a life of humiliation.’
Lebanon’s government reacted with anger to Hezbollah’s rocket launches. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam described the operations as ‘illegal acts’ and announced a ban on Hezbollah’s security and military activities, the harshest government stance against the group described in the report.
Security agencies were instructed to stop missile and drone launches and detain those responsible.
During an emergency cabinet meeting, the Lebanese information minister quoted President Joseph Aoun as saying: ‘There is a side that wants to drag the country to matters that we have nothing to do with.’
The Lebanese Armed Forces were tasked with enforcing the decision and asserting a state monopoly over weapons north of the Litani River using ‘all means necessary’.
Local broadcaster LBCI reported that the army detained 12 armed Hezbollah members at a checkpoint on Tuesday.
Hezbollah defended its actions. In a statement early Tuesday it said ‘confrontation is a legitimate right’, adding that it had repeatedly warned Israeli attacks could not continue without a response.
Senior Hezbollah official Mohamoud Komati said: ‘The Zionist enemy wanted an open war, which it has not stopped since the ceasefire agreement.’ He added: ‘So let it be an open war.’
Israeli forces also began advancing further into Lebanese territory from border positions, according to the National News Agency, which reported that troops entered Khiam and set up a position near the municipality building.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said the military had been instructed ‘to advance and seize additional controlling areas in Lebanon to prevent firing on Israeli border settlements’.
Katz also said Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem was a ‘target for elimination’.
As families arrived in Beirut, the waterfront filled with scenes reminiscent of the 2024 war, the report said, with cars stacked with mattresses and suitcases and some people sleeping outside in the cold.
Shelter space was already strained. Landlords in Beirut, suspicious of southerners’ links to Hezbollah, demanded identity cards and conducted background checks, while rents surged into the thousands of dollars a month.
The evacuated border region is also an agricultural heartland and home to Syrian refugees who work the land.
Um Mahmoud, who fled Idlib in 2011, had lived in Khiam ever since, farming land owned by a Lebanese family while raising three children.
When the conflict erupted in October 2023, she said her family was displaced four times before settling near Nabatieh.
Work dried up and they survived on food rations provided by a Lebanese woman who was also displaced.
Syrian refugees are barred from certain official shelters reserved for Lebanese citizens.
After the new evacuation orders late Monday night, Um Mahmoud said the roads filled with people moving through darkness.
‘You should have seen the exodus in the darkness. It was devastating, some people on motorcycles, others on foot,’ she said.
‘Farmers without trucks herded their sheep on the shoulders of the road.’
The family went to Marj al-Khokh, a displacement camp for Syrians, and rented an unfurnished tent.
The next day, nearby Israeli strikes prompted some families to return to Syria, but Um Mahmoud refused, fearing insecurity in Idlib.
Her family instead travelled to the Bekaa Valley to stay with relatives.
Leaving Khiam, she said, felt like being torn from the only stable home she had known in years.
‘My soul is attached to the south,’ she said.
‘After 15 years there, I got used to the people, the land. If I were to have a homeland, it would be the south.’