They call him the prince of doom. A phone vibrates at 3am and his face appears on X. He is delivering a message: leave or die.
The messenger is Avichay Adraee, the Israeli military’s Arabic language spokesperson. In what is frighteningly good Arabic for a non-native speaker, he yells into his phone’s camera, telling Lebanese people to evacuate certain areas “for their safety” before strikes on what Israel says is Hezbollah infrastructure.
On Wednesday a little after 8am, Adraee issued a new evacuation order. The residents of a large section of Tyre, the second most populated city in south Lebanon, were ordered to leave, joining people from more than 70 villages that have been put under Israeli evacuation orders – which Israel says are aimed at minimising casualties – since 23 September. In total more than 1.2 million people have been displaced by Israel’s offensive.
Amnesty International has criticised Israel’s evacuation orders, saying they are inadequate and that they raise questions as to whether they are meant to provoke mass displacement. In some cases, Israel has issued evacuation orders in the middle of the night over social media and given residents less than 30 minutes to evacuate before strikes began.
Three hours after Adraee posted on X, the airstrikes started. At least a dozen buildings were damaged or destroyed around Abou Deeb roundabout, a major residential area where families can be found sitting in cafes and enjoying an ice-cream on most nights.
On Thursday, there were no families left in the evacuated zone. Rubble and downed power lines filled the streets. What used to be 12-story buildings were reduced to piles of snarled concrete peppered with residents’ belongings – clothes, textbooks, toys. Reassured by the presence of the civil defence, Elias Mabhoor, a resident of the Christian quarter of Tyre, came riding in on his electric blue scooter to check on the home of his friend, Ibrahim, who lives abroad.
“Hey Ibrahim, look! This is your grandfather’s house, it’s all gone now!” Mabhoor shouted as he filmed a video for his friend, waving the phone back and forth to fit the destroyed building into the frame. Hassan Shur, a resident, returned to retrieve his song birds, at least a dozen of them twittering away in their cages on the doorstep of a building with half of its exterior wall missing.
A large boom rang out – a warning shot from an Israeli drone watching overhead – and residents were sent scurrying. Shur hurriedly put the bird cages on the back of his bike as the civil defence cried out for people to leave the evacuated zone, all too familiar with the Israeli airstrikes that follow its warning shots. If Adraee’s X post would not keep them out of their homes, Israeli bombs would.
“There is something mind-controlling about what they’re doing now. They’re displacing the population just by giving orders, it’s warfare by other means,” said Nadim Houry, the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative and the former Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch during the 2006 war.
Over the last year, Tyre had been a refuge for thousands of people displaced by Israel-Hezbollah fighting along the border. During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, it played a similar role, hosting internally displaced people, humanitarians and journalists who relied on it as a safe zone.
Damaged furniture in destroyed apartments that were hit by Israeli airstrikes, in Tyre. Photograph: Mohammad Zaatari/AP
Now, Tyre was no longer safe. The day after Israel issued its evacuation order, the city was almost entirely empty.
Burnt-out cars, flipped upside down by the force of a blast, lined the main thoroughfare of the city. Distant thuds announced Israeli airstrikes, and the occasional volley of a dozen outgoing Katyushas, the rockets popping and flaring up before accelerating and disappearing into the sky, was Hezbollah’s reply. Where beachgoers would usually lounge were journalists and a row of cameras pointed at Lebanon’s snaking coastline, with plumes of smoke where Israeli bombs dropped visible under Tyre’s clear blue sky.
Israel has said its evacuation orders are meant to minimise civilian harm and claims that it is one of the world’s only militaries to issue them in advance of strikes. However, in many of Israel’s deadliest strikes on Lebanon, there were no warnings issued, prompting questions about the purpose of the evacuation orders if not to reduce civilian deaths.
An Israeli strike in front of Rafik Hariri university hospital in Beirut, which killed 18 and wounded 60 on Monday, happened without any warning. The 45 residents of Ain el-Delb, near Saida, killed in an Israeli strike on 28 September were also given no evacuation orders.
“Evacuation orders are supposed to be for legitimate targets, but right now it’s not even clear if they’re legitimate targets … Israel has taken the principles of international law and turned them on their heads,” Houry said.
Despite the evacuation orders and constant airstrikes, some residents of Tyre have decided to stay behind. Hassan Dbouk, the head of the Union of Tyre Municipalities, remains in his office, overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid to those who are left in the city.
Dbouk has received two phone calls from Israeli officers urging him to evacuate. One of the calls lasted 20 minutes. “I said to him: ‘Why are you targeting civilians? We lost four employees of the municipality already.’ He simply said: ‘For that reason I’m calling you to leave.’ Everyone has got calls, now we stopped answering,” Dbouk said.
Dbouk recounted the parable of the valley of the ants, present in both the Qur’an and the Torah. In the legend, King Solomon leads an army towards a valley filled with ants. Hearing the ground tremble before the advancing soldiers, the ants urge one another to flee so that they are not crushed underfoot.
“Solomon heard the ants and started smiling. He told his army to stop, so that the ants would have time to get to their homes. Why doesn’t Israel do the same?”, Dbouk asked.
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