“Where are we supposed to go?” The road out of Dahiyeh and Lebanon’s forced evacuations |
Israel’s blanket evacuation orders for Dahiyeh and southern Lebanon breach the core safeguards of Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 49) which require safe routes and swift returns. It has driven more than 500, 000 people into forced displacement and urban collapse under the cover of “civilian protection” rhetoric.
“We’re still here, but nobody knows where we are supposed to go.” The message arrived from my friend in Haret Hreik, a district of Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh, following evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military for Beirut’s southern suburbs and large parts of southern Lebanon. Evacuation… a word that travels effortlessly through diplomatic corridors, carrying with it the reassurance of humanitarian precaution, suggesting that civilians are warned and depart in time to be spared, promising that violence is carefully managed, instead of being socially imposed. Nevertheless, if you look closely at what is currently unfolding across Lebanon, you will understand that the semantic calm of that word begins to dissolve as it no longer aligns with the bureaucratic comfort embedded in the term itself, following Israel’s issuance of massive displacement orders for Beirut’s southern suburbs and large parts of southern Lebanon.
On 5th March, Dahiyeh marked the beginning of the mass and forced displacement of people from the southern edges of Beirut, revealing that the idea of a mere administrative safety measure was no longer tenable. The roads leading out of Dahiyeh became clogged with cars moving forward without a clear destination, and three-wheeled vehicles stacked with mattresses and suitcases, resembling a slow-moving exodus.
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Even so, to anyone familiar with Dahiyeh, it is well known that the area is not a coordinate on a military grid. An urban environment composed of layers of ordinary life with apartment buildings perched above grocery shops, narrow streets crowded with taxis, schools wedged between traffic arteries, and pharmacies and cafés woven into everyday routines. Currently, hundreds of thousands of residents in Beirut’s southern suburbs are being targeted by evacuation warnings. The directives extend across large parts of southern Lebanon, and the area covered by the evacuation order encompasses roughly half of southern Lebanon, making it the most extensive displacement directive issued since the current escalation began. Furthermore, UNHCR reported that approximately 100,000 people had already been displaced inside Lebanon, while tens of thousands of Syrians........