Israel strikes Lebanese city of Tyre after evacuation orders

Israel has carried out at least four air strikes on the historic Lebanese port city of Tyre, hours after expanding its evacuation orders to cover several central neighbourhoods.

Videos showed huge clouds of black smoke rising from a seafront area that is only a few hundred metres from Unesco World Heritage-listed Roman ruins.

Lebanon’s state news agency said the strikes caused “massive destruction” to homes and infrastructure, but there were no reports of any casualties.

The Israeli military said it targeted command-and-control centres of Hezbollah, including its Southern Front headquarters.

The military’s Arabic spokesman had earlier issued a map of the neighbourhoods where he said it was going to act “forcefully” against the Iran-backed armed group.

Tens of thousands of residents had already fled the city in recent weeks in response to Israel’s intense air campaign and ground invasion.

But before the strikes began, a spokesman for a disaster management unit said about 14,000 people were still living in the city, including those displaced from elsewhere in the south.

“You could say that the entire city of Tyre is being evacuated,” Bilal Kashmar told AFP news agency, adding that many people were heading towards the suburbs.

Wael Farraj said he and his family had fled in response to the evacuation order and that they were sitting by the sea when they heard that their home had been destroyed.

“We took the children, grabbed what we could,” he told Reuters news agency as he inspected the damage. “We came back and looked, and our house had collapsed.”

“We are staying here and we are steadfast. We will remain here… among the rubble.”

Another man, Issam Awad, said: “Just like everyone else, we were sitting, and suddenly, without warning, the bombing started.”

“Thank God, we’re all fine, and no-one got hurt by the explosions.”

The Israeli military said the strikes were part of its efforts to target Hezbollah’s activities and obstruct its attempts to rebuild its military capabilities.

It also accused the group of systematically taking over civilian and religious areas to carry out attacks in a way that endangered the Lebanese population.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that Israeli aircraft carried out multiple air strikes elsewhere in southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley on Wednesday.

The regions were also targeted overnight along with the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut, where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

The Israeli military said the strikes in Beirut targeted weapons storage and manufacturing facilities, as well as command centres belonging to Hezbollah.

On Wednesday evening the pro-Hezbollah TV channel al-Mayadeen said its bureau in the city had been hit by an Israeli strike.

The military also said it had killed the Hezbollah sector commanders for the southern areas of Jibchit, Jouaiya and Qana in air strikes over the past several days, and that its troops had killed about 70 Hezbollah fighters during operations inside southern Lebanon to dismantle the group’s infrastructure and weapons caches.

There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah.

However, the group did say its fighters had launched barrages of rockets into Israel on Wednesday, including one in the morning that targeted the Gilot intelligence base, which is north of the central city of Tel Aviv.

Rocket alert sirens sounded in Tel Aviv, prompting senior US officials travelling with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to be ushered to a safe room in their hotel. It is not known whether or not Blinken himself was also forced to shelter.

Another rocket barrage hit two factory buildings in the northern Israeli towns of Acre and Kiryat Bialik, causing damage but no injuries.

Later, Hezbollah confirmed that Hashem Safieddine, who had been expected to become the group’s next leader, was killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Beirut on 4 October.

Safieddine was the cousin of Hezbollah’s late leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in another strike in the capital the previous week.

Israel’s launched its full-scale military campaign against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wanted to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel.

More than 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 1,900 in the past five weeks, according to the country’s health ministry. Israeli authorities say 59 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.