Four killed in Beirut hotel strike, Israel says it targeted Iranian commanders

IRANIAN DIPLOMATS LEAVE BEIRUT

Shawki al-Masri, who lives in a town adjacent to Nabi Chit, described the overnight bombing in the area as “a night of hell”.

“We heard the helicopters over our house all night – they were so low we thought they would land on us,” he told Reuters.

Orders to evacuate have displaced around 300,000 people, only a third of whom are now living in government shelters. A senior United Nations official described the displacement as “unprecedented” in comments to Reuters on Friday.

Israel’s military has issued orders for people living in a swathe of southern Lebanon, several towns in the east, and the entirety of Beirut’s southern suburbs to leave their homes. This amounts to around 8 per cent of Lebanese territory.

Israel’s military this week warned representatives of the Iranian government “still in Lebanon to leave immediately before they are targeted”.

Over 150 Iranian nationals, including diplomats and their families, left Lebanon on Saturday, a senior Lebanese security source told Reuters, adding that 20 left the previous day.

The Iranian embassy in Lebanon, citing safety concerns, said that the families of the Iranian embassy staff, along with teachers and students of the Iranian school and a group of Iranians living in Lebanon, have left Beirut temporarily.

Hezbollah has warned Israeli citizens living in communities near the border to flee their homes, but Israel has said there will be no evacuations. Many northern Israeli communities were evacuated during cross-border bombardment in 2023-24.

The United Nations warned on Saturday that the conflict was set to get “even worse”, and that talks between Israel and Lebanon “must be pursued with urgency” to end hostilities.