'45 minutes to leave': Evacuation warnings in Middle East

It is 2 a.m and pitch dark. You are woken by a phone call. A stranger on the phone says you and your family should immediately leave because the area is about to be bombed.

Do you leave everything behind — your home, your heirlooms, your pets? Can you just drive away in your pajamas, not knowing if you'll ever return?

These are the kinds of questions that thousands of people in Lebanon have faced recently, says Aya Majzoub, deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, around a quarter of Lebanese territory "is now under Israeli military displacement orders." That is, while fighting the Hezbollah group, the Israeli military has told locals to leave the area because they will be in danger if they don't.

"And most people are not even getting phone calls," Majzoub told DW. "Often the Israeli army's Arabic-language spokesperson will just announce warnings on social media," she explains.

Several days ago, that happened in the middle of the night. "There were evacuation warnings posted on Twitter [now called X] between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.," Majzoub recounted. These referred to parts of Dahieh in Beirut. "Most people would have completely missed them, had it not been for young men from the neighborhoods, who rushed into the street and started shooting in the air to wake people up."

This is just one of the incidents that has caused groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to criticize how Israel is giving evacuation warnings in Lebanon. Their concerns also include inaccurate or misleading maps, warnings only minutes before an attack, as well as warnings that are too broad.

More recently, Israel issued its first city-wide warning during the conflict in Lebanon. On the morning of October 30, an Israeli military spokesperson wrote on X, addressing locals in the eastern city of Baalbek, that Israel intended to "act forcefully against Hezbollah interests in your city and villages."

Baalbek city usually has between 80,000 and 100,000 inhabitants and locals scrambled to leave. Israeli airstrikes began just four hours later. Once again, the evacuation warnings were criticized because four hours are not enough to evacuate an entire city. This week, the Washington Post published a reportshowing most of the strikes that day were outside of the mapped evacuation zone anyway. 

A few days before this, the  Hezbollah group also issued a series of evacuation warnings in a video on a messaging service. In it, Hezbollah told locals in over 20 towns in northern Israel to evacuate because they were targets, thanks to the presence of Israeli troops. Although Hezbollah has rockets, unlike Israel, it doesn't have an air force, so many observers described those warnings as mostly "psychological warfare."

Still, Amnesty International has the same concerns about Hezbollah's evacuation warnings as it does about Israel's. "When these warnings come for entire towns and villages and don't specify particular military targets, they are also overly broad," Majzoub notes.

What is the legal situation?

The obligation for a military to warn civilians before an attack dates back to 1863 and the American civil war, when the "Lieber Instructions" were written. These were the first attempt to define rules for battlefield conduct and many of the principles in them would eventually form the basis of what's known as "international humanitarian law" today. 

More recently, the "obligation to warn" has been seen as "customary law" — that is, it's generally accepted by most armies. The International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, notes that many modern military codes of conduct, including Israel's, contain this obligation.

But deciding whether to warn civilians depends on the situation and if it would be "feasible." For example, a warning could take away the element of surprise. Decisions about feasibility are made by the attacker and in their calculations, the law says they should also include factors such as proportionality — that is, how many civilians might be killed or wounded in achieving an objective. 

"For an attacker, warnings make sense from a legal perspective," Michael Schmitt, a professor of public international law at the University of Reading in the UK, wrote in a text for US military academy West Point last October. "After all, the fewer civilians in the target area, the less likely the proportionality rule is to prohibit attack."

Feasible and effective

If a military decides a warning is "feasible," then rules say it must also be "effective."

"In Lebanon, we're not really talking about evacuation orders, we're talking about warnings," Emanuela-Chiara Gillard, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told DW. It's important to differentiate between the two, "because we are not in a situation of occupation [in Lebanon], the parties are not in a position to give orders," she points out. "So the question then is: Are [the warnings] effective in the circumstances? Do they allow civilians to move away from danger?"

But what an "effective" warning actually is, can depend on context and who is issuing it. For example, the US military says warnings don't need to be specific if they would harm a mission.

"Obviously it is subjective," Majzoub of Amnesty International concedes. "But I think we can all agree that giving people a warning on social media in the middle of the night is not effective," she argued, referring to the recent incident in Beirut.

Civilians protected — even if they stay

Following an evacuation warning, other rules continue to apply, Gillard said. For example, if civilians do stay in the area for which the warning had been issued, they cannot automatically be considered combatants. The military involved must consider proportionality too.

Once civilians have moved away from danger, they must also be allowed to return once it's safe. If they are not allowed, this may be seen as forcible displacement, considered a war crime.

"I'm very uncomfortable with people who say issuing a warning that you're going to be conducting an operation in a particular area, which encourages civilians to leave, is akin to forcibly displacing them," Gillard pointed out. "That argument doesn’t really hold water. A warning is a protective measure."

Evacuation warnings could possibly lead to forced displacement if they're given with the intention of not letting people return, Majzoub argues. In terms of what's happening in Lebanon right now, it's hard to say because the conflict is still in its early stages, she explains.

"But we do see that, every few days, more and more towns and villages are added to this list [of evacuation warnings]," she pointed out. "That then triggers the question: Are they [the Israeli army] actually issuing these warnings to protect people or to trigger mass displacement and relocation?"

Edited by: Andreas Illmer