Israel strikes Lebanon's Tyre after evacuation warnings

AFP correspondents reported several strikes on Lebanon's Tyre on Wednesday after the Israeli army warned residents to evacuate swathes of the coastal city which boasts a UNESCO world heritage site.

AFPTV footage showed plumes of thick black smoke rising from several neighbourhoods, with parts of the evacuation area just 500 metres (yards) from the city's ancient ruins.

"Four strikes targeted the city of Tyre after the enemy threatened to bomb it," the National News Agency said, after earlier reporting that "an enemy drone targeted" a "street in Tyre".

"The situation is very bad, we're evacuating people," said Mortada Mhanna, who heads Tyre's disaster management unit.

Bilal Kashmar, the unit's media officer, told AFP that many were fleeing the city and heading towards the suburbs.

"You could say that the entire city of Tyre is being evacuated," he said, adding that the once vibrant southern hub had already been emptied of most of its residents.

Only about 14,500 people were still in Tyre on Tuesday, thousands of them displaced from other parts of the south, he told AFP.

An AFP photographer in the city of Sidon, further north, saw dozens of cars on the coastal highway filled with families carrying mattresses, suitcases and clothes.

- 'Immediately move' -

"Some families, who had not left the city of Tyre before, began leaving their homes to stay clear of areas that the Israeli enemy threatened to target," Lebanon's official National News Agency said.

Civil defence teams helped transport elderly people and people with limited mobility "to safe areas", the NNA added.

Emergency teams drove around the city, urging people to evacuate over megaphones, a video journalist collaborating with AFP said.

Residents began to flee immediately after the Israeli army called on residents of large parts of Tyre to leave ahead of military operations targeting Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The army's Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee posted a map of the affected streets in Tyre on X, saying: "You must immediately move out of the area marked in red and head north of the Awali River. Anyone who is near Hezbollah elements, facilities and combat equipment is putting his life in danger."

On September 23, Israel launched an intensive air campaign in Lebanon, after almost a year of cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah over the Gaza war.

Since then, at least 1,552 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of health ministry figures, although the real number is likely to be higher due to data gaps.