By Emma Farge
GENEVA, March 13 (Reuters) – Over an eighth of Lebanon’s territory is under Israeli orders for people to leave their homes, an aid group said on Friday, while the United Nations peacekeeping mission said Israeli ground troops were making incursions and erecting roadblocks.
Israel has been carrying out daily strikes on Lebanon since March 2 when the Iran-backed group Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel to avenge the killing of Iran’s supreme leader in Tehran on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Almost 700 people in Lebanon have died in Israeli attacks and over 800,000 have been displaced. Israel’s military says it has targeted Hezbollah militants and Iranian forces.
The Norwegian Refugee Council said Israel’s evacuation orders for southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut now covered about 1,470 square kilometres or about 14% of the country.
“Israel’s mass evacuation orders have expanded to broad geographic directives, often demanding immediate movement, creating panic and fear across communities that strikes are imminent – even when they are not,” said Maureen Philippon, NRC Country Director in Lebanon.
U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk has said the blanket Israeli evacuation orders raise serious international law concerns.
NRC’s office in Tyre, south Lebanon, was badly damaged, it said, with no injuries. The Israeli military has carried out several strikes on Tyre since March 2, including a Tuesday strike on what it described as a Hezbollah command centre in the area.
The International Organization for Migration’s Mathieu Luciano told a Geneva press briefing that around 600 shelters had been set up across the country, with many of them almost full. Hospitals are increasingly overstretched due to surging trauma cases, a World Health Organization official added.
The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon told the same briefing its operations had been limited by the ongoing hostilities which injured two soldiers a week ago. Still, its troops had observed Israeli troop incursions, saying they had travelled up to 7 kilometres inside Lebanon and erected roadblocks restricting access.
“We are deeply concerned that the situation will deteriorate further,” UNIFIL spokesperson Kandice Ardiel said by video link from Lebanon.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; Additional reporting by Maya Gebeily in Beirut and Alexander Cornwell in JerusalemEditing by Peter Graff)
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