When the map turns red: Inside the lives upended by Israel’s expulsion orders
Submitted by
Zaynab Mayladan
on
Tue, 04/21/2026 - 10:00
In Lebanon, people are expelled from their homes, then forced to watch Israeli strikes destroy them
Naima poses in front of the rubble of the centre where her clinic once stood (Zaynab Mayladan/MEE)
Off
Phones started pinging, and maps circulated quickly across WhatsApp groups: red marking buildings, streets, and sometimes entire districts.
People zoomed in, trying to recognise landmarks. Within minutes, cars clogged narrow roads. Families rushed into the streets carrying children and elderly parents.
In some neighbourhoods, warnings arrived during school hours. Students were told to leave immediately. Parents, stuck in traffic, struggled to reach them. Some children were left standing alone, crying on the pavement.
In the morning of 27 September 2024, the Israeli military began to issue threats to residents of Lebanon to abandon their homes.
Since then, dozens of air strikes have been preceded by similar alerts, often giving residents a short window to flee.
“For your safety and the safety of your children, you must evacuate your homes immediately and stay away from them by a distance of no less than 300 metres,” read the warnings circulated widely online.
During the ceasefire
It was a Friday in March 2025, four months after a ceasefire had paused over two months of war between Israel and Lebanon.
Sarah was preparing iftar at her parents’ home on Jamous Street in Beirut's southern suburbs, locally known as Dahieh. Her young son was playing in her childhood bedroom with his white car when an Israeli expulsion order was shared on the family WhatsApp group.
The warnings, issued through the Israeli military’s Arabic spokesperson on X, almost never specify a timeframe for people to flee.
“We didn’t know how much time we had,” said Sarah, 29, from Majdal Selem in south Lebanon. “The second I saw the map, I knew it was our building.”
‘We felt death’: Survivors recount Israel’s massacre in Beirut
Read More »
Sarah picked up her son without his shoes and rushed outside.
“I did not even take my purse with me. Not one thing was picked up,” she said.
When she reached the street, the neighbourhood was already in chaos. Cars blocked the roads, people ran in different directions, and schools nearby had opened their gates and told students to leave.
She ran away from the building, holding her son, trying to calm him down.
“There were people who weren’t able to escape in time, and they were stuck in the area,” Sarah said.
“The area wasn’t emptied in that time; it is not realistic. It is very crowded and densely populated. How could you empty it in two hours?”
That day, Sarah drove to her brother’s house in the mountains. Minutes later, her mother, Fatima, arrived from her office.
Fatima opened the front door in shock, walked directly to the television, and watched her house being destroyed in an air strike.
Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Elie Abou Chacra describes this moment as a rupture.
“The home is not just a place,” he said. “It is part of the psychological system. It holds memory, routine, and a sense of control.”
When the warning arrives, the brain shifts into survival mode. Time compresses. Decisions become instinctive. What to take and what to leave becomes an impossible calculation under pressure.
Watching it collapse
Fatima, 60, had lived in her home for half of her life. It was the first property she and her late husband owned after years of renting. He helped build it with his brother, while she helped design it.
“The duplex was his idea,” she said. “But the details inside were mine.”
She added a sitting corner in the kitchen, filled the house with plants, and painted doors, bottles and chairs. “I literally had an exhibition in my house,” Fatima said.
Above the kitchen was a room that held around 5,000 books, which was later turned into her art studio too. Her late husband, a poet, kept his printed collections there, alongside handwritten drafts that had never been digitised.
Another cabinet held the belongings of their son, killed in 2008 by Israel while serving as a paramedic in south Lebanon: his suit, his watch, his favourite fragrance, and his nursing certificate.
“These things will never be compensated,” she said. “They will never come back to life and touch this wall, or this table.”
Abou Chacra said that objects tied to memory, especially those belonging to the dead, act as emotional anchors. Losing them can feel like losing the person again.
Fatima holds a PhD and works in education and family care, but art was her escape.
“When I return home, the only relief I have is to go to the colours,” she said. “I had at least 100 works in the house.”
All of them were lost.
Fatima holds one of her art pieces in her second place of displacement (Zaynab Mayladan/MEE)
That day, at work, Fatima’s phone pinged incessantly with text messages, but she ignored it, until a colleague alerted her to the expulsion order in her neighbourhood.
She got into her car and drove towards the mountains to her son’s house.
“To see your life savings, your memories, your emotions demolished like that, it felt like someone removed my heart from my chest and threw it on the floor,” Fatima said.
Hours later, she returned to her home while smoke from the bombing was still rising. Lebanese army soldiers stopped her from approaching.
She returned the next day. The house looked as if it was suffocating under the rubble, she said.
“Every item in that house has a soul,” she said. “The house raised a martyr, then the house itself became a martyr.”
“When I pass through the neighbourhood, I expect to see it,” Sarah said. “But when I see the rubble, I relive the same shock.”
“What gave them the right to take from me the roof that shelters me?”
That repetition, seeing, remembering, re-experiencing, is part of what Abou Chacra describes as trauma loops. The brain struggles to process the event as “finished”.
“The warnings literally tell you: I will shell your house, and you don’t have the capacity to save anything from it because you don’t know how much time you have,” Sarah said. “This is peak terrorising.”
'It closes the door to hope instantly'
Four months earlier, Nour and Mohammad believed they had survived the war.
“We thought we made it,” said Nour, 29. “That the war would end and our home would be saved.”
The married couple had bought their flat in Haret Hreik, a neighbourhood in Dahieh, in March 2024 for $115,000, and spent another $55,000 renovating it from scratch, redoing the wiring, plumbing and interiors.
“I kept reminding myself that I’m doing this once in my lifetime,” Mohammad said.
They moved in by June, but barely lived in it before the 2024–2025 war forced them to flee.
The expulsion order came on 25 November 2025, one day before the ceasefire. They were in Iraq when they received it.
“My brother-in-law told me it is our house, but I laughed at first,” Nour said, “I thought he was joking.”
Two hours later, her father called: there had been a strike. Seconds later, videos of their home started coming through.
Nour and Mohammad look at a photo of their building after it was struck by an Israeli missile in Dahieh, Beirut (Zaynab Mayladan/MEE)
“I felt a deep, heavy helplessness when I was watching the videos,” she said. “We didn’t even get to enjoy it.”
They lost everything.
“I still pay debts for things that don’t exist anymore,” said Mohammad, laughing bitterly.
Other than the huge financial loss, Nour lost her late mother’s clothes, her school uniform signed by classmates, and handwritten notes from friends.
“If I were there, what would I have saved?” she paused. “Nothing. It’s either everything or nothing.”
“Watching the destruction, through television or phone screens, intensifies the trauma,” Dr Abou Chacra explained.
“The brain processes it as it is happening in the moment. It closes the door to hope instantly.”
Mass displacement and villages erased
This year, as the war between Israel and Lebanon resumed after a fragile ceasefire, Israeli evacuation warnings expanded beyond individual buildings to mark entire areas.
According to the UN, around 20 percent of Lebanon’s population has been displaced, with expulsion orders affecting roughly a quarter of the country’s territory.
On 5 March 2026, Israel issued a mass warning for the first time, covering large parts of Beirut, 12 neighbourhoods. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were told to leave within hours. Entire districts emptied onto a single highway.
That same day, Naima, 36, lost her six-year-old skincare clinic in Centre Tayyar in Dahieh.
The building accommodated around 90 clinics and offices.
“I spent more time there than at my home,” she said. “I cried for a few minutes. Then I prayed and told myself: people are losing their lives.”
Around 40,000 housing units have been partially or completely destroyed by Israel since 2 March, according to Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research.
Some days saw more than 1,000 homes damaged or flattened, and entire neighbourhoods bombed.
Israel issued a forced evacuation order for the entire Dahieh area in Beirut on 5 March 2026 (X)
Israeli drone footage circulated widely online, showing entire villages in south Lebanon rigged and detonated in controlled explosions. Some residents recognised their homes in the videos. Others paid for satellite imagery, sometimes up to $200 per image, just to confirm whether anything remained.
Brigadier General Khaled Hamadeh, a researcher in political affairs, described the warnings as a new form of psychological warfare directed at civilians.
“What began as alerts for individual buildings expanded into mass displacement orders,” he said.
Over time, people adapted. They kept valuables ready, packed essentials, and waited for instructions.
'The house raised a martyr, then the house itself became a martyr'
- Fatima, displaced Lebanese
“The warnings shape how civilians behave, when they leave, when they return, and how they live,” Hamadeh said.
Under international humanitarian law, warnings are required before attacks that may affect civilians. But they must be specific, timely, and allow safe evacuation.
Blanket warnings covering entire districts raise the question of Israel’s redrawing of Lebanon’s demographic map.
Amnesty International found that some Israeli warnings in Lebanon were “inadequate, ineffective or misleading”, failing to provide civilians with a real opportunity to escape.
On the ground, however, these distinctions collapse into one question: How much time do you have to leave your life behind?
“Lebanon lacks systematic early warning systems or civil defence alerts,” Hamadeh explained.
“This leads civilians to often rely on warnings coming from the attacking side itself, which creates a shared operational language between the military actor and civilians, without the Lebanese state mediation.”
Reality on the ground
“In the moment, you have to decide which item deserves to survive,” Sarah said.
Expulsion orders have reshaped daily life across large parts of Lebanon. They determine when people leave work, when schools close, and when families scatter.
'The warnings shape how civilians behave, when they leave, when they return, and how they live'
- Khaled Hamadeh, researcher
That is why, for Fatima, the loss did not end with the rubble. After the strike, she rented another flat in Dahieh and furnished it carefully, wondering whether to treat it as temporary or not.
In the end, she decided to live in it fully.
“I decided to invest in it as if I am going to live there forever,” she said. “To show Israel that we are strong and their strategies will never weaken us.”
Her new home has survived the latest war, with only a few broken panes of glass.
Even now, displaced again, she keeps painting. She has bought new brushes, new colours, and new pots to draw on.
Sometimes people message her Instagram account asking if a painting is still for sale. She tells them no, it was left in the house, and the house is gone.
Still, she paints flowers.
“If I don’t see a flower during the day,” she said, “I'd die.”
Israel's war on Lebanon
Beirut
News
Post Date Override
0
Update Date
Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19
Update Date Override
0