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

Are you leaving everything behind – your home, your heirlooms, your pets? Can you just drive away in your pajamas and not know if you'll ever come back?

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

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human RightsAbout a quarter of Lebanon's territory “is now under Israeli military expulsion orders.” That is, while the Israeli military was fighting the Hezbollah group, it urged locals to leave the area or be in danger.

“And most people don't even get calls,” Majzoub told DW. “Often the Arabic-speaking spokesman for the Israeli army simply announces warnings on social media,” she explains.

A few days ago this happened in the middle of the night. ““There were evacuation warnings on Twitter (now called X) between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.,” says Majzoub. These affected parts of Dahieh in Beirut.Most people would have missed them completely if young men from the neighborhood hadn't rushed into the street and started shooting into the air to wake people up.

This is just one of the incidents that have led groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to criticize Israel's evacuation warnings in Lebanon. Their concerns also include inaccurate or misleading maps, warnings only minutes before an attack, and warnings that are too broad.

Most recently, Israel issued its first citywide warning during the conflict in Lebanon. On the morning of October 30th, an Israeli military spokesman wrote down

The town of Baalbek normally has between 80,000 and 100,000 residents and the locals retreated in a hurry. Israeli airstrikes began just four hours later. The evacuation warnings were again criticized because four hours were not enough to evacuate an entire city. This week is the Washington Post published a reportThis shows that most of the attacks that day occurred outside the mapped evacuation zone anyway.

A few days earlier, the Hezbollah group had also issued a series of evacuation warnings in a video on a news service. In it, Hezbollah called on locals in over 20 cities in northern Israel to evacuate because they were targets, thanks to the presence of Israeli troops. Although Hezbollah, unlike Israel, has missiles but no air force, many observers characterized these warnings primarily as “psychological warfare.”

Still, Amnesty International has the same concerns about Hezbollah's evacuation warnings as it does about Israel's. “If these warnings apply to entire towns and villages and do not specify specific military targets, they are also too broad,” notes Majzoub.

What is the legal situation?

A military's obligation to warn civilians of an attack dates back to 1863 and the American Civil War as the Lieber Instructions. were written. This was the first attempt to establish rules for conduct on the battlefield, and many of the principles it contained would eventually form the basis of what is now known as “international humanitarian law.”

More recently, the “duty to warn” has been viewed as a “customary law.” – that is, it is generally accepted by most armies. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) notes that many modern military codes of conduct, including Israel's, applycontain this obligation.

However, the decision whether to warn civilians depends on the situation and whether it would be “feasible.” For example, a warning could take away the element of surprise. Decisions about feasibility are made by the attacker and, according to the law, his calculations should also take into account factors such as proportionality – that is, how many civilians could be killed or injured in achieving a goal.

“For an attacker, warnings make sense from a legal perspective,” wrote Michael Schmitt, a professor of international law at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, in a text for the U.S. military academy at West Point last October. “The fewer civilians there are in the target area, the lower the probability that the proportionality rule will prohibit an attack.”

Feasible and effective

If a military decides that a warning is “feasible,” the rules must also be “effective.”

“In Lebanon we're not really talking about evacuation orders, but rather warnings,” Emanuela-Chiara Gillard, a research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told DW. It is important to distinguish between the two, “since we are not in an occupation situation (in Lebanon), the parties are not in a position to give orders,” she emphasizes. “So the question is: Are (the warnings) effective under the circumstances? Are they allowing civilians to move out of harm’s way?”

But what an “effective” warning actually is can depend on the context and who is issuing it. The U.S. military, for example, says warnings need not be specific if they would harm a mission.

“Obviously it’s subjective,” admits Amnesty International’s Majzoub. “But I think we can all agree that warning people on social media in the middle of the night is not effective,” she argued, citing the recent incident in Beirut.

Civilians protected – even if they stay

After an evacuation warning, different rules still apply, Gillard said. For example, if civilians are present in the area for which the warning has been issued, they cannot automatically be considered combatants. The military involved must also take proportionality into account.

Once civilians have moved away from the danger zone, they must also be allowed to return as soon as the danger is guaranteed. Failure to allow them may be considered forcible displacement and a war crime.

“I feel very uncomfortable when people say they are issuing a warning that you are going to carry out an operation in a certain area “Encouraging civilians to leave the country amounts to forcible displacement,” Gillard stressed. “This argument doesn’t really hold water. A warning is a protective measure.”

Evacuation warnings could potentially lead to forced relocations if they are issued with the intention of preventing people from returning, Majzoub argues. What is currently happening in Lebanon is difficult to say because the conflict is still in its early stages, she explains.

“But we are seeing more and more towns and villages being added to this list (of evacuation warnings) every few days,” she stressed. “That then raises the question: Is it (the Israeli army) actually issuing these warnings to protect people or to trigger mass displacement and resettlement?”

Edited by: Andreas Illmer

How the war in Lebanon has put pregnant women and babies at risk

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