Amnesty International (AI) has released a report this Wednesday accusing Israeli authorities of continuing to expand the "forced displacement" of hundreds of thousands of people throughout Lebanon since 2024. According to the organization, the Israeli Army has resorted to "illegal" "mass" evacuation orders with "no return" that particularly affect the south of the country, which, it recalls, constitutes a "war crime".
"In large parts of southern Lebanon, Israel's 'total evacuation' orders were followed by 'no return' orders. Forced displacement and the prohibition of return imposed by Israel, affecting tens of thousands of southern Lebanese civilians, constitutes forced displacement, which is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and, therefore, a war crime," denounced in a statement the Deputy Director of AI for the Middle East and North Africa, Kristine Beckerle.
The NGO maintains that Israeli forces have increased the use of "no return" orders that ban the return of the civilian population to their homes in southern Lebanon "indefinitely," also within the security strip declared "unilaterally" by Israel. This area, AI points out, already covers 6% of Lebanon's territory, compared to approximately 4.6% it represented in November 2024.
According to Amnesty's investigation, the Israeli Army has "subjected" a much larger number of people in 2026, and more frequently, to an "avalanche of illegal" mass "evacuation" orders. These measures would have been applied while a plan to destroy homes and civilian infrastructure aimed at depopulating large areas of the south of the country was being carried out. To reach these conclusions, the organization has collected orders issued since 2024, interviewed about twenty people displaced from the so-called "security zones," and analyzed various public information.
"In 2026, as in 2024, Israel's indiscriminate orders were issued without measures to ensure the welfare and safety of the evacuated persons, did not provide meaningful information or guidance for the civilian population to make informed decisions about whether to flee and for how long, and were never revoked, even after hostilities ceased in the areas subjected to these orders, as required by International Humanitarian Law," stated Beckerle.
The head of Amnesty has underlined the "devastating" effects that the fighting between the Israeli Army and the Shiite militia party Hezbollah has had on the population of Lebanon over these two and a half years. In this context, she has called for the "immediate" withdrawal of Israeli troops from the neighboring country "instead of forcibly uprooting communities." "Israel must allow displaced persons to return safely and freely to their lands and offer reparations to the victims of its violations of Humanitarian Law, including those whose homes it has illegally destroyed," she insisted.
The human rights organization explains that it has approached the Israeli Army, which "has denied issuing mandatory evacuation orders" and maintains that these are "early warnings to the civilian population" which it describes as "recommendations." However, Amnesty maintains that these evacuation orders "do not constitute effective early warnings."
AI also recalls that, just this week, after the agreement between the United States and Iran to halt hostilities in the region became known, the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, stated that his forces "will remain in the security zones of Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza without time limits."
In addition to "forced displacement," according to the NGO, there is the "widespread destruction" that the Israeli Army has been carrying out since 2024 within the no-return zone, a campaign that Amnesty had already described as "deliberate" at the time.
"In 2026, images from the Sentinel 2 satellite showed, almost to scale, the erasure of almost all the municipalities located along the border (...) that Amnesty had analyzed in 2024. Previously, some isolated structures and parts of villages may have remained intact. Now, almost all of them have been razed and the serious destruction has extended to municipalities located further inside the no-return zone," it indicated.