Israel strikes Beirut’s southern suburbs after issuing a blanket evacuation order

BEIRUT (AP) — Israel launched a series of strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut Thursday after ordering all residents of the densely populated area to evacuate.

Traffic was gridlocked in Lebanon 's capital on Thursday as panicked residents tried to flee after Israel's military issued an evacuation notice telling residents to “save your lives and evacuate your homes immediately,” and specified which routes they should take to escape.

Hours later, strikes began to hit the Beirut suburbs.

Since the resurgence of hostilities between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group, Israel has struck sites in Beirut’s suburbs and issued a blanket warning for residents south of the Litani River — an area in southern Lebanon stretching to the border with Israel — to evacuate their homes, but had not previously issued a blanket evacuation order for Beirut’s southern suburbs.

After the attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran triggered a new war in the Middle East, Hezbollah launched missiles and drones into Israel on Monday for the first time in over a year, and Israel has retaliated with bombardment of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The conflict had claimed 123 lives and forced the displacement of more than 83,000 people in Lebanon before Thursday's evacuation order.

Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich warned Thursday that the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah has a strong presence will look like Khan Younis, a city in Gaza that Israel has decimated during the war triggered by the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack in southern Israel.

“You wanted to bring hell on us, we are bringing hell on you,” Smotrich said as he toured towns on Israel’s border with Lebanon. “Dahiyeh will look like Khan Younis, and our citizens of the north will live in peace and quiet.”

The evacuation order rattled Lebanese authorities, with President Joseph Aoun calling his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in an urgent bid to halt the anticipated widespread strikes, according to a statement from his office.

Macron issued a statement calling for an end to the conflict and announcing that Paris will send aid to Lebanon, in the first apparent diplomatic endeavor to end the boiling conflict.

“Hezbollah must immediately cease its fire toward Israel. Israel must refrain from any ground intervention or large-scale operation on Lebanese territory,” the French president said in a post on X, adding that he has communicated with U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanon's top political leadership.

He called on the militant group to disarm and said he supports Beirut's endeavors to deploy the military to assert full control over the country's territory.

Hadi Kaakour, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs who was fleeing said he is not sure that even after leaving he will be safe.

“We don’t put anything past them (Israel), they will strike us no matter where we go,” he said.

Others expressed frustration at Lebanon being pulled into the larger war in the Middle East.

“We got sucked into a mess that we have nothing to do with,” said Yousef Nabulsi, another fleeing resident. “People have been displaced and are now staying on the streets, and this is wrong.”

U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon have seen and heard clashes in the area as more Israeli forces have moved across the border, a spokesperson for the peacekeeping mission known as UNIFIL said Thursday. It was the first confirmation of combat taking place.

“Ground combat was observed west of Kfar Kila,” a village near the border with Israel, overnight, which included “firing of shots,” UNIFIL spokesperson Tilak Pokharel said. In Khiyam, a town about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the border with Israel, he said peacekeepers saw “air attacks and flares and heard explosions.”

On Tuesday, Israel said it sent additional troops into southern Lebanon. Israeli forces had already been occupying several border points in Lebanon since a U.S.-brokered November 2024 ceasefire halted the previous Israel-Hezbollah war.

The Lebanese army has pulled back from the border as the Israeli troops moved in, while Hezbollah has issued a series of statements announcing attacks on Israeli troops attempting to advance. The Iran-backed militant group also published a video showing a tank being struck by a missile.

The Israeli army on Wednesday said two of its soldiers were wounded by anti-tank fire in Lebanon and on Thursday said two more were evacuated after being wounded in a battle in southern Lebanon.

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Associated Press writer Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.

A family flees Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, riding a three-wheeled motorized vehicle known as a "tok-tok," on a highway in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

Cars sit in traffic on a highway as residents flee Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

Displaced people fleeing Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, sit in traffic on a highway in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

Flames rise following an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

A giant poster shows the late Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, while workers check a destroyed building that was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Nabatiyeh town, south Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

A man removes clothes from his damaged shop at a commercial street that was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Nabatiyeh town, south Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

A giant poster shows the late Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, while workers check a destroyed building that was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Nabatiyeh town, south Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

Cars sit in traffic as residents flee Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Smoke rises following Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon as seen from northern Israel, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Hezbollah members walk past a building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Thursday, March 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

PRAIA, Cape Verde (AP) — Three patients with suspected hantavirus infections were being evacuated from a cruise ship to the Netherlands on Wednesday, the U.N. health agency said, as the vessel at the center of a deadly outbreak remained off Cape Verde with nearly 150 people on board waiting to head to Spain’s Canary Islands.

Associated Press footage showed health workers in protective gear heading to the ship for the evacuation that included the ship's British doctor, who Spain's health ministry said had been in “serious condition” but has improved. An air ambulance later departed.

Three people have died, and one body remained on the ship, the World Health Organization said. Eight cases have been recorded in all, three of them confirmed by laboratory testing. Hantavirus usually spreads by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings and can spread person-to-person, though the WHO calls that rare.

Contact tracing had begun on two continents, Europe and Africa, in search of infections around people who earlier left the ship, which departed over a month ago from South America for stops in Antarctica and several remote Atlantic islands.

Two Argentine officials investigating the origins of the outbreak said the government's leading hypothesis is that a Dutch couple contracted the virus while bird-watching in the city of Ushuaia before boarding.

They said the couple visited a landfill during the tour and may have been exposed to rodents. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, with the investigation ongoing. Authorities previously said Ushuaia and surrounding Tierra del Fuego province had never recorded a hantavirus case.

The Dutch foreign ministry said the three people evacuated were a 41-year-old Dutch national, a 56-year-old British national and a 65-year-old German national who would be "immediately transferred to specialized hospitals in Europe.” A Dutch hospital confirmed it would take one. German authorities were preparing for a second.

Two remain in "serious condition," Dutch ship operator Oceanwide Expeditions said, and the third had no symptoms but was “closely associated” with a German passenger who died on the MV Hondius ship on May 2.

Health officials said passengers and crew members still on the ship are without symptoms; the WHO said passengers represent 23 nationalities. Their journey to the Canary Islands will take three or four days, Spain’s health ministry said, adding that the arrival “won´t represent any risk for the public."

Meanwhile, authorities said testing in Switzerland, South Africa and Senegal had shown positive for the Andes strain of the virus. The WHO says the species of hantavirus is found in South America, primarily in Argentina and Chile, and can spread between people, though that’s rare and only through close contact.

The World Health Organization’s top epidemic expert told The Associated Press the risk to the public is low, and the Andes variant is known even if WHO has never seen a hantavirus outbreak on a ship.

“This is not the next Covid, but it is a serious infectious disease,” Maria Van Kerkhove said. “Most people will never be exposed to this.”

For those on the ship, access to clinical care is important, she said, because infected people can develop severe acute respiratory distress and need oxygen or mechanical ventilation. The hantavirus incubation period can be one to six weeks, or more, she said.

The ship left Argentina on April 1. The WHO has said the itinerary included stops across the South Atlantic, including mainland Antarctica and the remote islands of South Georgia, Nightingale Island, Tristan da Cunha, St. Helena and Ascension.

The ship is now in the Atlantic off West Africa's island nation of Cape Verde. The WHO said passengers were isolating in their cabins.

Two Dutch infectious diseases experts were joining the ship, Van Kerkhove said.

Spain’s health ministry said it would receive the ship in the Canary Islands after a request from the WHO and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. The Canary Islands regional president , Fernando Clavijo, said he worried about the risk to the population and demanded a meeting with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

Authorities in Switzerland said a former passenger was being treated at a Zurich hospital after testing positive for the Andes strain. South African authorities earlier said two passengers who were transferred there tested positive for the strain. One, a British man, was in intensive care and the other collapsed and died in South Africa.

Swiss health office spokesperson Simon Ming said the patient there had left the ship during its St. Helena stop. It was not clear when or how he traveled to Switzerland.

The patient’s wife hasn’t shown symptoms but is self-isolating as a precaution, a statement by the office said.

“There is currently no risk to the Swiss public," the office said, while looking into whether the patient had come into contact with others.

At St. Helena, the body of the Dutch man suspected to be the first hantavirus case on board was taken off the ship. His wife flew to South Africa, where she collapsed at the Johannesburg airport and died.

Later, a British man was evacuated at Ascension Island and taken to South Africa.

The ship's operator has not said if other people left at those or other locations.

The South African health ministry says officials have traced 42 out of 62 people, including health workers, they believe had contact with the two infected passengers who traveled there. The 42 tested negative for hantavirus.

But 20 people still need to be traced, including five people who may have been on flights to South Africa with some of the passengers as well as flight crew members.

Some may have now traveled overseas, the ministry said.

DeBre reported from Buenos Aires and Keaten from Geneva. Chinedu Asadu in Abuja, Nigeria. Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa; Mark Banchereau in Dakar, Senegal; Renata Brito and Joseph Wilson in Barcelona; Geir Moulson in Berlin; Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands and Michelle Gumede and Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this report.

This version corrects to say the evacuated doctor is British.

An air ambulance takes off with evacuated patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship from the airport in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

An air ambulance takes off with evacuated patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship from the airport in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

The MV Hondius cruise ship is anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

Health workers in protective gear arrive to evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

A night view of the MV Hondius cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Tuesday, May 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

An aerial view of the MV Hondius Dutch cruise ship anchored in the Atlantic off Cape Verde, Tuesday, May 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Arilson Almeida)

An aerial view of the MV Hondius Dutch cruise ship anchored in the Atlantic off Cape Verde, Tuesday, May 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Arilson Almeida)