On May 27, Israel extended its ethnic-cleansing policy to Tyre, the fifth-largest city in Lebanon with about 200,000 inhabitants. The IDF told residents that it was “compelled to act forcefully” in Tyre, because Hezbollah was violating a U.S.-brokered ceasefire that began five weeks ago, reported the BBC. The BBC did not mention that the ceasefire agreement excluded Hezbollah, and so Israel itself never stopped military operations in its self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon, which is now being expanded northwards.
According to the BBC report, the Israeli military told everyone in Tyre, as well as its Palestinian refugee camps and surrounding villages, to leave immediately and head north of the Zahrani River, about 40 km from the border. It was one of the most sweeping displacement orders of the conflict to date, the BBC said.
The warning and subsequent bombing came after the Lebanese army said that one of its soldiers was killed near his post in Bekaa in eastern Lebanon and that it had retrieved his body, reported Al Jazeera. Two more people were killed in the town of Deir Amas in the Tyre district, Lebanese media reported. Israeli air strikes also targeted the town of Braiqaa in the south, destroying two homes, the National News Agency reported, and the town of Deir Qanoun en-Nahr, Srifa, and Toura, as millions of people observed the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Meanwhile, in the town of Zawtar al-Sharqiyah, just beyond the “Yellow Line,” which stretches roughly 10 km (6 miles) north of the Lebanon-Israel border, Hezbollah said its fighters “clashed with the enemy forces at point-blank range.”