Britons have been urged to leave Lebanon as the Middle East braces for an almost certain escalation in violence and leaders scramble to prevent all-out war engulfing the region.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said on Monday that it continued to advise against all travel to Lebanon, which has for months been on a list of countries to avoid visiting amid fighting between Israel and the Lebanon militia Hezbollah.
An FCDO spokesperson said: “If you are currently in Lebanon, we encourage you to leave, while commercial options remain available.”
The Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, told Parliament: “There are frequent artillery exchanges and air strikes, tensions are high, and the situation could deteriorate rapidly. I am working with Foreign Office consular teams to make sure we are prepared for all scenarios, but if this conflict escalates, the government cannot guarantee we will be able to evacuate everyone immediately. People may be forced to shelter in place.”
The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, chaired a meeting of Cobra, the government’s emergency response committee, on the matter earlier on Tuesday, Mr Lammy said. “My message to British nationals in Lebanon is therefore quite simple: leave,” he added.
Airlines including Air France, Eurowings, Lufthansa and Condor have cancelled flights to Beirut amid the tensions.
Lebanon is bracing for retaliation from Israel after Hezbollah killed 12 Druze children in Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights at the weekend.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, vowed heavy retaliation against the Lebanese militant group, which retracted an initial admission that it was behind the rocket attack on a football field where children were playing on Saturday.
However, evidence suggests that the strike came from a Falaq-1 missile with an Iranian-made 50kg warhead, previously used by Hezbollah.
A US official told the Saudi Arabian news outlet Al Arabiya that the missile was launched by the Iran-backed militants. “It’s unclear if it was a mistake, but it’s been assessed to have been launched by the group,” the official said.
Mr Netanyahu visited the site of the attack on Monday and met leaders of the Druze community. He warned: “The state of Israel will not and cannot overlook this. Our response will come, and it will be severe.”
Around 300 friends and relatives of the children protested against his visit, accusing him of exploiting the bloodshed for political gain and calling for an end to the violence.
On Monday, Israeli strikes killed two people and injured three others in southern Lebanon, Lebanon’s state-run news agency said. Israeli military officials said they had struck Hezbollah operatives and infrastructure.
The region is now bracing for a crushing response from Israel after the Israeli security cabinet authorised Mr Netanyahu to decide on its “manner and timing”.
Diplomatic sources in Washington and Beirut told Lebanese news channel LBCI that an Israeli strike was certain, but efforts were under way to ensure the strike was limited geographically and avoided large or highly populated cities, including Beirut.
There are fears a major strike would prompt Iran-backed Hezbollah to launch a massive response in return, plunging the region into further violence.
Iran’s new President, Masoud Pezeshkian, said any Israeli attack on Lebanon would have “serious consequences” for Israel, Iranian state media quoted him as saying.
Jonathan Panikoff, former deputy national intelligence officer for the near east at the US National Intelligence Council, said Israel had a range of kinetic options available, with the most likely being heavy strikes on positions occupied by Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces near the border with Israel, as well as an effort to target specific commanders.
“My sense is the Israelis stay away from Beirut at least right now, and the focus of their strikes is intense but is limited if not to southern Lebanon then to there and the Beqaa Valley [in eastern Lebanon],” he told i.
“The real dividing point is, does Israel say this is severe enough that they actually strike not just in the south, that they strike in the Dahieh [Hezbollah stronghold] in southern Beirut, in other major Hezbollah strongholds in the Beqaa Valley, for instance.
“In those cases then the potential for a response from Hezbollah significantly changes and that’s where I think the concern is.”
He warned that were Israel to hit the Lebanese capital, Hezbollah might feel the need to respond strongly, plunging the region into crisis.
“If you hit Beirut, then I think it changes the dynamics … Hezbollah has to respond in a much more meaningful and impactful way, and if that happens, it’s going to be really hard to contain it,” added Mr Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programme.
“Then you get a real risk of Hezbollah deciding, ‘we know our reaction is going to start a full-scale war, so there is no value in not having a first-mover advantage’, so that means launching a very heavy response.”
He said that the militia group was not at a point where it wanted full-scale war with Israel. “The denials that Hezbollah put out [over the Majdal Shams strike] were not because Hezbollah thought anybody would believe them, as much as trying to deny it in hopes of tempering the response.”
Mr Panikoff said Iran did not want war with Israel, either.
Two Israeli officials told Reuters that Israel was preparing for the possibility of a few days of fighting and wanted to hurt Hezbollah but not drag the region into full-scale conflict. An Israeli diplomatic source said: “The estimation is that the response will not lead to an all-out war. That would not be in our interest at this point.”
Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted unidentified officials as saying the response would be “limited but significant”. It said options ranged from a limited attack on infrastructure, including bridges, power plants and ports, to hitting Hezbollah arms depots or targeting the group’s commanders.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, emphasised the importance of preventing escalation of the conflict in a phone call with the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, on Monday, the US State Department said.
Hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah have been their worst since they went to war in 2006, prompted by Israel’s near 10-month war against Hamas in Gaza. The current conflict has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.
