Eight people died and 32 were wounded after Israeli air strikes hit residential buildings in Tyre's eastern al-Massaken al-Shaabiya district on Tuesday morning, the Lebanese health ministry confirmed — while warning that the toll could rise as rescuers were still pulling people from the rubble. The Israeli military posted an evacuation order on social media almost simultaneously with reports of the strikes, telling all residents of Tyre and its surrounding area to move north beyond the Zahrani river, roughly 30 kilometres away. The order was unusually sweeping. For the first time since the current offensive began, it included Tyre's Christian quarter in the city's north-west — a detail that signalled a significant expansion of Israeli military pressure on a city already under heavy bombardment.

The army alleged that Hezbollah fighters had been operating in that neighbourhood the previous week. Earlier in the day, a pre-dawn drone strike killed two people in Kfar Roummane, near the major town of Nabatieh, and two Syrian nationals were killed later in Israeli strikes along the coastal highway north of Tyre. Roads heading north filled quickly. Residents tied mattresses and bags to car roofs and drove toward Beirut and Sidon.

Elias Barbour, who was making for his sister's home in Beirut, captured the desperation in a single question: "What have we done wrong?" Another evacuee, Mohammed Mustafa, travelling to Sidon with his daughter, insisted Hezbollah had no presence in his neighbourhood and called the military's justification a fabrication designed to drive civilians out.