Hucen Sleiman, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
As of 9 March 2026, around 700,000 people are displaced across Lebanon, fleeing bombardment in the south, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and parts of the Bekaa Valley to seek refuge further north. This is the latest wave in a crisis that has repeatedly emptied towns since late 2023. But behind these numbers lies a less visible pattern: in many cases, displacement begins before the bombs fall, triggered not by destruction itself but by the anticipation of it, communicated through digital evacuation warnings.
Warnings before bombs
At 11:47 PM on 3 October 2024, a satellite image of Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs began circulating on WhatsApp. A red circle roughly 500 metres in diameter marked several apartment blocks, a mosque, and a cluster of shops. The image, originally posted on the Israeli military’s Arabic-language X account, ordered residents inside the marked area to evacuate immediately.
Within hours, the screenshot had spread across neighbourhood groups. Families compared maps, called relatives, and debated whether their building fell inside the circle. By morning, the buildings were empty. The strike came two days later.
Map produced by the author based on evacuation warnings circulated on social media during the 2024–2026 escalation in Lebanon. The diagram reconstructs the structure of typical warning maps indicating a targeted building and an evacuation radius in Haret Hreik, Beirut.
Scenes like this repeated across South Lebanon and Beirut during the 2024–2025 escalation, and again in March 2026. Between late September and early November 2024, the Beirut Urban Lab documented more than one hundred announced strikes targeting over 160 buildings, with warnings posted shortly before bombardment and rapidly recirculated through messaging networks.
These warnings are often presented as humanitarian precautions intended to reduce civilian casualties. But they also have another effect:they compel people to leave. A red circle on a phone screen can trigger hurried packing, late-night departures, and sudden decisions about where to go. Displacement begins with the warning, not only with the explosion.
What displacement looks like
The movements produced by these warnings rarely resemble the large-scale displacements that humanitarian statistics usually capture. Instead, they are smaller, closer, and often repeated.
Many families do not leave the neighbourhood at all. In Beirut’s southern suburbs, residents frequently evacuate their apartments but stay in the same building’s basement, a neighbour’s ground-floor flat, or a relative’s home nearby, waiting to see whether the strike will happen.
In southern villages such as Meiss al-Jabal or Kafr Tibnit, some residents move only a few hundred metres, relocating to the edge of the village just outside the marked radius rather than leaving the area entirely.
These movements are also cyclical. As warnings circulate, families who had returned home may leave again within days. During the 2024–2026 escalation, many households kept bags packed, keys within reach, and phones nearby, ready to move if another warning appeared.
This kind of mobility does not fit easily into the usual categories of displacement. People may not cross administrative boundaries, register in shelters, or appear in official counts. Yet their lives are repeatedly interrupted, their routines suspended, and their homes treated as places that might have to be abandoned at any moment. Even without immediate destruction, evacuation warnings create a persistent sense of insecurity and fear. As anthropologist Stephen Lubkemann has shown in other conflict settings, wartime mobility is often fragmented and localised, shaped by conditions that do not amount to permanent flight but still fundamentally reorganise everyday life.
Why this matters for displacement research
These patterns matter because not all displacement looks the same, and contemporary conflict often produces forms of mobility that fall outside the categories through which displacement is usually measured, including short-distance or repeated relocations
First, many of these movements remain statistically invisible. Humanitarian figures tend to count people who enter collective shelters, cross districts, or register for assistance. They often miss those who stay with relatives a few streets away, move temporarily within the same village, or return home between strikes. The International Organization for Migration has repeatedly noted the difficulty of capturing dispersed, short-term, and informal displacement in Lebanon, where families frequently rely on personal networks rather than official shelter systems. As a result, a significant share of wartime mobility never appears in the numbers that guide humanitarian planning.
Second, invisibility has concrete consequences. Even short-distance displacement can disrupt work, schooling, healthcare, and access to land. Children may miss weeks of classes, farmers may be unable to reach their fields, and daily routines may be suspended for long periods, even when families remain within the same locality. When such movements are not recognised as displacement, they often fall outside the scope of assistance and policy response, despite producing real social and economic strain.
Third, evacuation warnings raise difficult questions about responsibility. Military authorities present warnings as measures intended to reduce civilian casualties. Yet when warnings repeatedly compel people to leave their homes without offering any guarantee of safety, they also function as a form of governance. By designating certain buildings or neighbourhoods as temporarily uninhabitable, warning maps reorganise how civilians move, where they stay, and how they plan their lives under threat.
In this sense, warnings do not simply inform. They actively reshape everyday life by producing conditions in which people must live in anticipation of possible destruction.
Not only Lebanon
Lebanon is not the only place where displacement begins with a message on a phone.
In Gaza, residents often receive phone calls or text messages ordering them to leave buildings before strikes, a practice documented by organisations such as Amnesty International.
In Ukraine, air-raid alert applications send constant notifications that structure daily routines in cities under threat.
In Sudan, local Telegram and Facebook groups circulate informal “danger zone” maps that compel people to move before fighting reaches their neighbourhoods.
In each case, the warning arrives before the violence, and civilians move in anticipation of threat. In each case, there are implications for the ordering of space, the legibility of the disruptions of armed conflict, and for how responsibility for this displacement is framed.
Conclusion
The hundreds of thousands displaced across Lebanon today include those who fled bombardment, but also those who left because a warning appeared on their phones. Evacuation messages circulated through social media have become part of how contemporary conflict reorganises space, compelling civilians to move before violence occurs. These anticipatory displacements are often small, repeated, and difficult to measure, yet they profoundly disrupt everyday life. Paying attention to them shifts how displacement is understood: not only as the result of destruction, but as a condition produced through the management of threat itself. In this sense, war displaces not only through what it destroys, but through what it makes people expect.
Displaced Before the Strike: Evacuation Warnings and Anticipatory Displacement in Lebanon
Hucen Sleiman, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
As of 9 March 2026, around 700,000 people are displaced across Lebanon, fleeing bombardment in the south, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and parts of the Bekaa Valley to seek refuge further north. This is the latest wave in a crisis that has repeatedly emptied towns since late 2023. But behind these numbers lies a less visible pattern: in many cases, displacement begins before the bombs fall, triggered not by destruction itself but by the anticipation of it, communicated through digital evacuation warnings.
Warnings before bombs
At 11:47 PM on 3 October 2024, a satellite image of Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs began circulating on WhatsApp. A red circle roughly 500 metres in diameter marked several apartment blocks, a mosque, and a cluster of shops. The image, originally posted on the Israeli military’s Arabic-language X account, ordered residents inside the marked area to evacuate immediately.
Within hours, the screenshot had spread across neighbourhood groups. Families compared maps, called relatives, and debated whether their building fell inside the circle. By morning, the buildings were empty. The strike came two days later.
Scenes like this repeated across South Lebanon and Beirut during the 2024–2025 escalation, and again in March 2026. Between late September and early November 2024, the Beirut Urban Lab documented more than one hundred announced strikes targeting over 160 buildings, with warnings posted shortly before bombardment and rapidly recirculated through messaging networks.
These warnings are often presented as humanitarian precautions intended to reduce civilian casualties. But they also have another effect:they compel people to leave. A red circle on a phone screen can trigger hurried packing, late-night departures, and sudden decisions about where to go. Displacement begins with the warning, not only with the explosion.
What displacement looks like
The movements produced by these warnings rarely resemble the large-scale displacements that humanitarian statistics usually capture. Instead, they are smaller, closer, and often repeated.
Many families do not leave the neighbourhood at all. In Beirut’s southern suburbs, residents frequently evacuate their apartments but stay in the same building’s basement, a neighbour’s ground-floor flat, or a relative’s home nearby, waiting to see whether the strike will happen.
In southern villages such as Meiss al-Jabal or Kafr Tibnit, some residents move only a few hundred metres, relocating to the edge of the village just outside the marked radius rather than leaving the area entirely.
These movements are also cyclical. As warnings circulate, families who had returned home may leave again within days. During the 2024–2026 escalation, many households kept bags packed, keys within reach, and phones nearby, ready to move if another warning appeared.
This kind of mobility does not fit easily into the usual categories of displacement. People may not cross administrative boundaries, register in shelters, or appear in official counts. Yet their lives are repeatedly interrupted, their routines suspended, and their homes treated as places that might have to be abandoned at any moment. Even without immediate destruction, evacuation warnings create a persistent sense of insecurity and fear. As anthropologist Stephen Lubkemann has shown in other conflict settings, wartime mobility is often fragmented and localised, shaped by conditions that do not amount to permanent flight but still fundamentally reorganise everyday life.
Why this matters for displacement research
These patterns matter because not all displacement looks the same, and contemporary conflict often produces forms of mobility that fall outside the categories through which displacement is usually measured, including short-distance or repeated relocations
First, many of these movements remain statistically invisible. Humanitarian figures tend to count people who enter collective shelters, cross districts, or register for assistance. They often miss those who stay with relatives a few streets away, move temporarily within the same village, or return home between strikes. The International Organization for Migration has repeatedly noted the difficulty of capturing dispersed, short-term, and informal displacement in Lebanon, where families frequently rely on personal networks rather than official shelter systems. As a result, a significant share of wartime mobility never appears in the numbers that guide humanitarian planning.
Second, invisibility has concrete consequences. Even short-distance displacement can disrupt work, schooling, healthcare, and access to land. Children may miss weeks of classes, farmers may be unable to reach their fields, and daily routines may be suspended for long periods, even when families remain within the same locality. When such movements are not recognised as displacement, they often fall outside the scope of assistance and policy response, despite producing real social and economic strain.
Third, evacuation warnings raise difficult questions about responsibility. Military authorities present warnings as measures intended to reduce civilian casualties. Yet when warnings repeatedly compel people to leave their homes without offering any guarantee of safety, they also function as a form of governance. By designating certain buildings or neighbourhoods as temporarily uninhabitable, warning maps reorganise how civilians move, where they stay, and how they plan their lives under threat.
In this sense, warnings do not simply inform. They actively reshape everyday life by producing conditions in which people must live in anticipation of possible destruction.
Not only Lebanon
Lebanon is not the only place where displacement begins with a message on a phone.
In Gaza, residents often receive phone calls or text messages ordering them to leave buildings before strikes, a practice documented by organisations such as Amnesty International.
In Ukraine, air-raid alert applications send constant notifications that structure daily routines in cities under threat.
In Sudan, local Telegram and Facebook groups circulate informal “danger zone” maps that compel people to move before fighting reaches their neighbourhoods.
In each case, the warning arrives before the violence, and civilians move in anticipation of threat. In each case, there are implications for the ordering of space, the legibility of the disruptions of armed conflict, and for how responsibility for this displacement is framed.
Conclusion
The hundreds of thousands displaced across Lebanon today include those who fled bombardment, but also those who left because a warning appeared on their phones. Evacuation messages circulated through social media have become part of how contemporary conflict reorganises space, compelling civilians to move before violence occurs. These anticipatory displacements are often small, repeated, and difficult to measure, yet they profoundly disrupt everyday life. Paying attention to them shifts how displacement is understood: not only as the result of destruction, but as a condition produced through the management of threat itself. In this sense, war displaces not only through what it destroys, but through what it makes people expect.
Posted in Migration Comments