Also on Tuesday, the UN refugee agency said more than a quarter of Lebanon is now protected under evacuation orders from the Israeli military.
“People are heeding these calls to evacuate and they are running away with almost nothing,” Rema Jamous Imseis, the agency’s Middle East director, said at a press briefing.
The evacuation order, along with Israel’s ground invasion and bombing campaign, triggered a mass exodus of Lebanese people from the affected areas.
According to the Lebanese government, more than 1.2 million people have become refugees. They left villages and major cities in the south and migrated north to Beirut, Tripoli and other cities.
Many people have ended up in unsafe and unsanitary conditions in shelters in and around the capital, where schools and shops have been closed to accommodate people.
The sheer volume of displaced people has overwhelmed welfare services, leaving thousands of people on the streets, the mayor’s office told the BBC.
Mayor Abdallah Daric told the BBC last week that previous invasion plans from 2006 had been used to prepare only 10% of the actual population.
“We never imagined it would be this big,” he said. “Every day our calculations grow bigger and bigger.”
Israeli attacks on Beirut, centered on the southern suburb of Dahieh, have taken place every evening for the past three weeks, but the capital has gone unhit for almost five days.
On Tuesday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the United States had raised “concerns” with the Israeli government about the “scope and nature” of the Beirut bombings in recent weeks.
“Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorists who pose a threat to the State of Israel, but we have real concerns about the nature of the campaign that has unfolded across Beirut over the past few weeks,” he said. said.
“We have seen (the number of strikes) decreasing in the last few days,” he added.
After Sunday’s Hezbollah drone strike, Netanyahu threatened to continue attacking the group “without mercy” in Lebanon, including in Beirut, on Monday night.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem issued a threat to Israel on Tuesday, saying Israel had a “new calculation” to inflict suffering on its enemies.
At the same time, Qassem called for a ceasefire in a televised address, saying it was the only solution to the current conflict. “If Israel doesn’t want to do this, we will continue,” he added.
At least 2,309 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes last year, according to Lebanese government figures that do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
Israel said about 50 Israelis, including soldiers and civilians, were killed.
