Israel’s second front: on the ground in Lebanon

March 24, 2026·25 min·2 clips

128 attacks on medical facilities in two weeks, and surviving paramedics now sleep in separate ambulances so one strike can't kill them all.

Tyre starts as a contradiction. It is a jewel on the Mediterranean, with ruins and a beach, but that picture keeps giving way to debris, airstrikes, and split-second choices. People have to move fast. Will Christou remembers corridors packed with people, bags, children, and journalists weighing whether to leave before the bombing everyone expects. The warning comes by phone. An automated Arabic message from a Romanian number turns evacuation into something cold and procedural, right in the middle of fear. The conversation then pulls back. While much of the world is watching Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and Donald Trump's Truth Social account, the episode stays with southern Lebanon. The military build-up sounds planned, not improvised. The guest says brigades had moved to the northern border and that Israel appeared ready for this possibility before the campaign widened. Whole areas are turned into no-man zones. Towns in the south and Beirut's southern suburbs come under evacuation or displacement orders, sometimes posted online at night, sometimes during the day. The numbers are hard to sit with. About 15% of Lebanon's territory is under evacuation order, and one in five people are described as displaced. More than a million people are away from home. The host asks what that means in a small country. The answer is blunt. Rain changes everything. What might feel cozy from inside an apartment points to tents, streets, and people without shelter in Beirut and elsewhere. The episode works because it keeps returning to the ground: a pier in Tyre, a phone call, a country absorbing mass displacement. Peace feels distant. By the end, the host and guest leave the sense that Israel and Hezbollah still see war as the option they can live with, so the conflict keeps going.

As heard by us

A restrained, ground-level report on Israel's campaign in Lebanon and the mass displacement it is causing.

Today in Focus follows Guardian reporter Will Christou in southern Lebanon as Israel's campaign turns whole areas into evacuation zones. The episode is strongest when it stays close to Tyre: people debating whether to run, journalists getting automated IDF warnings, and the wait…

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Why you'd press play

You're on a pier in Tyre with a Guardian journalist, waiting for bombs, when his phone rings.

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