US readies plans for mass Middle East evacuations

There were about 600,000 US citizens in Israel and another 86,000 believed to be in Lebanon when Hamas attacked, according to State Department estimates.

Hezbollah main concern

The concern in Lebanon is chiefly over Hezbollah, a political party and militant group that has controlled the country since 1992. It has long accepted training and weapons from Iran, prompting concerns that it could attack Israel from the north, creating a two-front war that would stretch Israeli forces. Already, there have been skirmishes along their shared border.

“This has become a real issue,” one official said. “The administration is very, very, very worried that this thing is going to get out of hand.”

The administration’s concern extends beyond those two countries, as officials watch the street protests that have spread across the Arab world, putting US personnel and citizens in the region at heightened risk. The bombardment of Gaza has inflamed regional fury at Israel and its treatment of Palestinians, an issue some officials believed no longer carried as much importance in the Arab world.

“The street to a large extent is now in charge,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former official in the Clinton administration.

“We were told for the last 10 years that the Arab world and Muslim world didn’t care about Palestine any more, and Abraham Accords were proof of that,” Mr Riedel said, referring to agreements, signed by the governments of Sudan, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, aimed at normalising relations with Israel. “Well, Palestine has come back. I don’t think it ever went away.”

More than 5000 people in Gaza, mostly civilians and children, have been killed amid unrelenting Israeli airstrikes since the October 7 attacks, Palestinian health officials say.

Rising anxiety

Top US officials have not wanted to discuss such contingency planning in public, hoping to avoid setting off a panic among Americans in the region. But their posture has shifted in recent days to convey the anxiety about other actors entering the conflict.

Last week, the State Department issued an advisory to all US citizens worldwide “to exercise increased caution” due to “increased tensions in various locations around the world”.

The warning was in response to demonstrations that have erupted in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict and broader anger in the Arab world over Washington’s full political, economic and military backing of Israel.

Depending on the scale of a potential US evacuation, it could be more difficult than any previous operations in recent memory, experts said. It could involve air force aircraft or navy warships, which have surged to the region this month.

“With 600,000 Americans in Israel and threats to other Americans across the region, it’s hard to think of an evacuation that might compare to this in scale, scope and complexity,” said Brookings Institution foreign policy director Suzanne Maloney.

On Monday, the Pentagon signalled, too, that it was bracing for a significant increase in attacks on US troops in the Middle East, and the department singled out Iran for its extensive sponsorship of militant groups with a long history of using rockets and drones to target US military positions. In response, Pentagon officials said, they were surging additional missile-defence systems to the region.

Escalation ‘possible’

Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters that a “broader escalation” was possible “in the days ahead”. Senior military leaders, he said, were taking “all necessary measures” to safeguard US personnel.

Particularly vulnerable are the estimated 3400 troops deployed in Iraq and Syria, where earlier in the day US personnel based near the Jordan border had intercepted at least two one-way attack drones, officials said. Americans operating in those countries had been targeted for years by Iranian-backed militias, including Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraq-based group that claimed responsibility for some of the previous attacks disclosed over the past week.

“We don’t necessarily see that Iran has explicitly ordered them to take these kinds of attacks,” General Ryder said. “That said, by virtue of the fact that they are supported by Iran, we will ultimately hold Iran responsible.”

Washington Post