The U.S. Department of State announced that it had ordered the evacuation of a number of U.S. Embassy employees in Lebanon along with their families.
Sources at the embassy told Alhurra that the mission continues to operate with its full core staff, stressing that the move is temporary and aimed at ensuring the safety of embassy personnel while preserving its ability to function and provide assistance to U.S. citizens.
Reuters quoted a U.S. State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying: “We are conducting a continuous assessment of the security situation, and based on the most recent evaluation we carried out, we determined that it was prudent to reduce our presence to essential personnel only.”
For his part, the head of Lebanon’s Civil Aviation Regulatory Authority, Dr. Mohammad Aziz, told Alhurra that no U.S. entity had requested Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport to take any exceptional measures related to the evacuation of American personnel. He explained that “if any embassy employees departed via Beirut airport, they did so on commercial flights with regular tickets, not as part of a large-scale evacuation using military aircraft.”
Commenting on a video circulating on social media that shows a large number of soldiers at Beirut airport and claims they are Americans, Aziz denied the accuracy of that information, saying the video depicts members of a South Korean battalion that arrived in Beirut to join the peacekeeping forces—a routine deployment.
In recent weeks, the United States has bolstered its military presence in the Middle East.
Last Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump warned that “very bad things will happen” if no agreement is reached in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
U.S. interests were repeatedly targeted in Lebanon during the 1980s, in parallel with the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975 and lasted until 1990. At the time, the United States held the Iran-backed Hezbollah responsible for a series of attacks, including a suicide bombing that struck a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 service members, and a suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon the same year that killed 49 of its staff.
The article is a translation of the original Arabic.
