British troops on standby to evacuate Lebanon

More than a thousand British troops are on standby for an evacuation of British nationals from Lebanon, amid fears that Israel will “go hard” in an attack on the country and bomb its international airport.
Hundreds of military personnel from all three services, including Royal Marine commandos, have already been deployed to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Hundreds more troops in the UK are being held at readiness to move out to the region, The Times can disclose.
The risk of a sudden escalation is considered to be so acute that military planners have prepared for an evacuation on a similar scale to that of Operation Pitting, the mission to rescue British citizens and Afghans from Kabul following the Taliban takeover in August 2021.
Their arrival is part of wider cross-government contingency plans for a rescue mission that a defence source said had been two years in the planning.
British ministers are bracing themselves for a co-ordinated attack on Israel involving Iran, Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed proxies after the killings last week of a senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran.
Israel had earlier blamed Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah commander, for a rocket attack that killed 12 children and teenagers as they played football in the Golan Heights.
Officials familiar with US intelligence believe Iran will retaliate against Israel later in the week or at the weekend, after a meeting on Wednesday of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation.
Foreign ministers from Islamic countries will gather in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for what has been described as an “extraordinary” meeting “to discuss the continued crimes of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people”.
There are fears that Israel will then retaliate by bombarding Lebanon with airstrikes and the crisis could spiral into an all-out regional conflict that could drag in the United States and the UK.
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A government source said the expectation was that Israel would “go hard”, widening its strikes from the areas in south Lebanon that it frequently targets.
The source said they were concerned the country could become “red hot”, with Israel targeting areas such as Dahiyeh, the Beirut stronghold of Hezbollah. There are fears the capital’s international airport, which was bombed during the 2006 war, could again become a target. “The question is what comes after that?” the source added.
As many as 16,000 British nationals are believed to be in Lebanon, a third of whom are Christian, although only 3,000 have registered with the embassy. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has urged them to leave the country immediately, while commercial options are still available.
In the worst-case scenario, UK personnel are prepared to extract thousands of British nationals on the same scale as the Lebanon war of 2006, when about 4,500 people left Beirut on British ships under Operation Highbrow.
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There are a range of options for evacuating British citizens depending on the accessibility of the airport, it is understood. Two British naval ships and several Royal Air Force transport helicopters are on standby in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ministry of Defence has said that the Type 45 air-defence destroyer HMS Duncan and the RFA Cardigan Bay, a transport ship that can deploy landing craft, were in the region.
Border Force officials would process UK nationals as they boarded the Royal Navy and RFA [Royal Fleet Auxiliary] vessels. The Foreign Office has already dispatched more consular officials to the region.
There are fears, however, that British nationals may be unable to travel to pick-up points and be forced to seek shelter.
Hezbollah, which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK, is one of the most heavily armed non-state military forces in the world, equipped with an estimated 120,000 to 200,000 rockets and missiles. It is separate from the Lebanon armed forces, which has been supported and trained by British troops for years and owes its true allegiance to Iran, rather than any Lebanese political force.
Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former senior United Nations counterterrorism official who is a senior adviser at the Counter Extremism Project, a non-governmental organisation, warned it appeared to be getting “harder and harder to prevent escalation each time”.
He said it was a “worse situation” than in April, when Iran launched 170 bomb-carrying drones, more than 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles toward Israel in response to an Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy compound in Syria.
Fitton-Brown said he believed the crisis was “likely to get nasty in the next 24 to 48 hours”, adding that it made sense for Iran and Hezbollah to strike Israel before all US military assets had arrived in the region.
On Wednesday the UK issued a safety notice advising British airlines not to enter Beirut airspace due to “potential risk from military activities”. Egypt also instructed all of its airlines to avoid Iranian airspace for three hours in the early morning on Thursday following a notification from Iranian authorities that military exercises would be conducted during that period.