According to the Cyprus Mail, at least 10 countries, including the UK, have asked Cyprus for assistance in evacuating their citizens from the Middle East.

NICOSIA, August 13. /tass/.

Ottawa has agreed with the authorities in Nicosia to carry out, if necessary, an emergency evacuation through Cyprus of 20,000 Canadian citizens who currently live and work in Lebanon. This was reported on Tuesday by the Cyprus Mail newspaper.

The message says that the relevant agreement between the countries was concluded on August 6 at the level of foreign ministers. After that, the Canadian armed forces rapidly transferred to Cyprus the resources necessary to evacuate people from Lebanon when regular commercial flights with this country were disrupted in the context of the aggravation of the Middle East conflict.

The Cypriot edition reports that on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called on citizens of his country in a situation where commercial flights from Beirut are still being operated to immediately leave Lebanon due to the fact that the situation in the Middle East has become extremely dangerous.

According to the Cyprus Mail, at least 10 countries, including the UK, have asked Cyprus for assistance in evacuating their citizens from the Middle East. Moreover, the situation in this region is considered so difficult that the armed forces of the United Kingdom, which have military bases Akrotiri and Dhekelia at their disposal in Cyprus, are preparing for an evacuation operation comparable in scale to the evacuation of British citizens from Kabul during the takeover of power in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2021.

Another round of escalation in the Middle East followed the death in Tehran of the head of the politburo of the radical Palestinian movement Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, and the liquidation in Beirut of one of the commanders of the military wing of the Shiite movement Hezbollah, Fuad Shokr, at the end of July. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah blamed Israel for the incident and said they would not leave it unanswered. The authorities of the Jewish state do not comment on the death of Haniyeh, and the elimination of Shokr was called a response to the shelling of the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, where 12 children were killed. Hezbollah denies any involvement in the incident.

https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/21595287