Since Israel expanded its assault on Lebanon last month, the Middle East stands on the edge of a wider regional conflict, the sparks of which we have seen amid the rocket exchanges between Israel and Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Yemen. For the past year, Western states have offered tepid responses to the horrors inflicted on Gaza, despite the very high civilian toll and the Strip’s untold destruction. Over one month into its full-scale war on Lebanon, facts on the ground show that Israel is using the same tactics. The extent of the violence used is designed to create large-scale humanitarian suffering and, if history is any indication, will also exacerbate and accelerate state failure.
As Israel invades Lebanon, it is committing the same war crimes perpetrated in Gaza. There have been numerous and documented cases of Israel readily employing “double tap” attacks—mainly on first responders—killing journalists, deliberately destroying several villages, killing over 160 emergency workers, directly targeting and destroying hospitals, and attacking United Nations peacekeepers. Israel’s military establishment has stated that its use of disproportionate force is a tactic of controlling the population, with the official aim of eliminating Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In just over one month of operations in Lebanon, over 1,700 people have been killed (over 2,780 since October 2023), and more than 1.2 million have been displaced, as Israeli strikes targeted most of the country’s territory, including South Lebanon, the Beqaa, Beirut, Mount Lebanon, Byblos, and North Lebanon.
Israel’s conduct, so far with almost no pushback from Western powers, has created a humanitarian crisis and may not even succeed in destroying Hezbollah.
Israel’s officially stated objective for the war is to destroy Hezbollah’s military capacity to secure its border. Several days after Israel expanded its attacks, while speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Lebanese public that Israel was “not at war with you.” However, in the midst of Israel’s expanded war on Lebanon, on October 8, Netanyahu threatened that if Lebanese citizens do not throw Hezbollah out, then they would face “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.” This clear threat of collective punishment to a civilian population is an explicit attempt to interfere in Lebanon’s internal politics and subvert the balance of power between the different parties. This is a deeply troubling portent and is reminiscent of what took place in 1982 when Israel tried to impose its political will militarily. Israel’s conduct, so far with almost no pushback from Western powers, has created a humanitarian crisis and may not even succeed in destroying Hezbollah.
Additional suffering
As the Lebanese watch the violence and destruction inflicted on their country, along with the disregard for their national sovereignty, they may question the apparent double standards of the international community in its treatment of Israel and Russia. The speed at which Western states moved to sanction Russia for its unilateral invasion of a sovereign state would have been most welcome in Lebanon to avoid the destruction it faces with this conflict, now and in the future.
The Israeli campaign punishes an already beleaguered population that has been dealing with a series of crises since 2019 including hyperinflation that pushed 80 percent of the population under the poverty line, a destructive port explosion that killed over 200 hundred people and displaced thousands, collapsing state institutions, and policy paralysis. Compounding the misery of the Lebanese has been a completely impotent caretaker government that has shown no preparedness for this conflict.
Against the backdrop of the humanitarian disaster is the warning from the World Health Organization that Lebanon could soon experience a major cholera outbreak. The destruction has been cataclysmic, with whole villages completely ruined, pushing thousands of families sleeping on the streets. This has already placed acute pressure on hosting communities and driven a rise in confessional tension.
A familiar tale
The last time the IDF invaded Lebanon in 1982, their operation was framed by their United Nations spokesperson as a means for Israel to “exercise its right of self-defense” and remove the Palestinian Liberation Organization from South Lebanon. The reality is that Israeli ambitions stretched far beyond that, as it saw the opportunity to shape the internal politics of Lebanon in its favor by supporting the presidential candidacy of Bashir Gemayel, one of the most influential Lebanese Maronite political figures-cum-warlord at the time, who had built a close working relationship with the Israeli government.
These ambitions were foiled when Gemayel was assassinated in September 1982. With his death, Israel’s presence in Lebanon became a centrifuge around which new rounds of violence would revolve. The IDF then laid siege to Beirut, participated in the massacre of innocent Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, and supported a proxy militia that committed atrocities against fellow Lebanese. Israel’s operation of “self-defense” did not create a more peaceful Lebanon.
An important divergence from IDF’s 1982 invasion is that at the time, some of the Lebanese population favored their presence, at least initially. However, as the 17-year occupation carried on, a deep hostility toward its presence grew, legitimizing Hezbollah as a force of resistance to occupation, particularly when the IDF directed operations against the group in 1992 and 1996. The eventual retreat of the IDF in 2000, popular among the Israeli public but negative among security officials because it was seen as a capitulation to Hezbollah, would be an open policy sore for Israel and would set the scene for the next decades of conflict.
Netanyahu’s tactic to place the onus on the Lebanese to rid themselves of Hezbollah, while suffering nationwide strikes, shows that Israel does not care for democratic processes and is sowing the seeds of inter-confessional tension
Following the retreat, there were constant threats and posturing between Hezbollah and Israel, with the occasional outbreak of low levels of conflict. This eventually erupted into the 2006 war, in which over 1,000 Lebanese were killed and approximately 1 million were displaced from South Lebanon. However, the devastation of the first weeks of the present war has already far exceeded that of 2006. With no ceasefire on the horizon, there are fears that the war will create fresh discord between different Lebanese confessions and political groups. Considering the IDF’s indiscriminate strikes that include areas that do not support Hezbollah, the fear is that the current solidarity of the Lebanese population will fail under the pressure.
Netanyahu’s tactic to place the onus on the Lebanese to rid themselves of Hezbollah, while suffering nationwide strikes, shows that Israel does not care for democratic processes and is sowing the seeds of inter-confessional tension. Israel’s policy is also particularly galling for non-violent and democratic reformers in Lebanon who have paid the price of challenging the party with their lives. Opposition against Hezbollah has been an ever-present feature of Lebanese politics since 2005 to the point that real green shoots of reform appeared in the 2022 parliamentary election. Directly following the 2019 October revolution that called for radically different politics and the downfall of traditional leaders including Hezbollah, 13 independent parliamentarians won seats, the largest return of its kind in post-war Lebanon.
The efforts of the independent political forces will go in vain, as one can expect that Israel’s disproportionate harm to civilians will likely generate greater support for Hezbollah in the long term. As a result, the public debate on the extent of Hezbollah’s responsibility for the current conflict will disappear. This already happened during the 2006 war, as those in the public who did not offer full support for Hezbollah were branded as being in collusion with Israel and its Western allies, and not supportive of their Lebanese compatriots. At the moment, Hezbollah’s folly of choosing to continue a conflict with an Israeli government that has a credible case to answer for genocide has been criticized by many on the ground, including some of its long-term political allies. This criticism and nuance will be lost while Israel causes more indiscriminate civilian suffering in Lebanon, as there is no question in the Lebanese population’s mind, even those opposing Hezbollah, of who the aggressor is.
It seems that Israel has recreated precisely the same conditions that brought Hezbollah to popularity in the first place in the 1980s and 1990s. For all the death and destruction that has been caused, Hezbollah remains functioning and a threat to Israel, as it continues to fire into Israeli territory on a daily basis, despite its reduced fighting capacity.
A failure of the West
As all Western “red lines” on Gaza, such as the invasion of Rafah, have been ignored by Netanyahu, it is no surprise that there has been a similarly limp response to Israel’s acts in Lebanon. First in line is the Biden administration whose continued defense of Israeli actions has become an exercise in humiliation during White House briefings as media in attendance routinely undermine the narrative delivered by the administration’s spokesperson. Additionally, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell’s bizarre response to the increased operations in Lebanon, that “there is no force capable of stopping Netanyahu,” underlines the lack of intent from those best placed to end the violence. The international community’s unwillingness to do the bare minimum, such as suspending, even temporarily, arms sales to Israel, as Emmanuel Macron has called for, will only further embolden Netanyahu to continue his limitless use of violence.
Justice is not built on injustice, particularly if justice takes the shape of attacking densely populated areas
When the White House’s statement characterized Nasrallah’s assassination as “justice,” they deliberately left out the significant injustice that his killing caused. The 2,000-pound bomb pulverized four apartment buildings, the kinetic energy of which was so great it vaporized many of the inhabitants in one of the most densely populated areas of Beirut. Justice is not built on injustice, particularly if justice takes the shape of attacking densely populated areas like Basta in central Beirut, where a strike without warning killed 22 civilians and injured 117 more, all done on the flimsy basis that a Hezbollah official was in the vicinity. Daily and deadly Israeli attacks could be added to the list, like the attack in the Beirut neighborhood of Jnah, that killed 18 civilians, or the one that leveled down a residential building in Ain el Delb, adjacent to Sidon, killing over 70 people, or the one that killed 22 when a residential building was targeted in Aitou, over 200 kilometers north of the border with Israel.
The character of the strikes show that innocent Lebanese lives do not matter, as long as spurious and feeble justifications are provided for ending them. The Israeli government when carrying out these attacks manufactures the same excuses as used in Gaza. It did the same when it stated that the Sahel hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs had a bunker under it to store Hezbollah gold and money, without providing any evidence. After various media outlets searched the hospital and did not find anything, the Israeli army called off the attack, though the hospital had already evacuated its patients.
If the Israeli approach to Gaza is any indicator, Israel undoubtedly has the will, the freedom, and material support to cause far more destruction
If the Israeli approach to Gaza is any indicator, Israel undoubtedly has the will, the freedom, and material support to cause far more destruction. And the fact that Israel’s war on Lebanon seems to be popular in Israel, with Netanyahu’s polling numbers increasing positively since the attacks on Lebanon started, shows that there is little care for the negative shifts this will cause in Lebanon. After 13 years of almost uninterrupted domination of Israeli politics, Netanyahu’s political survival now apparently rests on the bodies of Lebanese and Palestinians.
The likely result of this conflict is that Israel will have provided Hezbollah with all the ammunition it needs to justify its continued military presence, making the job of Lebanon’s reformers next to impossible. The responsibility for the many calamities that this conflict will have created will not only be on Hezbollah and Israel but also on the Western states who have steadfastly refused to forcefully bring their diplomatic power to uphold the very basic tenets of international law; the same tenets they were keenly rushing to protect when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
The Lebanese deserve better than to have their struggle to democratize sacrificed because of the cowardice and passivity of Western states unwilling to sanction a government headed by a person who is only fighting for his political survival through violence that destabilizes the region.
Drew Mikhael is a Nonresident Fellow at TIMEP focusing on migration and displacement across the MENA region.