Lebanon suffered its bloodiest day in decades as the Israeli airforce turned its gunsights north this week. Over five hundred people are confirmed to have lost their lives as Tel Aviv, which has exchanged fire with Hezbollah for nearly a year on the border, mounted a sweeping bombardment of the country’s south. It marked yet another escalation to coincide with the ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as Israel’s belligerence toward Lebanon, which has resulted in a number of invasions in the past fifty years.

The massive aerial bombardment throughout Lebanon, particularly its Shia-majority south, is confirmed to have killed at least 569 people in its first day. This days after Israel planned a brazen terrorist raid, detonating communication devices in public spaces that killed several people and injured hundreds. The Israeli government is bristling with fighting words. In one of several examples, education minister Yoav Kisch declared, “The way things are progressing at the moment, Lebanon will be annihilated…the price of aggression from Lebanon’s territory will be paid by the state of Lebanon.” He then added, “I am correcting myself: it will not be annihilated. Lebanon as we know it will cease to exist.”

A rescuer inspects the debris at the site of an overnight Israeli strike on a pharmacy in the southern Lebanese village of Akbiyeh on 24 September 2024 (AFP/Mahmoud Zayyat)

The pomposity of these words and the general aggressiveness of the Israeli position reflects the standard position of Tel Aviv, typified in a characteristically incongruous euphemism – “de-escalation through escalation” – with regards to Lebanon, supposing that a major assault will cow the Lebanese state and populace, perhaps with the result of overthrowing or purging Hezbollah or otherwise coming cap in hand for a meek surrender. It ignores the long history of Israel’s wars in Lebanon, all of which have been wholly unsuccessful and only served to bolster the ranks of militant groups such as Hezbollah.

Background

The Lebanese border with the Israeli occupation of northern Palestine has been unquiet for the better part of the last year, with regular exchanges of fire almost since the Gaza genocide began further south. Hezbollah, which was originally formed during Israel’s 1980s occupation of Lebanon, largely dominates the Shia-majority south of the country. Since Palestinian militants originally ensconced themselves in the region during the 1970s Israel’s attitude has been one of collective punishment: making the Lebanese state and people pay for any acts of militancy with purposely disproportionate attacks.

That strategy peaked in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which advanced as far north as its capital, but although Israel did manage to expel much of the then-Fatah-led Palestinian resistance, they soon encountered various Lebanese opponents -most prominently Hezbollah- and were eventually forced to withdraw in 2000 after years of skirmishes punctuated with occasionally massive assaults that always featured the same pattern of collective punishment. This was formalized after the 2006 war with the Israeli military’s so-called “Dahia doctrine”, named after a suburb Israel heavily targeted, which called for wholesale and indiscriminate destruction as a form of political pressure. The architect of this brutalist doctrine, Gadi Eizenkot, is today a minister in the Israeli government.

With its major Iranian support, Hezbollah has often been earmarked both by Israel and by various Arab rivals as a rival: this is one of the enemies against which such Arab states as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have embraced American-brokered normalization with Tel Aviv. There is no doubt that the group has been historically effective in fighting Israeli attacks, and after it repulsed the 2006 Israeli attack, was widely portrayed as the world’s most effective non-state army. The group more contentiously brandished that ability in the Syrian war in the 2010s to help rescue the regime of Bashar Assad from a predominantly Sunni insurgency, draining much of its earlier goodwill. Nonetheless, the group’s legitimacy within Lebanon hinges on its image as “resistance”, primarily to the many Israeli attacks that have charred the country’s history.

Though its leader Hassan Nasrullah was careful not to commit himself to a full-scale war – conscious, likely, of Iran’s interests against such a conflagration – his group has nonetheless responded to the Gaza genocide with a series of raids on the Israeli border, which have marked a low-lying border war that has sent most settlers scuttling south for safety. Israel has killed several leading Hezbollah commanders – including its air commander Ali Burji, field commanders Abu-Taleb Abdullah, Abu Nima Nasir, and Jawad Tawil, and military chiefs Mohsen Shukr and more recently Tahsin Akil.

This autumn, as the Gaza genocide reaches a year, Israel has now decided to expand the war against the Lebanese state and its citizens.

Related:

– Israel Seeks Escalation For Latitude – The Regional “Conflict” Widens

– “In Our Thousands, In Our Millions” | The Palestinian Refugee Camps of Lebanon