Lebanon has been drawn devastatingly into the US-Israel war on Iran after Hizbullah fired rockets on Israel following the assassination of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and other leaders. Around 500 Israeli air attacks in southern Lebanon and south Beirut, the illegal displacement of one million people and now an occupation by Israeli ground troops have happened in under two weeks.
Israel’s stated policy of wiping out Hizbullah’s military capacity and operational bases has led to the deaths of over 1,000 Lebanese so far and leaves the country in fear and shock alongside social and economic collapse. Israeli attacks continued on Sunday, including on bridges in Southern Lebanon, as the Lebanese authorities said they feared a wider invasion was imminent.
This campaign is utterly disproportionate in military and civil terms to the Hizbullah threat. That threat has been endemic in southern Lebanon ever since the movement was founded after the Israeli invasion of 1982 began this long historical cycle of resistance under Iranian tutelage.
Hizbullah is deeply embedded in this part of Lebanese society, controls much of its economy and is part of the national coalition government. A long-standing dilemma for Lebanon’s armed forces has been how to assert full control over the southern part of the country without provoking civil war.
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This all-out war is all the more regrettable because it will probably destroy recent more determined efforts by the Lebanese government to assert control through a gradual policy of reducing armed groups and negotiated compromises. That followed the lethal Israeli attacks on Hizbullah’s leadership in 2024, which gravely weakened the organisation, and the formation of a new Lebanese coalition the following year. Some of its members foresaw a possible opening up of political and economic relations with Israel if this strategy was successfully implemented. France has offered to broker direct talks with Israel along these lines.
Any tentative political and diplomatic progress has been shattered by this war. The Israeli attacks form part of its overall strategy against Iran . Binyamin Netanyahu’s government believes it must fight equally ferociously against its Lebanese and Gazan proxies as against Iran itself.
Widening the war to Lebanon is its choice, with widespread Israeli public support. It suits Netanyahu to continue a state of emergency even if the Iran war is over soon – which looks increasingly unlikely. His government favours brute force over diplomacy even if this requires another indefinite occupation of southern Lebanon.
Such an outcome, alongside forced population displacements, would perpetuate Hizbullah rather than defeat it. That lesson from the last forty years of the conflict is cast aside in this campaign.
