Written by 
Flattened villages, burned fields, homes pockmarked with bullet fire, and smoke billowing out of freshly bombed infrastructure: Southern Lebanon is beginning to look like war-torn Gaza.
In Lebanon, as in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has been unleashed without any coherent strategic vision or clear war aim. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first said that the goal was to push out Hezbollah beyond the Litani River in the hopes of enabling more than 80,000 Israelis to return to northern Israel. But in the following weeks, he unveiled a more sweeping goal, as he threatened the Lebanese people to either oust Hezbollah or face levels of “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
Flattened villages, burned fields, homes pockmarked with bullet fire, and smoke billowing out of freshly bombed infrastructure: Southern Lebanon is beginning to look like war-torn Gaza.
In Lebanon, as in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has been unleashed without any coherent strategic vision or clear war aim. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first said that the goal was to push out Hezbollah beyond the Litani River in the hopes of enabling more than 80,000 Israelis to return to northern Israel. But in the following weeks, he unveiled a more sweeping goal, as he threatened the Lebanese people to either oust Hezbollah or face levels of “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
It’s not clear whether Israel will make good on that threat of rendering southern Lebanon a second Gaza. But to some extent, Netanyahu has already shown that he is willing to try—or at least, to make it seem as if he is.
According to Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars—a United Kingdom-based conflict monitor—southern Lebanon has undergone the world’s “most intense” aerial bombing campaign of the past 20 years, aside from Gaza. On Sept. 23 alone, to cite just one date, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it used 2,000 munitions on 1,500 targets.
“One of the most intense air campaigns we’d seen was when the U.S. and their allies dropped 5000 bombs on Mosul in a month,” Tripp told Foreign Policy in a written statement. “Prior to the Gaza war, the deployment of this number of munitions in this short a time span would have been almost unheard of, at least in any comparative air campaign that we know of.”
More than 500 people died in Lebanon on Sept. 23 as the Israeli Air Force cleared the way for a ground invasion. That’s the highest death toll in a single day in Lebanon since the end of its 15-year-long bloody civil war, and more than five times higher than the average daily killings in the Syrian civil war.
Israel’s invasion of the south has thus far displaced more than a million people, with terrifying consequences for the social fabric of an already-fragile nation. As the IDF searches for Hezbollah stockpiles and hunts down the militant group’s members in homes, market squares, places of worship, and farms, it is once again destroying the memories of those who lived there. Some villages along the 120-kilometer (75-mile) stretch of the Blue Line—the de facto border between Israel and Lebanon—have been destroyed, and nearly all have been abandoned.
The scope of the destruction is particularly visible in Yaroun and Maroun al-Ras, villages near the border. A senior Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Foreign Policy that the towns of Ayta ash Shab and Meiss al-Jabal have been “deliberately” destroyed to make sure “the enemy couldn’t just return and reuse the same infrastructure.”
Richard Weir—a senior researcher in the Crisis, Conflict, and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch—who is on the ground in Lebanon, said that Israel has used a range of munitions when conducting its attacks in the country.
“In Ain Ed Delb, in southern Lebanon, we’ve seen an entire building taken down following at least two munitions striking the building with dozens of people, many of whom were already displaced,” he said. In other cases, Weir added, the Israeli military “demonstrated its ability to attack targets more discreetly by choosing weapons that have limited effects.”
Israel has declared a military zone on its side of the border and deployed units from four divisions, each with around 10,000 soldiers, who are backed by special forces and intelligence units. Jonathan Conricus, currently a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Israeli military official who served in the 2006 war against Hezbollah, reckoned that IDF ground troops are operating about 5 kilometers (3 miles) inside Lebanon, to search and destroy Hezbollah infrastructure and hold the ground for an undetermined period.
Eran Lerman, Israel’s deputy national security advisor for foreign policy, said that Israeli special forces have been periodically entering southern Lebanon for nearly a year to soften the battlefield for an invasion. “Now it’s about large formations coming in to wipe out Hezbollah infrastructure and create the capacity to monitor any future attempt the group or its remnants may make to return,” he told Foreign Policy.
Both Lerman and Conricus believe that while there’s no appetite to occupy southern Lebanon, there are no plans to leave, either. They said it is hard to imagine the IDF troops leaving before a diplomatic and political resolution is agreed upon. Israel’s quick tactical and combat successes in Lebanon—including the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah combined with Hezbollah’s weaker-than-expected resistance—have encouraged the government to not only aim for pushing Hezbollah out of the south, but also for ridding Lebanon of the group forever.
The thinking is that Israel’s attacks, together with the United States’ ongoing show of strength in the Mediterranean, could deter Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, while at the same time building confidence among domestic Lebanese actors to challenge the duo’s dominance. “The French could motivate the Christians to take a more active political position against Hezbollah,” Conricus added.
But there’s much that could go wrong in such a mission. So far, there’s no sign of an open rebellion against Hezbollah or its supporters. Experts fear communal conflict within Lebanon, and historically, that hasn’t served Israel either. In Israel’s 1982 offensive against the country, while it succeeded in kicking out the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its leader, Yasser Arafat, from Lebanon, Hezbollah was born and became stronger.
But many in Israel, including Lerman, believe that this time, the situation is different. “There are people in Lebanon who will support us,” Lerman said. Even in 1982, when Israel made local alliances and backed a right-wing Christian militia, as many as 3,500 Palestinians were killed in two days in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in a massacre conducted by these militia members.
Ayman Mhanna, the executive director of the Beirut-based Samir Kassir Foundation, said that he is worried about the ruin of southern Lebanon, but what’s keeping him up at night is the fear of intercommunal strife and tensions. He said that he doesn’t expect the death toll to be as high in southern Lebanon as it has been in Gaza, where more than 42,000 people have been killed in the past year of fighting, especially since the region isn’t as densely packed, and people are still free to move to other parts of the country.
Mhanna’s paramount concern is the day after—a lack of aid to rebuild the south, displaced Shiites overstaying their welcome in other parts of the nation, and tensions culminating into internal chaos.
“The country is reeling under a severe economic and political crisis, and we won’t get international aid until there is a government, and I suspect some Arab countries are happy with what’s happening to Hezbollah,” he told Foreign Policy over the phone from Montreal, where he is residing.
Others believe that Israel will be more cautious this time around and, despite the intensive initial air raids, will likely move methodically.
“If we face the kind of resistance that we are facing now, which is minimal, then that will reflect in ground operations,” Lerman added.
A more enduring resistance to Israeli troops may arise as they occupy the region. Israel has not publicized a strategy on how to sustain its occupation and filter out Hezbollah members from the masses of Lebanon’s Shiite residents, or to stop another group from taking its place. It doesn’t even know which force should guard the border, considering that it trusts neither the Lebanese Armed Forces nor the U.N.’s peacekeepers.
The Israeli establishment hopes that the Palestinians will turn against Hamas and the Lebanese against Hezbollah and blame these groups for all the death and destruction of the past year. It believes that the region is at an inflection point where both its own efforts, and efforts of its Western allies over the years—such as ability to exert influence over the Lebanese Armed Forces and normalization deals with several Arab States under Abraham Accords, as well as domestic crises in Lebanon and Iran—are about to create a perfect situation that ends the age of anti-Israel armed resistance.
The trouble is that while Netanyahu expects a new Middle East to emerge at the end of what he said would be “a long war,” no one knows what this new Middle East will look like. For now, all that’s clear is that the Israelis are laying waste to southern Lebanon.