Lebanon stands firm in the face of attempted ethnic cleansing.
a million people displaced. Journalists killed. Tanks burning in ambushes. And the open, unapologetic talk of annexation from genocidal officials who have decided the mask is no longer necessary.
Good day, spectators,
And whilst the world's attention remains fixed on the missiles flying over Tehran and the warships circling the Persian Gulf, there is another, more intimate catastrophe unfolding on the hills of Lebanon, particularly the south, and it’s one with a familiar script: mass displacement, indiscriminate bombing, and the open, unapologetic talk of annexation from Israeli officials who have apparently decided that the mask is no longer necessary.
In the past week, the rhetoric has escalated from threat to blueprint. Israel's Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces will retain control of the territory south of the Litani River, a swath of land stretching up to twenty miles from the Israeli border. 'Hundreds of thousands of residents of southern Lebanon, who were evacuated, will not return south of the Litani River until the security of northern residents is assured,' Katz declared. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, was even more explicit. 'The new Israeli border must be the Litani,' he told Israeli radio, making clear that what is being sold as a 'buffer zone' is in fact a land grab. The military has already bombed five bridges over the Litani River, bridges that serve as lifelines for civilians, used to access medicine, hospitals, and basic supplies.
This is not a new war aim. It is the open avowal of an old one: the ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon.
the numbers.
Since the 2nd of March, when Hezbollah launched rockets in retaliation for the US-Israeli assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader, the human cost has been staggering. According to Lebanese authorities, at least 1,116 people have been killed and 3,229 wounded, and among the dead are more than 120 children. But the numbers that should stop you cold are the displacement figures. More than 1.2 million people, a fifth of Lebanon's entire population, have been forced from their homes in less than a month, and among them are 350,000 children.
One in every five people in Lebanon has fled their home since this escalation began. They have left with nothing. They sleep in schools, in shelters, in the streets. A 20-year-old woman named Wafaa, displaced from eastern Lebanon with her four family members, told Save the Children: 'I want to achieve my dreams. I want to live in Lebanon and grow up like all children and young people around the world without war.' Her dream is not radical. It is the baseline of human existence, and it is being systematically demolished.
the infrastructure of annihilation.
Israel's strategy is becoming transparent, and it is not merely bombing Hezbollah positions but destroying the connective tissue that allows southern Lebanon to function as a society. Bridges over the Litani have been blown up. Fuel stations and health centres and residential buildings have been struck. Roads have been severed. The goal, as Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr reported from the ground, is to 'isolate the region from the rest of the country.' Hanna Amil, the mayor of the Christian border town of Rmeis, whose residents have refused to leave, described the reality of life under this siege with quiet devastation: 'Once or twice a week, a convoy from the Lebanese army accompanies us as we try to get basic goods from nearby areas. Already, we have no state electricity, no water and we have diesel shortages. If all the routes to the north get cut off, who knows what the future could hold for us.'
Watch: Israel is wiping out critical bridge after critical bridge in South Lebanon. Civilians can’t flee. Ambulances can’t reach the wounded.
In the past 72 hours alone, Israel has killed at least four journalists in southern Lebanon, and this too is not collateral damage. It is a pattern. On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike hit a car in the town of Jezzine carrying four people, all of whom died, among them Ali Shoaib, a correspondent for Al-Manar, Fatima Ftouni, a reporter for Al-Mayadeen, and her brother Mohammad Ftouni, a cameraman.
The Israeli military claimed Shoaib was a member of Hezbollah's Radwan Force operating under journalistic cover and provided no evidence. On Wednesday, Hussein Hammoud, an Al-Manar cameraman, was killed while filming an Israeli raid on the southern city of Nabatieh, and a week earlier, on 18 March, journalist Mohammed Sherri was killed in an Israeli strike on a residential building in central Beirut.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that at least four media workers have been killed in Lebanon since the war on Iran began on 28 February. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned the strikes as 'blatant violations of international humanitarian law,' reminding the world that journalists are civilians protected under the Geneva Conventions and UN Security Council Resolution 1738. The pattern is unmistakable. Israel kills journalists, offers unproven justifications, the world watches, and the next journalist picks up a camera anyway.
the Merkava massacre.
And yet, for all its firepower, Israel is discovering, once again, that southern Lebanon is not Gaza. It is not a flat, besieged enclave of refugees but a mountainous, fortified territory defended by a legitimate paramilitary force that has spent decades preparing for exactly this confrontation. This past Wednesday, Hezbollah announced that its fighters had destroyed 21 Israeli Merkava tanks in a single 24-hour period, a loss so severe that Israeli media described it as 'a military disaster unprecedented in the history of Hezbollah's wars with Israel.' The bulk of the losses occurred in a single engagement between the towns of Taybeh and Qantara, where Hezbollah fighters 'monitored them and prepared to lure the enemy into a well-planned ambush.' Military analysts noted that this represents the heaviest tank losses Israel has suffered in over forty years, since the early stages of the 1982 Lebanon War. The Iron Dome has been completely overwhelmed in the past few weeks too. Hezbollah has launched over 3,500 rockets, missiles, and drones at Israeli positions since the war began, and Israeli forces attempting to reinforce their trapped units have found themselves under fire from heavy missiles.
Watch: Hezbollah regularly publishes footage of its drones targeting Israeli Merkava tanks and other armoured vehicles.
Watch: Footage of Hezbollah striking a Merkava tank in the town square of Taybeh, southern Lebanon.
There is a dark irony here that should not be lost. Smotrich, the man calling for annexation, told Israeli radio that the military campaign 'needs to end with a different reality entirely.' He is right, but perhaps not in the way he imagines. The reality we see on the hills of southern Lebanon is one of Israeli tanks burning in ambushes and a cowardly force of soft IGF ‘soldiers’ bogged down in terrain it does not control, facing a population that hates them and refuses to break.
Fun.
the well worn annexation blueprint.
Is this moment different from previous Israeli invasions of Lebanon? From 1978 to 1982 to 1996 to 2006, we have seen the nakedness of the territorial ambition. In the past, Israeli leaders spoke of 'security zones' and 'buffer areas' with at the very least a veneer of temporary necessity. Today, the language is permanent. Smotrich has explicitly compared the plan to the annexationist project in the West Bank, where Israel has spent decades carving up Palestinian land, and Katz has invoked the 'Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza,' the complete erasure of neighbourhoods with bulldozers. The blueprint is not improvisation. It is the export of a method perfected elsewhere.
Lebanon's Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has lodged a formal complaint with the UN Security Council, warning that these actions 'pose a serious threat to Lebanon's sovereignty, territorial integrity and the rights of its citizens, and violate international law, international humanitarian law and the UN Charter.' The complaint will join the long list of documents that the empire files, reads, and ignores.
And where are the voices of the West? The EU has once again done fuck all but issue statements urging 'restraint.' The US has offered 'concern.' The usual chorus of human rights organisations has released the usual reports. The WHO has recorded at least 64 attacks on healthcare facilities in Lebanon since the escalation began, resulting in 51 deaths and 91 injuries. But none of it matters. None of it stops a single bomb. Because the silence of the powerful is not a failure of communication; it is a policy. The same European capitals that tripped over themselves to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine cannot find the vocabulary to condemn the open talk of annexing Lebanese territory, and the same governments that posture endlessly about the 'rules-based order' have nothing to say when their ally blows up bridges and declares a new border.
Watch: The terrifying moment Israel targeted RT journalist Steve Sweeney in Lebanon who was covering the destruction of another bridge.
The people of southern Lebanon have seen this film before. They remember 1982, when Israel invaded and occupied the south for eighteen years. They remember 2000, when Hezbollah's resistance finally drove the occupation forces out. They remember 2006, when another invasion brought another war and another withdrawal. They know what is being attempted, and they are not leaving. The evacuees who have fled are not gone forever; they are waiting in shelters, in schools, in the homes of relatives, watching the news, waiting for the moment they can return. Some have refused to leave at all.
This is the reality the empire cannot compute. You can bomb a people. You can displace them. You can destroy their bridges and their hospitals and their homes. But you cannot bomb them into forgetting that this land is theirs, and you cannot bomb them into accepting annexation as liberation.
The hills of southern Lebanon are burning. A million people are displaced. The talk of annexation is no longer talk but policy being implemented with bulldozers and bombs, and yet Hezbollah is destroying tanks by the dozen, the journalists keep filming, and the people are refusing to surrender their future. The question is not whether Israel can take southern Lebanon. It has tried before, and it has failed before. The question is whether the world will finally find the courage to say: enough.
And on that note, I’ll let you go for today.
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All my homies stand with Lebanon! And Iran and Yemen
I saw footage of Israel deliberately bombing a Lebanese ambulance. Like you said, Deaglan, same old. Yet it touched me like nothing else. They are disgusting terrorists. More and more I realise that Israel does not have a right to exist at all. The USA should give the Zionists a piece of Nebraska or something and let the Middle East be. But like always, there is too much money involved in killing brown people.