On October 1, Israel sent ground forces into Lebanon, after months of artillery exchanges with Hezbollah, the Iranian-allied militia. This was followed days later by Israeli bombing raids aimed at decimating the militia’s leadership and destroying its infrastructure. Hezbollah began shelling northern Israel over a year ago when Hamas fighters crossed into Israel from Gaza, killing 1,200 Israelis, including 46 U.S. citizens, and taking 251 hostages. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon came less than a week after cell phones and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon started exploding. Israel was alerting Hezbollah and the world of its prodigious security capabilities.
In the days and weeks following the invasion, Israeli bombing raids spread from Hezbollah command centers on the southern outskirts of Beirut to the residential and commercial center of the city. This led to the mass displacement of civilian noncombatants who had no place to shelter. The Lebanese Ministry of Health reports that hospitals in the city continue to be overwhelmed by civilian casualties. In his general audience on October 9, Pope Francis called the escalation of violence unacceptable. Four days later, an Israeli missile destroyed a Greek Catholic church in the diocese of Tyre where locals had taken shelter. Eight bodies were recovered from the rubble.
The Israeli incursion into Lebanon is not just an effort to prevent further shelling by Hezbollah. On Sunday, October 13, Israeli tanks broke through the gates of a United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in southern Lebanon, injuring several peacekeepers. Days earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the peacekeepers to move north. They refused, citing their international mandate under the UN Charter. In his official response, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres bluntly stated that the Israeli attack on unarmed peacekeepers may rise to the level of a war crime.
Lebanon was once the only majority-Christian country in the Middle East. That began to change in the 1950s when Palestinian refugees sought safe haven in Lebanon following the first Arab-Israeli war. In 2023, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency put the number of Palestinians in the country at 250,000.
A second wave of refugees, numbering 1.5 million, crossed into Lebanon from Syria during that country’s civil war. The impact of these conflicts has been devastating on Lebanon, a country less than half the size of Vermont, and in the grip of an unparalleled financial crisis coupled with political gridlock that has resulted in Lebanon being without a president since 2022.
Netanyahu’s chilling threat echoed a strategy known as the Dahia Doctrine, named for the Dahia neighborhood of Beirut, where Hezbollah had its command headquarters during Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Israel’s strategy during that conflict was to destroy the infrastructure, thereby causing as much civilian suffering as possible—all in an effort to incite the Lebanese to rise up against Hezbollah. The strategy didn’t work in 2006, and there is no reason to think it will work today. The Lebanese themselves are deeply divided on this issue. Some are tragically willing to take up arms and risk yet another civil war in the misguided belief that Israel will drive Hezbollah from their land.
In a video message broadcast on October 9, Netanyahu warned that Lebanon would become another Gaza unless the Lebanese rose up and freed their country from the grip of Hezbollah. The Lebanese are well aware of the fact that their country will not regain its sovereignty as long as Hezbollah operates within its borders and with its own army bankrolled by Iran. But it is hard not to see Netanyahu’s message as a cynical attempt to further destabilize an already dangerous situation by turning the Lebanese against each other in a disastrous civil war.
All of this has direct implications for the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally and its biggest supplier of arms. The bunker bombs Israeli pilots are dropping on Beirut are supplied by the United States, a fact that makes Netanyahu’s refusal to heed calls from the Biden administration to limit violence against civilians all the more egregious. The administration’s efforts to prevent a wider war have been effectively buried under the rubble of Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, including the Lebanese who never asked for this war, is paying the price.
In his 1972 World Day of Peace address, Pope Paul VI spoke words that were simple and profound, “If you want peace, work for justice.” “Peace,” he went on to say, “is not treachery. Peace is not a lie made into a system. Much less is it pitiless totalitarian tyranny.” The seeds of peace will be planted in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East when justice comes for the people of Palestine. Until then, Iran and the United States will continue their proxy wars in the region, and Lebanon will be another of its victims.
The election of President Biden in 2020 saved this nation from an unspeakable alternative. But Biden came to office with a set of ideological priorities. Aides who might have pushed back failed to do so, as did a cheerleading media establishment. By the time you read this, another American-made shell will have fallen, and more innocent men, women, and children will have died. How long will we allow this to continue?
