The Biden administration says it supports “limited” Israeli military operations in Lebanon. But for Lebanese who are desperately fleeing Israeli attacks, watching their country be destroyed, or hearing the thump of airstrikes and whirring of drones overhead—well, Israel’s war doesn’t feel particularly limited. And there’s little reason to believe it will remain limited, as Israel presses its ground offensive in southern Lebanon and both U.S. and Israeli aims become more expansive.
The Biden administration has now endorsed a new Israeli war on Hezbollah in Lebanon—a total inversion of the administration’s earlier push for a diplomatic solution and a ceasefire. What’s more, Washington is trying to opportunistically leverage Israel’s military campaign to reshape Lebanon’s politics. It’s a policy that is destabilizing and dangerous.
The United States ought to be pressing for a life-saving ceasefire in Lebanon, and withholding material support to Israel’s expanding war. Instead, it is cosponsoring an Israeli attack it will not be able to moderate or control.
The truth is that Israel is not carrying out limited operations to “degrade” Hezbollah. It is waging a war on Lebanon—one in which the United States is a full, open partner. People in Lebanon, and around the world, can see the Biden administration supporting Israeli military operations that are killing Lebanese, and opposing a ceasefire. These people will, justifiably, hold the United States responsible for this war’s bloodshed and destruction—particularly as the war expands.
Israel Suddenly Escalates
The Israeli war in Lebanon dramatically escalated in September, after almost a year of back-and-forth attacks between Israel and Hezbollah. The Lebanese political party and paramilitary group initially fired on Israeli positions on October 8, 2023, a day after Hamas launched its attack from the Gaza Strip. Israel retaliated, and an extended, deadly tit-for-tat began along its de facto border with Lebanon, known as the Blue Line.
As Israel and Hezbollah traded attacks, Israeli leaders pressed for a solution on the Blue Line that would allow the safe return of tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the country’s north. The United States led efforts to broker a de-escalatory agreement based on UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701, which ended Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon. Hezbollah seemed amenable to the agreement’s presumptive terms but refused to halt its attacks and finalize a deal until a ceasefire was first agreed in Gaza.
Then, almost a year after the October 7 attacks, and as it became clear there would be no Gaza ceasefire, Israel made its move in Lebanon. On September 17, Israel first detonated booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members. Israeli planes and drones then bombarded southern Lebanon, the country’s eastern Beqaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. And Israel targeted top Hezbollah leadership with airstrikes, culminating on September 27 in the assassination, with a massive airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, of Hassan Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders. On October 1, Israel announced it had begun “limited, localized, and targeted ground raids” in southern Lebanon—in other words, it had invaded.
Israel is currently attempting to advance in southern Lebanon, though it has faced resistance from Hezbollah. Hezbollah has also continued to attack northern Israel using drones and volleys of rockets and missiles. Israel’s ongoing air campaign has focused on southern Lebanon, the Beqaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs. Yet its planes have also bombed other areas, including locations in central Beirut, the mountainous Aley district, and the northern city of Tripoli.
Israeli attacks have killed more than 2,400 people in Lebanon since October 2023, mostly in the weeks since Israel’s escalation in September; 569 people were killed on September 23 alone. Israel has issued evacuation orders for a quarter of Lebanese territory. More than 700,000 people are displaced inside Lebanon, out of a prewar population of roughly 6 million people. Designated shelters are mostly full; displaced families have camped in open spaces across the country’s center and north, including in improvised tents on Beirut’s waterfront corniche. More than 400,000 people have fled to Syria.
“Limited” War
Israel describes these attacks as “limited and targeted raids” against Hezbollah command nodes and infrastructure in areas along the Blue Line, from which Hezbollah can threaten communities in northern Israel. Israeli officials say that Hezbollah had effectively transformed Lebanese border villages into military bases and was preparing for an October 7-style cross-border attack. Israel has advertised operations in southern Lebanon demolishing Hezbollah military infrastructure and confiscating the group’s arms, and touted a bombing campaign elsewhere as targeting Hezbollah leaders, bases, and arms stockpiles.
U.S. officials also insist that the Israeli campaign is limited. Yet “limited” can mean different things, depending on who is speaking for Washington. Some spokespeople have focused on the limited geographic scope of Israel’s ground incursions in southern Lebanon. Other U.S. officials have defined “limited” in terms of Israel’s military objectives, which center, these officials say, on dismantling Hezbollah’s “attack infrastructure” along the Blue Line in order to permit civilians’ safe return to northern Israel.
The war in Gaza has shown how the Biden administration can be extremely flexible when defining acceptable limits for Israeli military action.
The Biden administration also seems to have additional ideas about what the bounds of Israel’s operation should be. American officials have said they understand Israeli operations as “limited incursions not with the goal of holding territory,” and that Washington does not support a lasting Israeli presence in southern Lebanon. They have also said that Washington wants the Beirut airport to remain open and that they oppose Israeli airstrikes on “densely populated areas” of Beirut. (Presumably this means municipal Beirut, and not Beirut’s built-up southern suburbs, which Israel has bombed extensively.)
But the war in Gaza has shown that the Biden administration can be extremely flexible when defining acceptable limits for Israeli military action. Recall the administration’s opposition to Israel launching a “major ground operation” in Rafah. When Israel went ahead and invaded Rafah, administration officials insisted this was not a “major ground operation,” and that Israeli counterparts had assured them Rafah operations would be “limited” and for “a short duration.” Those assurances were false.
There is no reason to believe the Biden administration will not again engage in these kinds of rhetorical gymnastics to rationalize—and support—Israel’s “limited” actions in Lebanon. And of course, Israel will be doing all this with arms made and supplied by the United States.
Shifting American Goalposts
Even as the Biden administration insists Israel’s military operations are limited, the administration has substantially broadened U.S. aims in Lebanon.
The Biden administration has advocated a “diplomatic solution” to restore calm along the Blue Line since October 2023. Yet the administration’s idea of what that solution ought to entail has evidently changed since it reversed its position on an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah—switching, almost overnight, from opposing military escalation to supporting it.
Prior to September 17, the Biden administration was emphatic that it did “not want to see a further escalation of the conflict” in Lebanon. Administration representatives insisted that a diplomatic solution was the best way to address Israel’s security concerns. Even after Israel began to increase military-security pressure on Hezbollah in September, the administration was still working to mobilize diplomatic support for a joint U.S.–French ceasefire initiative.
Then Israel escalated even further—including by assassinating Nasrallah, whose killing the Biden administration hailed as “a measure of justice”—and the administration’s position flipped. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller put it bluntly on October 8: “The situation on the ground has changed. . . . It is a different world you’re looking at today than it was several weeks ago.”
Now, the Biden administration no longer wants an immediate ceasefire—for the time being, it unequivocally supports Israeli efforts to weaken Hezbollah.
Biden administration officials say the United States is still seeking an ultimate diplomatic solution premised on UNSCR 1701, in which Hezbollah withdraws north of Lebanon’s Litani River and the Lebanese army and UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers exercise security control south of the river. But now, the administration is apparently pushing for a version of that solution that is maximally disadvantageous to Hezbollah. Miller has said that Hezbollah “has been significantly degraded and now finds itself on the back foot”—making it possible to push a harder bargain on the group than when it was at the “height of its power” weeks earlier.
Truly transferring security control in southern Lebanon to the Lebanese army and UNIFIL would amount to creating a large neutral zone inside Lebanese territory. The United States and other Western donor countries have long supported the Lebanese Armed Forces. Since 2006, the United States alone has provided the Lebanese army with more than $2.5 billion in security assistance. Yet the Lebanese army is essentially an internal security force. It cannot defend Lebanon against Israel, and its foreign sponsors do not equip it to that end. As Israel launched its first ground incursions in southern Lebanon on October 1, the Lebanese army withdrew from its observation posts along the Blue Line and repositioned roughly three miles back. Throughout the war, it has mostly been on the sidelines.
Pushing to politically marginalize Hezbollah risks igniting intra-Lebanese conflict.
The Biden administration is also going beyond arrangements along the Blue Line. Critically, it is pressing for Lebanon’s parliament to urgently convene and elect a new president. (Lebanon’s political factions have been deadlocked over the election of a new president since October 2022, when Michel Aoun left office. U.S. officials claim, dubiously, that Hezbollah has been the main obstacle to electing a president.) This push for a new president, U.S. officials have made clear, is part of an effort to diminish Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon generally—in Miller’s words, “to break the stranglehold that Hezbollah has had on the country.”
Yet pushing to politically marginalize Hezbollah risks igniting intra-Lebanese conflict. Hezbollah’s near-monopoly on political violence has made it Lebanon’s most powerful veto player, but it is only one veto player among many in Lebanon’s dysfunctional political system. Trampling Hezbollah’s prerogatives will not fix Lebanon’s broken politics, and if other Lebanese parties attempt it, Hezbollah may react violently. Trying to remake Lebanon’s political system by force is effectively an attempt at regime change—with all the justifiably negative implications—even if U.S. officials reject that characterization.
In the meantime, the Biden administration seems happy to let Israel continue its war with Hezbollah, so long as Israel concentrates its bombing in specific, disfavored areas and leaves Beirut airport open. Already, this war has killed twice as many people in Lebanon as the 2006 war, which ran for thirty-four days before the U.S.-supported UNSCR 1701 brought it to an end.
Israel Wants a Deep Buffer
Of course, it is not at all clear that Israeli leaders actually agree with the Biden administration’s stated aims in Lebanon.
Notably, Israel’s efforts to dislodge UNIFIL peacekeepers—whose mandate partly stems from UNSCR 1701—from their positions along the Blue Line appear inconsistent with the United States’ preferred solution based on UNSCR 1701. The Israeli military has also killed several Lebanese army soldiers.
If Israel is actually willing to countenance the sort of diplomatic solution that the United States has advocated, it may press for terms that substantially curtail Lebanese sovereignty. Israeli press has reported that Israeli leaders will likely push for an enhanced version of UNSCR 1701 that interdicts arms smuggling from Syria, mandates UNIFIL to confront Hezbollah, and authorizes continued Israeli intelligence gathering and new ground incursions in southern Lebanon. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he opposes any ceasefire that does not “change the security situation in Lebanon” and “stop Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping.”
Yet Israel may not actually be interested in a negotiated resolution. Instead, it may attempt to unilaterally impose its own solution in southern Lebanon. It is not obvious, after all, that Israel intends to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon and cede control to a non-Israeli third party. U.S. officials have publicly acknowledged this fact, and their discomfort with it. “We are very cognizant of the many times in the past where Israel has gone in on what looked like limited operations and has stayed for months or for years,” Miller said in early October. “And ultimately that’s not the outcome that we want to see.”
“We want to see the implementation of 1701,” said Miller the following day. “And what 1701 calls for is Israeli troops back on the Israeli side of the border, Hezbollah pulled back beyond the Litani River, and the Lebanese Armed Forces and UNIFIL exercising security control over southern Lebanon.”
Yet if Israel really wants a buffer zone cleared of Hezbollah forces along its northern border, that will likely require Israel to hold part of southern Lebanon. How much of southern Lebanon is unclear. Israel occupied large sections of southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000; for much of that time, it controlled a border strip mostly south of the Litani River. Today, however, Israel has issued evacuation orders for areas in Lebanon well above the Litani River and has directed residents to relocate north of the Awali River—above the city of Sidon, and more than forty miles from the Blue Line.
Even an Israeli advance to the Awali River would not put northern Israel beyond the range of Hezbollah’s missiles and drones. The Israeli military may just push as far as it can.
The main check on how far Israel can press into Lebanon is likely Hezbollah’s armed resistance. No one knows, though, how thoroughly Israeli attacks have damaged Hezbollah’s combat units and infrastructure, and how long Hezbollah units can withstand more concentrated Israeli bombing.
Seeking to Transform Lebanon
Beyond securing the Blue Line and northern Israel, Israeli leaders may also have plans for Lebanon’s internal politics, quite apart from the Biden administration’s push for a new Lebanese president.
In an October 8 video addressed to the Lebanese people, Netanyahu urged the Lebanese to “take back” their country and “free [it] from Hezbollah,” or else face “the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.” Netanyahu’s message and others by Israeli officials—including repeated claims that Israel’s “war is with Hezbollah, not with the people of Lebanon” and that “the southern suburb isn’t like the rest of Beirut”—may be aimed at inflaming intra-Lebanese tensions. Israel’s bombing campaign has already forced hundreds of thousands of Shia Lebanese to seek shelter in non-Shia-majority areas. Israel has since repeatedly bombed concentrations of displaced people in non-Shia areas, heightening fears among many Lebanese that hosting the displaced may invite Israeli attacks. If the war drags on and the country’s displacement crisis becomes protracted, social tensions between host communities and the displaced could well flare into violence.
What’s more, if Israel occupies Lebanese territory and prevents displaced residents from returning home, that could also change Lebanon’s political balance and weaken Hezbollah by massively dispossessing the party’s social base. Lebanon’s many thousands of displaced people have been dislocated from their homes and livelihoods. Israel has already carried out controlled demolitions in border communities, including, in at least one case, the destruction of an entire town. If Israel establishes a depopulated buffer zone in southern Lebanon, it could turn thousands and thousands of Lebanese—including members of Hezbollah’s civilian constituency, but also many others—into refugees in their own country.
American Culpability
The Biden administration may insist that Israeli operations in Lebanon are limited, but there is little reason to believe they will stay that way—and whatever comes next, the United States will be responsible. The Biden administration spent a year trying and failing to convince Israel to wage a war in Gaza that didn’t indiscriminately kill civilians and make Gaza totally uninhabitable. There is little reason to assume Israel’s campaign in Lebanon will be different. To add insult to injury, the administration is using Israel’s invasion and the death and destruction it has visited upon Lebanon to strong-arm Lebanon’s leaders and force U.S.-approved political change. This is a policy of political-military extortion, and everyone—in the region and beyond—can see it.
American officials like to say that their country is a partner and supporter of Lebanon. But to state the obvious: this is not how a friend of Lebanon should behave. The United States is now helping Israel wage war on Lebanon. People in Lebanon will not forget it.
HEADER IMAGE: People sleep in the open in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, where they are sheltering after being displaced by the ongoing conflict with Israel, on October 14. Around 1.2 million people are believed to have been displaced by the ongoing conflict as the Israeli military expands its military operations across Lebanon. Source: Carl Court/Getty Images
Tags: israel, gaza war, lebanon
The United States Should Stop Cosponsoring Israel’s War on Lebanon
The Biden administration says it supports “limited” Israeli military operations in Lebanon. But for Lebanese who are desperately fleeing Israeli attacks, watching their country be destroyed, or hearing the thump of airstrikes and whirring of drones overhead—well, Israel’s war doesn’t feel particularly limited. And there’s little reason to believe it will remain limited, as Israel presses its ground offensive in southern Lebanon and both U.S. and Israeli aims become more expansive.
The Biden administration has now endorsed a new Israeli war on Hezbollah in Lebanon—a total inversion of the administration’s earlier push for a diplomatic solution and a ceasefire. What’s more, Washington is trying to opportunistically leverage Israel’s military campaign to reshape Lebanon’s politics. It’s a policy that is destabilizing and dangerous.
The United States ought to be pressing for a life-saving ceasefire in Lebanon, and withholding material support to Israel’s expanding war. Instead, it is cosponsoring an Israeli attack it will not be able to moderate or control.
The truth is that Israel is not carrying out limited operations to “degrade” Hezbollah. It is waging a war on Lebanon—one in which the United States is a full, open partner. People in Lebanon, and around the world, can see the Biden administration supporting Israeli military operations that are killing Lebanese, and opposing a ceasefire. These people will, justifiably, hold the United States responsible for this war’s bloodshed and destruction—particularly as the war expands.
Israel Suddenly Escalates
The Israeli war in Lebanon dramatically escalated in September, after almost a year of back-and-forth attacks between Israel and Hezbollah. The Lebanese political party and paramilitary group initially fired on Israeli positions on October 8, 2023, a day after Hamas launched its attack from the Gaza Strip. Israel retaliated, and an extended, deadly tit-for-tat began along its de facto border with Lebanon, known as the Blue Line.
As Israel and Hezbollah traded attacks, Israeli leaders pressed for a solution on the Blue Line that would allow the safe return of tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the country’s north. The United States led efforts to broker a de-escalatory agreement based on UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701, which ended Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon. Hezbollah seemed amenable to the agreement’s presumptive terms but refused to halt its attacks and finalize a deal until a ceasefire was first agreed in Gaza.
Then, almost a year after the October 7 attacks, and as it became clear there would be no Gaza ceasefire, Israel made its move in Lebanon. On September 17, Israel first detonated booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members. Israeli planes and drones then bombarded southern Lebanon, the country’s eastern Beqaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. And Israel targeted top Hezbollah leadership with airstrikes, culminating on September 27 in the assassination, with a massive airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, of Hassan Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders. On October 1, Israel announced it had begun “limited, localized, and targeted ground raids” in southern Lebanon—in other words, it had invaded.
Israel is currently attempting to advance in southern Lebanon, though it has faced resistance from Hezbollah. Hezbollah has also continued to attack northern Israel using drones and volleys of rockets and missiles. Israel’s ongoing air campaign has focused on southern Lebanon, the Beqaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs. Yet its planes have also bombed other areas, including locations in central Beirut, the mountainous Aley district, and the northern city of Tripoli.
Israeli attacks have killed more than 2,400 people in Lebanon since October 2023, mostly in the weeks since Israel’s escalation in September; 569 people were killed on September 23 alone. Israel has issued evacuation orders for a quarter of Lebanese territory. More than 700,000 people are displaced inside Lebanon, out of a prewar population of roughly 6 million people. Designated shelters are mostly full; displaced families have camped in open spaces across the country’s center and north, including in improvised tents on Beirut’s waterfront corniche. More than 400,000 people have fled to Syria.
“Limited” War
Israel describes these attacks as “limited and targeted raids” against Hezbollah command nodes and infrastructure in areas along the Blue Line, from which Hezbollah can threaten communities in northern Israel. Israeli officials say that Hezbollah had effectively transformed Lebanese border villages into military bases and was preparing for an October 7-style cross-border attack. Israel has advertised operations in southern Lebanon demolishing Hezbollah military infrastructure and confiscating the group’s arms, and touted a bombing campaign elsewhere as targeting Hezbollah leaders, bases, and arms stockpiles.
U.S. officials also insist that the Israeli campaign is limited. Yet “limited” can mean different things, depending on who is speaking for Washington. Some spokespeople have focused on the limited geographic scope of Israel’s ground incursions in southern Lebanon. Other U.S. officials have defined “limited” in terms of Israel’s military objectives, which center, these officials say, on dismantling Hezbollah’s “attack infrastructure” along the Blue Line in order to permit civilians’ safe return to northern Israel.
The Biden administration also seems to have additional ideas about what the bounds of Israel’s operation should be. American officials have said they understand Israeli operations as “limited incursions not with the goal of holding territory,” and that Washington does not support a lasting Israeli presence in southern Lebanon. They have also said that Washington wants the Beirut airport to remain open and that they oppose Israeli airstrikes on “densely populated areas” of Beirut. (Presumably this means municipal Beirut, and not Beirut’s built-up southern suburbs, which Israel has bombed extensively.)
But the war in Gaza has shown that the Biden administration can be extremely flexible when defining acceptable limits for Israeli military action. Recall the administration’s opposition to Israel launching a “major ground operation” in Rafah. When Israel went ahead and invaded Rafah, administration officials insisted this was not a “major ground operation,” and that Israeli counterparts had assured them Rafah operations would be “limited” and for “a short duration.” Those assurances were false.
There is no reason to believe the Biden administration will not again engage in these kinds of rhetorical gymnastics to rationalize—and support—Israel’s “limited” actions in Lebanon. And of course, Israel will be doing all this with arms made and supplied by the United States.
Shifting American Goalposts
Even as the Biden administration insists Israel’s military operations are limited, the administration has substantially broadened U.S. aims in Lebanon.
The Biden administration has advocated a “diplomatic solution” to restore calm along the Blue Line since October 2023. Yet the administration’s idea of what that solution ought to entail has evidently changed since it reversed its position on an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah—switching, almost overnight, from opposing military escalation to supporting it.
Prior to September 17, the Biden administration was emphatic that it did “not want to see a further escalation of the conflict” in Lebanon. Administration representatives insisted that a diplomatic solution was the best way to address Israel’s security concerns. Even after Israel began to increase military-security pressure on Hezbollah in September, the administration was still working to mobilize diplomatic support for a joint U.S.–French ceasefire initiative.
Then Israel escalated even further—including by assassinating Nasrallah, whose killing the Biden administration hailed as “a measure of justice”—and the administration’s position flipped. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller put it bluntly on October 8: “The situation on the ground has changed. . . . It is a different world you’re looking at today than it was several weeks ago.”
Now, the Biden administration no longer wants an immediate ceasefire—for the time being, it unequivocally supports Israeli efforts to weaken Hezbollah.
Biden administration officials say the United States is still seeking an ultimate diplomatic solution premised on UNSCR 1701, in which Hezbollah withdraws north of Lebanon’s Litani River and the Lebanese army and UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers exercise security control south of the river. But now, the administration is apparently pushing for a version of that solution that is maximally disadvantageous to Hezbollah. Miller has said that Hezbollah “has been significantly degraded and now finds itself on the back foot”—making it possible to push a harder bargain on the group than when it was at the “height of its power” weeks earlier.
Truly transferring security control in southern Lebanon to the Lebanese army and UNIFIL would amount to creating a large neutral zone inside Lebanese territory. The United States and other Western donor countries have long supported the Lebanese Armed Forces. Since 2006, the United States alone has provided the Lebanese army with more than $2.5 billion in security assistance. Yet the Lebanese army is essentially an internal security force. It cannot defend Lebanon against Israel, and its foreign sponsors do not equip it to that end. As Israel launched its first ground incursions in southern Lebanon on October 1, the Lebanese army withdrew from its observation posts along the Blue Line and repositioned roughly three miles back. Throughout the war, it has mostly been on the sidelines.
The Biden administration is also going beyond arrangements along the Blue Line. Critically, it is pressing for Lebanon’s parliament to urgently convene and elect a new president. (Lebanon’s political factions have been deadlocked over the election of a new president since October 2022, when Michel Aoun left office. U.S. officials claim, dubiously, that Hezbollah has been the main obstacle to electing a president.) This push for a new president, U.S. officials have made clear, is part of an effort to diminish Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon generally—in Miller’s words, “to break the stranglehold that Hezbollah has had on the country.”
Yet pushing to politically marginalize Hezbollah risks igniting intra-Lebanese conflict. Hezbollah’s near-monopoly on political violence has made it Lebanon’s most powerful veto player, but it is only one veto player among many in Lebanon’s dysfunctional political system. Trampling Hezbollah’s prerogatives will not fix Lebanon’s broken politics, and if other Lebanese parties attempt it, Hezbollah may react violently. Trying to remake Lebanon’s political system by force is effectively an attempt at regime change—with all the justifiably negative implications—even if U.S. officials reject that characterization.
In the meantime, the Biden administration seems happy to let Israel continue its war with Hezbollah, so long as Israel concentrates its bombing in specific, disfavored areas and leaves Beirut airport open. Already, this war has killed twice as many people in Lebanon as the 2006 war, which ran for thirty-four days before the U.S.-supported UNSCR 1701 brought it to an end.
Israel Wants a Deep Buffer
Of course, it is not at all clear that Israeli leaders actually agree with the Biden administration’s stated aims in Lebanon.
Notably, Israel’s efforts to dislodge UNIFIL peacekeepers—whose mandate partly stems from UNSCR 1701—from their positions along the Blue Line appear inconsistent with the United States’ preferred solution based on UNSCR 1701. The Israeli military has also killed several Lebanese army soldiers.
If Israel is actually willing to countenance the sort of diplomatic solution that the United States has advocated, it may press for terms that substantially curtail Lebanese sovereignty. Israeli press has reported that Israeli leaders will likely push for an enhanced version of UNSCR 1701 that interdicts arms smuggling from Syria, mandates UNIFIL to confront Hezbollah, and authorizes continued Israeli intelligence gathering and new ground incursions in southern Lebanon. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he opposes any ceasefire that does not “change the security situation in Lebanon” and “stop Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping.”
Yet Israel may not actually be interested in a negotiated resolution. Instead, it may attempt to unilaterally impose its own solution in southern Lebanon. It is not obvious, after all, that Israel intends to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon and cede control to a non-Israeli third party. U.S. officials have publicly acknowledged this fact, and their discomfort with it. “We are very cognizant of the many times in the past where Israel has gone in on what looked like limited operations and has stayed for months or for years,” Miller said in early October. “And ultimately that’s not the outcome that we want to see.”
“We want to see the implementation of 1701,” said Miller the following day. “And what 1701 calls for is Israeli troops back on the Israeli side of the border, Hezbollah pulled back beyond the Litani River, and the Lebanese Armed Forces and UNIFIL exercising security control over southern Lebanon.”
Yet if Israel really wants a buffer zone cleared of Hezbollah forces along its northern border, that will likely require Israel to hold part of southern Lebanon. How much of southern Lebanon is unclear. Israel occupied large sections of southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000; for much of that time, it controlled a border strip mostly south of the Litani River. Today, however, Israel has issued evacuation orders for areas in Lebanon well above the Litani River and has directed residents to relocate north of the Awali River—above the city of Sidon, and more than forty miles from the Blue Line.
Even an Israeli advance to the Awali River would not put northern Israel beyond the range of Hezbollah’s missiles and drones. The Israeli military may just push as far as it can.
The main check on how far Israel can press into Lebanon is likely Hezbollah’s armed resistance. No one knows, though, how thoroughly Israeli attacks have damaged Hezbollah’s combat units and infrastructure, and how long Hezbollah units can withstand more concentrated Israeli bombing.
Seeking to Transform Lebanon
Beyond securing the Blue Line and northern Israel, Israeli leaders may also have plans for Lebanon’s internal politics, quite apart from the Biden administration’s push for a new Lebanese president.
In an October 8 video addressed to the Lebanese people, Netanyahu urged the Lebanese to “take back” their country and “free [it] from Hezbollah,” or else face “the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.” Netanyahu’s message and others by Israeli officials—including repeated claims that Israel’s “war is with Hezbollah, not with the people of Lebanon” and that “the southern suburb isn’t like the rest of Beirut”—may be aimed at inflaming intra-Lebanese tensions. Israel’s bombing campaign has already forced hundreds of thousands of Shia Lebanese to seek shelter in non-Shia-majority areas. Israel has since repeatedly bombed concentrations of displaced people in non-Shia areas, heightening fears among many Lebanese that hosting the displaced may invite Israeli attacks. If the war drags on and the country’s displacement crisis becomes protracted, social tensions between host communities and the displaced could well flare into violence.
What’s more, if Israel occupies Lebanese territory and prevents displaced residents from returning home, that could also change Lebanon’s political balance and weaken Hezbollah by massively dispossessing the party’s social base. Lebanon’s many thousands of displaced people have been dislocated from their homes and livelihoods. Israel has already carried out controlled demolitions in border communities, including, in at least one case, the destruction of an entire town. If Israel establishes a depopulated buffer zone in southern Lebanon, it could turn thousands and thousands of Lebanese—including members of Hezbollah’s civilian constituency, but also many others—into refugees in their own country.
American Culpability
The Biden administration may insist that Israeli operations in Lebanon are limited, but there is little reason to believe they will stay that way—and whatever comes next, the United States will be responsible. The Biden administration spent a year trying and failing to convince Israel to wage a war in Gaza that didn’t indiscriminately kill civilians and make Gaza totally uninhabitable. There is little reason to assume Israel’s campaign in Lebanon will be different. To add insult to injury, the administration is using Israel’s invasion and the death and destruction it has visited upon Lebanon to strong-arm Lebanon’s leaders and force U.S.-approved political change. This is a policy of political-military extortion, and everyone—in the region and beyond—can see it.
American officials like to say that their country is a partner and supporter of Lebanon. But to state the obvious: this is not how a friend of Lebanon should behave. The United States is now helping Israel wage war on Lebanon. People in Lebanon will not forget it.
HEADER IMAGE: People sleep in the open in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, where they are sheltering after being displaced by the ongoing conflict with Israel, on October 14. Around 1.2 million people are believed to have been displaced by the ongoing conflict as the Israeli military expands its military operations across Lebanon. Source: Carl Court/Getty Images
Tags: israel, gaza war, lebanon