Israel is openly considering a new settlement land grab in Lebanon, showing de-escalation is not even an option
By Murad Sadygzade, President of the Middle East Studies Center, Visiting Lecturer, HSE University (Moscow).
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/murad-sadygzade/Telegram
Al-Zahraa mosque in Sidon, Lebanon, destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on April 8 © Chris McGrath / Getty Images
Israel’s
war in Lebanon has entered a stage in which claims of supposedly
precise strikes on military infrastructure can no longer be taken
seriously.
The scale of the operations, the depth of the advance
in the south, the destruction of bridges and residential neighborhoods,
the massive strikes on Beirut, and the steady expansion of the so-called
buffer zone all show that this is not merely a tactical effort to
contain Hezbollah. It is an attempt to reshape the military and
political reality of southern Lebanon for years to come. Israel
describes this as the creation of a security belt up to the Litani
River. In the language of the region, however, it reads differently. It
is a course toward long term control of territory, the depopulation of
the border strip, and the creation of facts on the ground that will be
extremely difficult to reverse.
Formally, the new phase of the war
began on March 2, when Hezbollah opened fire on Israel after American
and Israeli strikes on Iran and the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Israel responded with a broad air campaign against Lebanon and then
expanded its ground operations in the south. At that point, the
government of Nawaf Salam tried to distance itself from Hezbollah’s
decision and took the unprecedented step of banning the movement’s
military activity outside state institutions, demanding that its weapons
be handed over to the state. This was an important sign of a shifting
balance within Lebanon itself. Hezbollah can no longer act as though its
armed autonomy is automatically accepted by the entire state. Yet the
move also revealed the other side of the crisis. Beirut is exerting
political pressure on Hezbollah, but it has neither the resources nor
the internal consensus to disarm it quickly without risking a deeper
internal fracture.
A land grab by any other name
From a
military point of view, Israel rapidly moved far beyond the boundaries
of retaliatory strikes. By late March, Defense Minister Israel Katz had
openly declared the intention to hold southern Lebanon up to the Litani
as a security zone, which means nearly a tenth of Lebanese territory.
This was followed by strikes on bridges, the destruction of homes in
border villages, and evacuation orders for residents south of the river.
Soon afterward, Israel was already constructing new fortifications and
destroying increasingly empty villages, while Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu was openly speaking of expanding the security strip. The
Israeli military machine was no longer concealing the long-term nature
of the operation. This was no raid. It was a project of territorial
transformation under the military pretext of combating Hezbollah.
This
is where the central political question emerges. For the Israeli right,
southern Lebanon is increasingly becoming an ideologically charged
space. The bluntest statement came from Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich, who said in late March that Israel’s new border should run
along the Litani – the clearest call yet by a senior Israeli official
for the seizure of Lebanese territory. True, at the current moment there
is no officially approved government program for the construction of
Jewish settlements in southern Lebanon in a formal cabinet document. Yet
when a senior minister speaks of changing the border, while the army
simultaneously burns out the border zone, destroys homes, and prepares
for prolonged control of the territory, the analytical conclusion is
already clear. This is occupation, from which the idea of future
settlement expansion follows almost naturally. For the far right in
Israel, that appears to be a desired outcome. The stated pretext is the
struggle against Hezbollah. The real content is the consolidation of a
new coercive order on the ground.
This is precisely why fears
inside Lebanon are so acute. For Lebanese society, talk of a buffer zone
is an echo of the long history of invasions and occupation in the
south, which lasted until the year 2000. When Israel destroys bridges
across the Litani and drives the population from their homes, it is in
effect creating the conditions for a new prolonged presence. Even if
Israeli rhetoric presents this merely as a security zone, the result for
residents looks very much like a classical model of military control.
That is why French President Emmanuel Macron has stressed the need to
preserve Lebanon’s territorial integrity, while the United Nations has
described such rhetoric as deeply alarming.
Massacres and targeted strikes
The bloodiest moment in this
campaign came with the strikes of April 8. On that day, Israel carried
out the heaviest air assault on Lebanon since the start of the March
war. Israeli forces said they had struck more than one hundred Hezbollah
targets in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and the south of the country, with
a large share of the blows falling on densely populated areas.
According to the Lebanese Civil Defense, 254 people were killed and more
than 1,100 were wounded. Lebanon’s Health Ministry gave a lower, though
still horrific, figure at the time and stressed that the count was not
yet complete. Reports described scenes in which people were carrying the
wounded away on motorcycles because ambulances were overwhelmed after
central Beirut was hit without prior warning. The United Nations High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called it a massacre that
undermined any chance of a sustainable ceasefire.
The war did not
stop there. On April 10, an Israeli strike in Nabatieh hit a government
building and killed 13 members of Lebanon’s state security services.
This was an especially telling episode. Once not only Hezbollah
strongholds but also state institutions and Lebanese security structures
come under attack, the line between a war against an armed movement and
a war against the Lebanese state itself begins to dissolve. At that
point, Lebanese authorities were estimating that at least 1,953 people
had been killed since March 2. Another 6,303 had been wounded. More than
one million people had been displaced from their homes. Israeli
evacuation orders covered roughly 15 percent of Lebanese territory.
Israel
continues to justify these actions as necessary to push Hezbollah away
from its border, deprive it of the capacity to fire on northern Israel,
and create a depth barrier. Military officials and experts alike are
speaking about Israel’s new ‘forever war’ doctrine – in which conflict
is a semi-permanent condition and buffer zones are created not only in
Lebanon but also in Gaza and Syria. This is a crucial – a strategy no
longer built around the idea of definitively destroying Israel’s
adversaries, but around their permanent weakening, displacement, and
containment through the holding of territory.
Why Netanyahu is averse to peace
That
is why, for Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, the war has become
not only an instrument of foreign policy but also a condition of
domestic political survival. Netanyahu wants to avoid snap elections,
which he would likely lose, and the war helps shift public attention
away from failures and internal crises toward the language of national
mobilization. Polling does not show any major political boost for him,
yet the war still gave him something a ceasefire would not. It allowed
him to preserve a security-centered agenda, delay opposition pressure,
and postpone the moment of direct political reckoning. If the shooting
stops, the uncomfortable questions will remain: Why was such vast
destruction deemed necessary? Why were the stated goals not achieved?
And what is to be done about the political erosion of Netanyahu himself?
Hezbollah under mounting pressure
At
the same time, Hezbollah is in a difficult position of its own. On the
one hand, it retains the capacity to strike back. Since early March the
group had launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel. In early
April, a missile triggered air raid sirens in areas including Tel Aviv,
while Hezbollah claimed strikes on Israeli military infrastructure in
Haifa. After Israel’s massive assault on April 8, Hezbollah resumed
rocket fire, saying it was responding to a violation of the ceasefire.
At least four Israeli soldiers were killed in fighting in southern
Lebanon by late March. This means that the Israeli offensive is meeting
real resistance. There are confirmed losses among Israeli servicemen. As
for losses in equipment, reports of damaged or destroyed Israeli armor
and infrastructure often come from Hezbollah or other parties to the
conflict and are not always independently verified in full detail.
Still, the broader picture is clear. Even with Israel’s overwhelming
superiority in the air and in firepower, this war is not a bloodless
march. Hezbollah remains capable of inflicting damage and of preventing
the south from being fully and safely absorbed by Israel.
On the
other hand, pressure on Hezbollah today comes not only from Israel but
also from within Lebanon. The government has banned its military
activity. President Joseph Aoun expressed readiness for direct talks
with Israel even at the start of the war, and by early April it had
become known that a meeting between the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors
was being prepared in Washington under American mediation. Lebanon’s
formal position is that a ceasefire must come first, with broader talks
to follow. Yet the very fact that Beirut is entering such a framework
reflects an unprecedented level of domestic rejection of Hezbollah’s
armed autonomy and a profound exhaustion with war. At the same time,
Hezbollah opposes direct negotiations with Israel and prefers a format
in which the Lebanese question is treated within the broader framework
of American-Iranian dialogue. Lebanese officials close to Hezbollah
appear to support the Pakistani track of US-Iran negotiations,
considering it more appropriate than a separate Washington process. This
is what makes Hezbollah’s current predicament so serious. It has to
resist the Israeli offensive, withstand pressure from the Lebanese
state, and prevent its future from being decided without it at external
talks.
The bigger picture
At this point, the Lebanese front connects
directly with the Iranian one. In its negotiations with the US, Iran
has insisted that any ceasefire must extend to Lebanon, not only to the
direct US-Iran theater of war. The Iranian Foreign Ministry stated that
it was in contact with Lebanon to secure compliance with ceasefire
commitments on all fronts. One of Iran’s central demands at the
Islamabad talks was a ceasefire in Lebanon, alongside sanctions relief
and the question of compensation for the strikes. In other words, Tehran
does not view the Lebanese front as peripheral. For Iran, it is part of
a single regional bargain involving both allied states and affiliated
movements. In the Iranian view, the situation cannot truly be stabilized
while Israel remains free to continue its war against Hezbollah and
then apply the same model of pressure against other forces aligned with
Tehran.
That is why Israel’s position that the ceasefire with Iran
does not apply to Lebanon appears not as a technical reservation but as
an attempt to preserve an exemption from any broader regional
de-escalation. Netanyahu explicitly stated that Lebanon was not covered
by the ceasefire with Iran, and on that same day Israel launched the
most devastating strikes on Beirut of the entire March war. In effect,
Israel is trying to secure the right to participate in negotiations over
a new regional architecture while continuing at the same time to
reshape neighboring spaces by force. This formula is convenient for
Netanyahu’s government, but it almost guarantees a prolonged conflict.
For Lebanon, it means negotiations under bombardment. For Hezbollah, it
means the threat of gradual expulsion from the south. For Iran, it means
that its allies are being methodically weakened at the very moment when
it is expected to sit down at the negotiating table.
Against this
background, it is especially important not to oversimplify. Yes,
Hezbollah is weaker than it was in previous years. Reuters, citing
sources familiar with the movement, reported that at least 400 of its
fighters had been killed since the war began. Yes, its disarmament is
now being discussed inside Lebanon as an element of state policy. Yes,
the US is pressuring both Beirut and Israel to create a negotiating
framework. But none of this means that Hezbollah has been broken or that
the Israeli army has already achieved its goals. On the contrary, the
very need to build a buffer zone, raze villages, and destroy bridges
shows that Israel cannot obtain lasting security through an ordinary
military raid. It wants to alter the geography of resistance itself.
Projects of that kind almost always mean a long war, new waves of
refugees, further radicalization, and an extremely high price for
civilians.
The balance at the current moment looks like this.
Israel is waging against Lebanon not simply a campaign of retaliation
for Hezbollah fire, but an offensive that bears the clear features of a
project for long-term control over southern Lebanon. Israeli right-wing
politicians are speaking ever more openly about the territory up to the
Litani as a desirable new frontier. For part of that camp, the idea of
occupying the south and eventually extending Jewish settlement there no
longer looks like a fringe fantasy but like a direction of travel that
the war is making more tangible. Hezbollah is indeed under severe
strain, because it is being squeezed by the Israeli army, the Lebanese
state, and the logic of international negotiations all at once. Yet it
continues to strike back and inflict losses on Israel, which means that a
quick and clean victory for the IDF still does not appear to be within
reach. Iran, for its part, is trying to make an end to Israeli
aggression against Lebanon and against other states and movements allied
with Tehran part of the broader framework of its negotiations with
Washington. And for Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, war remains
politically necessary, because without it the question of the price of
their rule, the failures of their strategy, and their accountability to
the electorate would return with full force. That is the most dangerous
aspect of the current crisis. The war has long ceased to be only an
instrument of security. For a significant part of Israel’s ruling
establishment, it has also become a way of prolonging its own political
time.