The seventh Israeli invasion of Lebanon is being waged in both the shadow of genocide in Gaza and within the world that Israel’s permission to commit genocide has created. This is a world where international law has become a punchline, where there are no innocents and where there is no form of degradation—starvation, siege, ethnic cleansing—that is off limits. It is world where Israel can boast of their “success in Gaza” as a naked threat to civilians, where people in Lebanon are asked to choose between the slow asphyxiation of a so-called ceasefire and the catastrophe of a war without limits. In short, it is a world of permanent war, with shifting battlefields but one center: Palestine.
The carte blanche given to Israel to rebrand war crimes into war doctrine did not begin yesterday. In 2006 Israel announced the “Dahieh doctrine” as a shorthand for its blatant and intentional strategy of collective punishment of civilians in Lebanon. Hospitals, schools, electrical plants, roads, the country’s only civilian airport, and other infrastructure was destroyed, and about one million people were displaced. In 2008 Israel began its stated policy of "mowing the lawn" in Gaza, a practice of periodic attacks intended to weaken Hamas and terrorize Palestinians into submission. The title of the policy announced its anchoring logic: the dehumanization of Palestinians to the point where they could be metaphorically described as overgrown grass, ripe for razing every once in a while. But who could blame Israel for practicing the truth of the matter: It has never been, and most likely never will be, held accountable for its history of atrocities in Lebanon and in Palestine, including the crimes that created and sustain it: the Nakba and the brutal, illegal occupation and settlement of Palestine.The logical outcome of this license to permanently occupy a dehumanized people, coupled with an ideology that treats even the birth rates of Palestinians as a “demographic threat,” reached its apotheosis in 2023. “The Gaza Doctrine” is now shorthand for total siege, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Every time Israel was not held accountable for its crimes, its confidence in committing them grew until they become acceptable “strategies,” as long as they are waged against people whose lives are not considered to be of equal worth in the staid capitals of Europe and the United States. This geopolitical racism is in full expression today; the Dahieh Doctrine, Moving the Lawn, and the Gaza Doctrine are all operating concurrently, at different scales, in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
In Lebanon, Israel’s war of impunity is being waged against three fronts: the battlefield, the country’s social fabric and its political society. Militarily, Israel is doing what it has done in Gaza and previously in Lebanon: assassinations, the destruction of entire landscapes and indiscriminate bombardment against a people that have no air defenses, no bomb shelters and no air force—in conjunction Israel has launched a ground invasion. It is also trying to break the Lebanese army by calling on it to collaborate in fighting Hizballah. This pressure comes after fifteen months of over 15,000 unanswered Israeli ceasefire violations that preceded the current escalation. On February 16, 2026, two days before Israel was supposed to withdraw from Lebanese territories according to the extended deadline of the ceasefire, Israel "announced" that it would instead occupy five, key, Lebanese, border locations—al-Aziyah, al-Awaida, el-Hamames, Jabal Bilat, and Labbouneh—as strategic, security, vantage points. Diplomacy, led by Prime Minister Nawwaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun and through repeated appeals to France and the United States to make Israel abide by the ceasefire agreement it signed in November 2024, failed to make any difference. This failure was coupled with daily, flagrant ceasefire violations not only in Lebanon but also in Gaza. Twenty-six people were killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon in the month of February 2026 alone. But although Hizballah’s decision to launch rockets at Israel on March 2 is deeply unpopular and polarizing, the Lebanese army will not confront Hizballah, in part out of concern for its internal cohesion and because it recognizes the threat of cantonization. In fact, many of the post-civil war reforms of the LAF were to strengthen its unity and ward off the possibility that Israel is demanding of it: suicide.
Israel is intentionally creating a humanitarian disaster that they know the country, including its government and civil society network, cannot absorb. As of March 2, at least 1024 people in Lebanon have been killed by the Israeli army, including 118 children and 40 health workers. More than 1,000,000 people have been displaced. Israel has stated that it wants to create a demilitarized and depopulated zone south of the Litani River (about 19 miles into Lebanon) similar to the “yellow line” they drew in Gaza. As Israel is expanding its territory and control into Gaza, the West Bank and Syria, there is good reason to believe that it desires to occupy and perhaps annex this resource rich territory, a goal often repeated by early Zionist and Israeli leaders and openly spoken of by Israeli politicians today.
Israel is targeting Lebanon’s social fabric, inflicting mass punishment to weaken public support for Hizballah—a strategy it also pursued unsuccessfully during the 2006 war. Through the displacement of primarily Shia Lebanese, Israel is also attempting to foment sectarian violence by continuing to target displaced people in their spaces of refuge. These attacks both kill and are intended to make people from different sects and areas too afraid to help their displaced compatriots. This is possible because sectarian redlining has created a more segregated landscape (with notable exceptions) than what existed before the Lebanese Civil War. The US Ambassador to Lebanon has adopted Israel’s sectarian map and reportedly requested that Israel not attack Christian villages in South Lebanon. On March 11, Israel inflicted a double tap strike and massacre on the corniche of Ramlet al Bayda, Beirut’s only public beach, where displaced people were living in cars and tents. The spectacle of the impunity of their violence is the point—every limb strewn on the corniche announces their license to commit further atrocities. The plan in Lebanon, as is Iran, is to mine the very real rifts in political society until they implode and, if that does not work, to widen the boundary of collective punishment. This is not analysis. These are the threats issued by Israel to the Lebanese government, and to people in Lebanon, every day.
Before this return to open war, the Lebanese political equation had turned into a precarious balancing act between the government, the army, the Central Bank, and Hizballah and its allies. Each element is reliant on different countries (now at war), institutions and actors for support, and all were suffering from overlapping crises of legitimacy. After the war, no matter its outcome, this political equation will change—in fact the very system of political sectarianism may be recalibrated, as it was after the civil war. But the war will not end soon, even if this episode of it does.The colonization of historic Palestine has always required the pacification, or subjugation, of their kin across different borders. Israel, the only state in the Middle East armed with nuclear weapons, will never allow the formation of a Palestinian state, nor will it willingly change its commitment to ethno-sectarian dominance. This refusal is a declaration of permanent war against Palestinians and their supporters. In fact, if Israel is not stopped the world may soon witness the birth of a new inventory of crimes: The West Bank Doctrine.
In pursuit of this permanent war, and while they still have the unconditional support of the US government and its politicians, Israel has decided to be a country buffered by depopulated wastelands, with no people, party or government capable of mounting any modicum of resistance to either the occupation of their own land, or that of Palestine. This goal requires not only the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but also, at this point, of South Lebanon. Israel’s vision for the Middle East—ethno-sectarian cantons—is an existential threat to Lebanon and its system of governance. However, even if Israel occupies South Lebanon, and Hizballah is somehow neutralized, resistance will grow like weeds under every boot print in the ground. Eventually, they will be ensnared.
[A shorter version of this essay was published on March 19, as part of the MERIP roundtable War Across Boundaries–Perspectives on Iran and a Region Under Siege.]