After nearly a year of unrelenting attacks in Gaza, Israel further escalated and expanded its war by invading Lebanon late Monday. Iran responded the following evening by launching ballistic missiles into Tel Aviv, stoking fears that the region is on the precipice of an even broader war.
The Israeli military has tried repeatedly to minimize the perceived scope of its attacks, describing its ongoing invasion of Lebanon as “limited, localized, and targeted ground raids” against Hezbollah. Such semantics are also in play in the U.S., where President Joe Biden publicly called for a ceasefire, while reporting suggests the White House privately condoned Israel’s expansion of its war into Lebanon.
“Increasingly we’ve seen Israel use words like ‘targeted’ and ‘limited,’ words that try or seek to convey that this is somehow acceptable,” said Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the D.C.-based think tank Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. “And yet we know from the last year — in Israel’s war in Gaza and this latest front in Lebanon — that these are euphemisms for, at the end of the day, what may very well amount to be war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
“Certainly a country’s invasion of another in the way that Israel has led this ground invasion, could arguably be the crime of aggression, which under international law is prohibited,” El-Sadany added.
The invasion would mark the first time Israeli troops have crossed into Lebanon since Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006. For its part, Hezbollah denied reports that Israeli forces have so far crossed into Lebanese territory.
The Israel Defense Forces has said its invasion is focused on “Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon” that “pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel.” Among its stated aims is to allow displaced Israeli citizens to return to their homes in northern Israel. The military added it would support its ground troops by continuing its “precise strikes on military targets” in Lebanon.
However, Israel’s definition of “military targets” has proven to be broadly applied.
For the past two weeks, Israel’s bombing campaign across Lebanon, including strikes into the densely populated capital Beirut, has killed more than 1,000 people, including at least 243 children and women, the country’s health minister said. One million people in Lebanon — nearly a fifth of the country — have been displaced from their homes. Over the weekend, Israel bombed Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, and Syria within a 24-hour span, damaging civilian infrastructure and killing dozens. In Lebanon on Sunday alone, Israeli strikes killed at least 105 people, a single-day death toll from Israeli strikes previously seen only in Gaza.
For months, American experts in Middle East foreign policy have warned the U.S. government of the dangers of continuing its support of Israel on its path toward a regional war. The U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to carry out its attacks, including an $8.7 billion military aid package appropriated from congressional funds.
Leading up to the attack on Lebanon, U.S. leaders, including Biden, publicly criticized Israel and said it should not invade, calling for deescalation and a ceasefire. But a Politico report revealed that the U.S. was quietly supporting Israel in ramping up military operations in Lebanon.
“The people who are supposed to be peacekeepers are the people who are green-lighting war.”
“The people who are supposed to be peacekeepers are the people who are green-lighting war,” El-Sadany said, referring to U.S. officials and the Politico report. “And certainly this is a calculus approach to this conflict that does not center civilian life and the sanctity of civilian life in the way that it should.”
In the airstrikes that killed longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday, the Israeli military likely used American-made 2,000-lb “bunker buster” bombs. The Israeli strike on a series of Beirut apartments also killed more than 30 people, including civilians, according to the Lebanese government.
Shortly after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the U.S. government affirms the recent ground offensive and that it “agreed on the necessity of dismantling attack infrastructure along the border.”
How far this war will spread remains uncertain. Much of Iran’s missile response, like its April retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a top Iranian commander, was intercepted before striking its targets.
Austin warned Iran and Iran-backed Hezbollah that the U.S. is ready to “defend” U.S. personnel and its allies, such as Israel, and that there would be “serious consequences for Iran in the event Iran chooses to launch a direct military attack against Israel.”
The U.S. said its Navy had intercepted some of the missiles launched from Iran to Tel Aviv. Israel has pledged a “significant response” to the Iranian attack.
While the IDF has said it doesn’t seek any long-term occupation of Lebanon, El-Sadany pointed to the war in Gaza where Israel continually moved its goal posts.
“It does seem that the U.S. has accepted Israel’s objectives as their own, and the problem here is that Israel’s objectives are not clear,” she said. “What does it mean to end Hamas? What does it mean to end Hezbollah? Are you talking about taking out a few top commanders? Are you talking about taking out every single person affiliated with Hezbollah, the political party?”
In addition to its armed wing, Hezbollah also operates as an official political party in Lebanon and has been a part of the national government for over three decades.
“The goal posts have never been defined and the problem with the U.S. automatically absorbing those objectives without even understanding the definition of what that means to Israel is what is making us all less safe and is pulling us into this war that we’ve now been in for a year, and allowing Israel to open up new fronts in an extremely dangerous way,” El-Sadany said.