The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of all Lebanese living south of the Litani River, a waterway about 25 kilometres north of the Israeli border, displacing some 400,000 people.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Israel looks to be establishing a buffer zone in southern Lebanon akin to the one created by the “Yellow Line” that has divided the devastated Gaza Strip in two, a Lebanese cabinet minister says.
The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of all Lebanese living south of the Litani River, a waterway about 25 kilometres north of the Israeli border, displacing some 400,000 people.
“They don’t want this population to come back to their homes, nor allow them to rebuild what has been destroyed,” Culture Minister Ghassan Salamé said Monday in an interview with The Globe and Mail at his Beirut residence. “Israel has also been able to impose buffer zones in Gaza, with the Yellow Line, and now more and more in the West Bank and certainly in Syria and, of late, in Lebanon. One can see the strategy here: domination of the skies and buffer zones to try to avoid a new Oct. 7.”
Lebanon’s Minister of Culture, Ghassan Salamé, at his home in Achrafieh in east Beirut.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
The Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas – which killed more than 1,200 people – have plunged the region into near-continuous violence since then, as Israel has sought to destroy the entire Iranian-backed “axis of resistance” that includes both Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Mr. Salamé said the new war in Lebanon is inextricably linked to the region-wide war pitting the United States and Israel against Iran.
That leaves Lebanon, whose government and modest army are not formally involved in the conflict, in an even more vulnerable position than during the 2006 and 2024 Israel-Hezbollah wars, when the U.S. put restraints on Israeli military action and pushed for an eventual diplomatic resolution.
With the U.S. and its Sunni Arab allies focused on the conflict with Iran, Israel has faced little international pushback as it has carried out a week of air strikes on Lebanon – killing at least 486 people and injuring more than 1,300 others – while sending soldiers into the country and massing troops and tanks for a widening ground operation in the south. Three Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah fire, while the Israeli military said Sunday that it had killed “approximately 200” Hezbollah fighters.
Mr. Salamé, a respected voice on regional affairs and a former head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya, said Israel appeared to be trying to create a depopulated buffer zone in southern Lebanon modelled on the Yellow Line it has imposed on Gaza with U.S. support.
In Gaza, Israeli troops have retained 53 per cent of the narrow coastal territory under the first phase of a wobbly ceasefire that was declared in October, with the strip’s 2.2 million residents confined to the remaining land. While Israel is committed to withdrawing from more of Gaza under subsequent phases of the pact, many Palestinians believe it intends to make the Yellow Line the new de facto border.
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Mr. Salamé said Israeli troops had already remained in five strategic locations on the Lebanese side of the border after the 2024 war – in defiance of a ceasefire that each side accused the other of violating before its collapse last week – and Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said last week that the goal of the new ground operation in Lebanon was “creating a buffer, as we promised, between our residents and any threat.”
More than 70,000 Palestinians were killed in two years of war in Gaza. Israel has also expanded its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and has taken advantage of the chaotic end of Syria’s civil war to expand its presence on the eastern side of the Golan Heights.
When the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran on Feb. 28, Iran struck back by firing missiles and drones at Israel, as well as at U.S. military bases and allies around the region.
Hezbollah joined the war on March 2, pulling Lebanon into the conflict. Later the same day, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam declared that Hezbollah’s actions had been “illegal” and called on Lebanon’s army to disarm the militia. However, Mr. Salamé acknowledged that the country’s underfunded armed forces weren’t strong enough to enforce the order.
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What happens next in Lebanon depends on the wider conflict. Mr. Salamé dismissed U.S. President Donald Trump’s call for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” as unrealistic in a war that so far has involved only air strikes against Iran, with Tehran trying to raise the costs of the conflict with its counterattacks.
“Asymmetrical wars do not go into surrender. In asymmetrical wars, if you survive, you win,” Mr. Salamé said.
The aftermath of an Israeli strike on the Hezbollah affiliated al-Qard al-Hassan bank in the Dahiyeh in Beirut, Lebanon on Monday.Oliver Marsden/The Globe and Mail
Meanwhile, Israel has continued to pound targets across southern Lebanon, as well as in the southern suburbs of Beirut, an area collectively known as the Dahiya that is considered a Hezbollah stronghold.
The Dahiya was under heavy attack again on Monday. Less than four kilometres away from Mr. Salamé’s home in central Beirut, smoke billowed from the ruins of a building on Old Saida Road that had housed a branch of the Al-Qard Al-Hasan Association, a financial institution connected to Hezbollah.
Some 200 metres away, down an alley, there was another pile of rubble that had been a multistorey apartment building until last week. Nearby, a black Hyundai Tucson had been flattened by a piece of flying concrete.
“Israel claims that a Hezbollah member lived there,” said Hussein Mraie, a 28-year-old real estate agent who fled the Dahiya with his family as soon as the hostilities started but returned Monday to see some of the damage. Like many Dahiya residents, Mr. Mraie was now crowded into an apartment of relatives in another part of the city, along with nine other family members.
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The centre of Beirut has been jammed with internally displaced persons since Thursday, when the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the entire Dahiya, matching its call for all of southern Lebanon to leave. Mr. Salamé told The Globe that there were now 700,000 IDPs across the country, a number that included only those who had formally registered with the government.
“I just feel like it’s enough, let it end. We can’t take this any more,” said Abir Zreik, a 47-year-old mother of four whose children were lying on a thin blanket on the sidewalk outside the city’s Horsh Beirut park. Twenty-one members of Ms. Zreik’s extended family were living in three tents pitched side-by-side-by-side.
Most public spaces in Beirut, which was already home to almost half of Lebanon’s 5.4 million people, are now crammed with families living in tents and cars or sleeping on pieces of cardboard despite overnight lows hovering near 10 degrees.
“We are facing a humanitarian crisis with insufficient means,” Mr. Salamé said. He said the government was trying to find a diplomatic route to halt the war but there was nothing in the way of negotiations taking place so far.
In the past, it was frequently the U.S. that helped bring an end to Lebanon’s wars. That seems unlikely this time.
“The U.S. is a belligerent, and therefore has some difficulty being a mediator,” Mr. Salamé said. “In our case, it’s a belligerent in alliance with Israel.”