Israel Expands the Genocide to Lebanon

Israel is now expanding their genocidal war to Lebanon.

After a series of escalations, Israel has now gone to full-scale war not only with Gaza but with Lebanon as well.

This escalation began when Israel launched an attack on Lebanon by detonating pagers that were secretly containing bombs. The Western press celebrated this attack as a “precision strike” on Hezbollah officials but in reality, it killed and injured many civilians who were in the vicinity of the public places where the bombs were detonated. Journalist Séamus Malekafzali reported in the Nation that over 10 civilians were killed in the explosions and over 3000 injured. According to his article, “the hospital system of Beirut has been completely overwhelmed with thousands of simultaneous life-changing, disfiguring maimings”.

This attack was followed by a similar attack using walkie-talkies instead of pagers, this time targeting a mass funeral held for a child and medical worker who were killed in the first wave of explosions, and explosive devices were also found in ambulances. As Seamus Malekafzali reported in the aforementioned article:

More explosives, this time hidden in walkie-talkies, were detonated, seemingly timed to coincide with a mass funeral for a child and a hospital worker who had been killed the day before, exploding in the hands of Hezbollah guards while mourners were packed together in the crowd.

… explosive-laden devices were found in ambulances in Beirut as well as in the homes of emergency responders in southern Lebanon.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said these attacks were “Indistinguishable from terrorism” and former CIA director Leon Panetta admitted that this was “a war of terror” and that these attacks were without a doubt “a form of terrorism”.

This was followed by a series of Israeli bombs dropped on Lebanon that killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah as well as 30 Hezbollah officials and over 1000 civilians. The bombings also displaced one million people from their homes, forcing them to flee southern Lebanon.

Israel has been preparing for and has already begun a ground invasion of Lebanon. Just like in Gaza, Netenyahu is pushing propaganda to justify killing endless innocent civilians in Lebanon. At the UN he claimed that Hezbollah “fires those rockets and missiles after they place them in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings, and in the private homes of the citizens” and that they have “ a missile in every kitchen” and “A rocket in every garage”.

Just like in Gaza this is genocidal language that will be used to justify bombing civilians and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon based on bogus claims that they were Hezbollah command centers, similar to how Israel lied about Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital being a Hamas command center to justify attacking it.

For context on Hezbollah, the only reason they even exist is because of previous Israeli invasions of Lebanon. As journalist Ali Abunimah explained, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to try to expel the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) and killed tens of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. This invasion led to the growth of several resistance organizations to the Israeli occupation, one of which was Hezbollah, which did not exist before the invasion. These resistance groups including Hezbollah eventually forced Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon in May of 2000.

Israel as always claims this is a war of “self-defense” and uses the fact that Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza after Israel began their genocidal war on October 8th. But this claim ignores the fact that since the war in Gaza began, Israel has done far more strikes in Lebanon than Hezbollah has done on Israel.

Pictured Above: Chart from Bloomberg showing that Isreali attacks on Lebanon since October 7th far outnumber Hezbollah attacks on Israel.

Furthermore, this entire escalation could have been prevented had Israel ended their genocidal war in Gaza. Hezbollah has said repeatedly that it will stop all rocket attacks if Israel withdrawals from Gaza and an Israeli official admitted to NBC news that the reason that they killed Nasrallah-sparking this war-was because he “refused to separate Lebanon from Gaza” in ceasefire negotiations and that “He declined messages to stop connecting himself to Gaza”.

In other words, Israel could have stopped this war and Hezbollah's attacks on them entirely had they just done a ceasefire in Gaza and ended the almost year-long genocidal war there. But instead of ending that war, they decided to start another genocidal war as Hezbollah would only agree to a ceasefire if they ended it.

The Biden administration also bears a lot to blame for this war as well. Had they stopped arming and financing Israel's genocide in Gaza and forced a ceasefire, this war could have been prevented. Furthermore despite claims to the press that Biden administration officials expressed “increasing frustration” over Neteyahu’s invasion of Lebanon, they will continue to arm and fund them while they do the war despite the fact that they could end it instantly by stopping the arms flow. The Israeli war in Lebanon is yet another war the Biden administration could have prevented but continued to support anyway adding yet another war to its already bloody legacy.