Dana El-Kurd

In Lebanon, or rather the way Lebanon enters this story is a couple of days after the assassination of Khamenei, the Ayatollah of Iran, Hezbollah launched rockets towards Israel.

And this was used by the Israelis as effectively them saying that we will unleash hell on Lebanon.

And that's often how it's been reported.

What is often missed, even in that context, I mean, is that there was a so-called ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and Hezbollah, obviously, for 13 months before that.

But that so-called ceasefire, the reason I'm saying so-called ceasefire, had already been violated by the Israelis.

And this is figures that come from the UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon over 15,000 times.

Whereas they themselves, in fact, even the BBC today, I saw an article today, acknowledged that Hezbollah had not violated the ceasefire.

Which, you know, I guess tells you also where the mood is at in terms of the coverage.

Since then, like in the past three weeks, the hell, and this term was used by Israeli officials themselves, that has been unleashed on Lebanon has been unprecedented.

And even by Israeli wars on Lebanon standards, which is saying a lot, as of time of recording, at least 20% of the entirety of Lebanon has already been displaced.

And for the most part, these are people that had already experienced displacement at least once in 2024 when this war started, if not older patterns of displacements going back to the civil war and the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in the 80s and 90s and so on.

And pretty unclear where this is headed.

Because just hours before we even started recording, they escalated their bombings of bridges connecting South Lebanon to the rest of Lebanon, bridges over the Litani River, which is one of the rivers in the south, as part of the attempt to cut off the entire region of South Lebanon from the rest of the country.

And yeah, we can get into more of the details and the impact that this is having on Lebanon itself, of course, because this tends to be, unfortunately, not covered as much.

Yeah, thank you.

It's important to note that such comments are not new at all, and they have also been uttered in times of quote-unquote peace, so when there isn't any kind of active conflict.

In my own article for 972, which I wrote about, I don't know, two weeks ago or so, I quoted a number of those politicians, and I'll just mention a few of them here.

You have Gallant, who has, of course, since been and still has an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

He threatened to send Lebanon back to the Stone Age, and this was in November 2024.

The diaspora affairs minister, Amishai Chikli, declared in September 2024 that Lebanon, quote, does not meet the definition of a state.