Repetitive folly: Israel’s futile war in Lebanon deepens

Call it a repeating script, a rusty template, or simply a creaky model to emulate time and again. The structural and homicidal destruction of Gaza undertaken by Israeli forces is now finding full expression in southern Lebanon, a cause of concern even for those in Washington. The war's increasing savagery is a reminder of how hollow the exhortations by the Netanyahu government seem following the official cessation of hostilities against Hezbollah in November 2024.

Israel's pre-emptive war on Iran, commencing on February 28 with the full and criminal connivance of the United States, took place alongside an incursion into southern Lebanon that has become a burgeoning invasion ostensibly to create a chunky buffer against Hezbollah's attacks. Presumably, the wishful thinking here was to eliminate Iran as a threat, thereby removing Hezbollah's most ardent patron and sponsor. At the time, coteries of commentators and Israeli leaders lavished praise on the country's technical and military achievements, forgetting the central point that Hezbollah remains an idea as much as a physical movement, a deep well rather than defined, terminable cul-de-sac. Ideas, which can only really be battled by better ones, prove sleekly stubborn before tanks, missiles and jets.

From March, the southern part of Lebanon was subjected to infrastructural degradation, population displacement and the wholesale destruction of villages, all on the spurious premise that the security of Israeli settlements near the border will be somehow improved. In April, in the long cast shadow of the Iran War, another ceasefire was brokered between Israel and Lebanon, with another extension to the truce for another 45 days agreed to mid-May. This farcical theatre has taken place amidst ongoing IDF operations which have, as of June 1, displaced over a million Lebanese and seen more than 3,300 deaths. Israel has lost 24 soldiers and 4 civilians during that time.

With Iran resiliently stubborn in diplomacy, collaterally backed by its continued blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, and Hezbollah showing signs of renewed martial vigour, the two-pronged plan has been defanged. Hezbollah's revivified hunger for battle has taken the form of lethal attacks on the IDF with drones resistant to electronic jamming. These explosive-laden fibre-optic First-Person View drones, connected to their operators with a bare yet lengthy optical wire, permit visibility and manoeuvrability for miles. Israeli soldiers, long seen as having immune breastplates against Hezbollah's attacks, are now dying.

Former Israeli national security official Orna Mizrahi, who heads the Lebanon program at Tel Aviv's Institute for National Studies, accepts that "the drones made for some confusion, because it was a surprise. The IDF didn't think that it would be such a dangerous weapon. In Israel, they looked at it as a toy." Remarks from the IDF reported in the Times of Israel show that the military has been disabused of this notion. The FPV drones posed "a dynamic and evolving threat, characterized by inexpensive, readily made tools with a high rate of variability."

The BBC reports the troubled account of a council chief from the northern Israeli town of Shomera, Sami Zanetti: "The problem is you don't feel them coming. You're sitting there, and suddenly it arrives. And if you run away, it follows you." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, acknowledging the dangers posed by these economical, effective packages of death, promises that a "special team" is labouring away to "solve this."

Despite the increasingly attritive toll on its forces, the propaganda channels on Israeli triumphs continue to prove thick and hefty, attempting to justify a campaign described by Michael Koplow of the Israeli Policy Forum as "a political imperative in search of a strategy." The May 31 seizure of the Beaufort Castle area and the Ali al-Taher Ridge was celebrated by the Israeli Alma Research and Education Center as one of "operational significance, as it constitutes a strategic zone in southern Lebanon and psychological significance for all parties involved in the conflict." The "loss of control over the Beaufort area" was deemed "a direct operational setback for" Hezbollah.

These ground operations, false heralds of decisiveness, barely conceal the increasing desperation within the Netanyahu government, culminating in threats made on June 1 to attack the Lebanese capital. On June 2, the Israeli Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, told a gathering at the Defense Export Conference that the bombing of certain neighbourhoods of Beirut with alleged ties with Hezbollah was in the offing. "The proof of this policy in protecting the settlements [near the border] will be simple and will become clear in the coming days: if the shooting against the settlements ceases, or if it continues and we attack Dahiyé in Beirut, this equation will become a reality."

Currently, another counterfeit, jejune ceasefire is in play, one that was only reached after a ranting call of colour and invective between US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu on June 1. (According to a US official quoted by Axios, Trump is said to have bellowed the following: "You're fucking crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.") While Trump finds himself held in an Iranian lock, tightened by Tehran's insistence on tying a halt of Israeli hostilities in Lebanon with a broader cessation of conflict, Israel has been ensnared by its own too-clever-by-half logic in Lebanon. The un-snaring will be sanguinary and ugly.