Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military on Monday to intensify its strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, declaring via Telegram video that “we are at war with Hezbollah, and we will intensify our strikes.” Al Jazeera reported that the announcement triggered an exodus from the southern suburbs of Beirut and came despite a ceasefire agreed last month that had recently been extended. The order followed strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure in the Beqaa Valley, Tyre and Nabatieh districts, and left four people dead in the town of Kfar Reman. Incendiary phosphorus munitions were dropped on forests in Qlailah municipality, igniting citrus groves and farmland. One Israeli soldier was killed by a drone strike during combat operations. The announcement fell on Lebanon’s Liberation Day — the anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after an eighteen-year occupation — while the Lebanese Health Ministry reported 3,185 people killed since Israel entered open war with Hezbollah on March 2.
The received wisdom
The conventional analysis of Israel’s Lebanon operation frames it as a necessary military campaign against a non-state actor that has directly attacked Israeli territory, amassed an arsenal of roughly 150,000 rockets, and operates as an Iranian proxy capable of destabilising the region. Hezbollah, in this framing, is not a legitimate political actor capable of negotiating in good faith — it is a designated terrorist organisation that uses Lebanese civilian infrastructure as a shield, placing moral responsibility for civilian casualties on itself rather than on Israel. The ceasefire of last month, in this view, was a mistake that gave Hezbollah time to regroup rather than a genuine off-ramp. Netanyahu’s escalation order is therefore presented by his government and its supporters as a return to strategic coherence after a pause that demonstrated goodwill but changed nothing structural. Finance Minister Smotrich’s demand to “resume bombing Beirut” and cut Lebanon’s electricity represents the far end of this spectrum; the prime minister’s announced intensification represents a more moderate version of the same logic.
There is something to this argument. Ceasefires that leave armed groups intact and unreconstructed are, historically, often preludes to resumed conflict rather than paths to resolution.
A different read
The trouble is that the same critique applies with equal force to the Israeli operation itself. Israel’s strikes since March 2 have killed 3,185 people in Lebanon. Phosphorus munitions have been dropped on agricultural land. The southern suburbs of Beirut have been struck repeatedly. And yet — by any serious military metric — Hezbollah retains its capacity to launch drone strikes that kill Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon. If the offensive’s strategic goal is to “crush” Hezbollah, as Netanyahu declared, the operation is not achieving it at a pace proportionate to the human and diplomatic costs being incurred.
This is a pattern with deep historical roots. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which began as a limited operation to push the PLO back from its borders, ended with an eighteen-year occupation that ultimately strengthened Hezbollah — the very organisation the current campaign is targeting. The 2006 war aimed at disarming Hezbollah by force produced instead UN Security Council Resolution 1701, a partial disarmament framework that Hezbollah never actually complied with. The current campaign is now in its fourth month, has imposed enormous costs on Lebanese civilians, and has not, by any available public reporting, degraded Hezbollah’s command-and-control or long-range missile capacity to a degree that changes the strategic balance.
The timing of Monday’s escalation announcement matters. Al Jazeera noted that Israeli escalation in Gaza is also occurring at a moment when “Netanyahu is accused of stalling ceasefire for domestic political reasons.” The prime minister’s coalition depends on far-right ministers — Smotrich and Ben-Gvir — who have made maximalist war aims a condition of their continued participation in government. Ben-Gvir called explicitly for Israel to “conquer Dahiyeh,” Hezbollah’s Beirut stronghold. These are not military assessments; they are political commitments to a base that defines success as territorial control and symbolic dominance rather than as strategic security outcomes.
Lebanon’s Liberation Day is worth sitting with. Twenty-six years ago, Israel ended an occupation that had lasted eighteen years, cost thousands of lives, and — in the widely shared assessment of Israeli security analysts — contributed more to Hezbollah’s growth as a political and military force than anything else. The anniversary is a reminder that military presence in Lebanon has a documented history of generating the very threats it is intended to neutralise. That is not an argument for accepting rocket attacks on Israeli territory. It is an argument for distinguishing between operations designed to achieve durable security and operations designed to satisfy coalition arithmetic.
The phosphorus munitions use on agricultural land deserves specific mention. Incendiary munitions are not prohibited in all contexts under international law, but their use in or near populated and agricultural areas is widely condemned and has drawn repeated criticism from UN human rights bodies. Citrus groves are not Hezbollah rocket launchers. Their incineration does not advance any military objective commensurate with the humanitarian cost — and it provides exactly the kind of imagery that isolates Israel diplomatically and compounds the suffering of Lebanese civilians who are not Hezbollah combatants.
What to watch
- Whether the ceasefire’s formal expiration triggers any third-party mediator response — Qatar, Egypt, or the United States — and whether the Biden-era diplomatic architecture for a Lebanon deal survives the current escalation.
- The pace of Beirut suburb evacuations as a real-time indicator of how seriously Lebanese civilians assess the threat, independent of official statements.
- Whether far-right coalition partners formally demand expanded ground operations, and whether Netanyahu can maintain coalition discipline without granting those demands.
- Any further use of Oreshnik-class weapons by Russia in the same week — the two escalations, while unconnected, create compounding pressure on Western diplomatic bandwidth.
— J