Israeli aircraft buzz Beirut as the drums of war bang loud

THE PEOPLE of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, have a reputation for partying through the bad times—including during a 15-year-long civil war and years of conflict with Israel. Now even they are rattled. Ever since Israel’s twin assassinations of Hizbullah and Hamas officials a week ago, crowds have been thronging the airport; many remember how Israel bombed the airport in a previous war in 2006 and are trying to get out before that happens again. Embassies have called on their nationals to evacuate. On Lebanon’s border with Israel, 120km south of Beirut, UN peacekeepers are on a knife edge. “This is the longest period of tension and instability we can remember,” says one officer.

Nerves were shredded further on August 6th by a series of sonic booms as Israeli jets screamed across the Beirut sky shortly before a scheduled speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, the Iran-backed militia based in Lebanon. The Israeli fly-by was a warning to Hizbullah not to escalate or participate in an Iranian retaliatory attack on Israel. But Mr Nasrallah, who spoke in front of a red backdrop—a colour associated with revenge in Shia Islam—had a warning of his own. The group would respond to Israel’s assassination on July 30th of Fouad Shukr, its military commander, regardless of the consequences.

In the ten months since the attacks of October 7th Hizbullah has faced contradictory demands from its base. “Hizbullah feels it has to convey this…image of resistance and support for Hamas in its fight against Israel,” says Lina Khatib of Chatham House, a think-tank. “But at the same time, there is no appetite for an all-out war in Lebanon, even among many Hizbullah supporters.” These competing demands are getting ever harder to reconcile. Hizbullah attacked Israel on October 8th and has since launched rockets and drones at northern Israeli cities daily. In return, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has killed hundreds of Hizbullah fighters and dozens of civilians and levelled thousands of houses. Hizbullah leaders have died in their cars and homes, if not on the open battlefield.

One result is that the far south of the country is now almost empty of people. Crops are unharvested, heaps of bananas rot and homes are abandoned. In Alma al-Shaab, a Christian village on the border with Israel, a fridge full of beer baked in the sun outside an empty shop. On a five-hour trip your correspondent saw just one civilian—an elderly man chain-smoking on his porch. Some 90,000 Lebanese civilians have fled their homes. Tens of thousands of Israelis remain displaced from homes near their northern border, too. The IDF claims that its strikes are extensive, according to the Financial Times, because every third home in south Lebanon is used by Hizbullah. Yet some observers believe that Israel is trying to create a new buffer zone similar to that established in the 1980s (which Israel denies). Many Lebanese believe that Israel wants to make this displacement permanent.

Caught between the two warring sides are soldiers from Ghana, Ireland and Italy, part of the 10,000-strong United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), a peacekeeping force created in 1978. It has often been the target of Israeli criticism because of its perceived failure to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the war in 2006 and was designed to allow the Lebanese army to take control of the south and push Hizbullah about 30km away from the border, north of the Litani river. UNIFIL says the onus is on Israel and the Lebanese government to adhere to the provisions of Resolution 1701 and that its troops are monitors and at best referees. They have no powers of arrest, nor are they raiding arms caches.

The peacekeepers warn that the pattern of the conflict is already shifting. Lieutenant Colonel Bruno Vio of UNIFIL’s Italian contingent has noted a shift from “quantity to quality” of fire. Instead of lobbing dozens of shells or rockets, both sides are being more targeted in their use of force, but also using bigger weapons. They are becoming more willing to escalate by crossing their opponent’s red lines, for example by striking targets farther from the border.

A more extensive retaliatory strike by Hizbullah in the coming days would mark the start of a new phase. It could choose to raise the intensity of its existing pattern of attacks across the border, or collaborate overtly with any Iranian action, perhaps of the sort that took place on April 13th, when Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, most of which were intercepted.

Israel would almost certainly retaliate with heavier strikes of its own. But in one scenario it could go much further, by invading south Lebanon in the hope that it could push back Hizbullah. Israel’s generals hope that this might restore deterrence, and make Israel’s northern borderlands habitable again.

Dislodging Hizbullah from the south, by negotiation or force, would be a fraught task. It is deeply embedded in southern communities: almost all of the fighters killed since October 7th are from villages in the border area, according to officials in Lebanon. It helped rebuild the south after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000. One Lebanese official told American mediators on a recent visit that “it would be easier to move the Litani south [than to eject Hizbullah].” An Israeli ground offensive would also tax an army already exhausted by ten months of war in Gaza.

Yet Israel—still traumatised by the surprise Hamas attack on October 7th—is unwilling to tolerate the presence of a vastly more powerful hostile armed force right on its border in the north. Few Lebanese want a war. But with both sides implacable, the drumbeat is deafening. ■

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