Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz on Tuesday said the military would occupy a swathe of southern Lebanon even after the end of the war against Hezbollah, as warplanes carried out fresh strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Katz’s statement was not the first Israeli declaration signalling an intention to occupy parts of the south, but it was the clearest since the Middle East war spread to Lebanon on March 2.
Also on Tuesday, AFPTV’s live broadcast showed a strike hitting Beirut’s southern suburbs, long a bastion of Hezbollah. The Israeli military said it “has begun to strike Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure in Beirut”.
It also renewed its strikes on Lebanon, particularly the country’s south, with Israeli troops carrying out ground incursions in border areas.
The Iran-backed militant group drew Lebanon into the war by launching attacks on Israel to avenge Israel’s killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel has responded with broad strikes across Lebanon and a ground offensive.
“At the end of the operation, the IDF will establish itself in a security zone inside Lebanon, on a defensive line against anti-tank missiles, and will maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani,” Katz said in a video statement published by his ministry.
He was referring to a river that flows around 30 kilometres from the border.
Katz also said the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese would be “completely prevented” until northern Israel’s security was ensured.
Katz added that “all the houses in the villages adjacent to the border in Lebanon will be demolished in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza, in order to remove once and for all the border-adjacent threats from the residents of the north”.
Israeli forces devastated Rafah and Beit Hanoun during their two-year war against Hamas in Gaza, triggered by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s attack against southern Israel in October 2023.
Concerns for international law
Lebanese authorities say more than 1,200 people have been killed since the hostilities began, with more than one million others displaced.
On Sunday, Human Rights Watch said it had written to Katz to express its “grave concerns about recent statements made by Israeli officials that undermine respect for international humanitarian law and a willingness to abide by them”.
“These concerns arise in the context of a broader pattern of laws-of-war violations by Israeli forces,” says the letter, a copy of which was published by HRW.
The organisation cited comments made by Katz on March 16 in which he threatened to prevent the return of people who had fled the region south of the Litani.
“Using the denial of civilian return as a bargaining tool constitutes forced displacement, which is prohibited under the laws of war and a possible war crime,” HRW said.
Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told journalists on Tuesday that since the start of the war, Hezbollah had fired “somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 rockets, UAVs and missiles, and mortars… towards Israel, some towards our troops, some towards civilian communities”.
Hezbollah meanwhile has been announcing in daily statements that it has targeted Israeli sites and forces, or that it has engaged in direct clashes with Israeli forces in border towns.
The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon said on Monday that two of its personnel were killed in southern Lebanon in the second deadly incident in 24 hours.
The EU on Tuesday demanded an investigation into the attacks on peacekeepers, which its spokesman Anouar El Anouni said were “totally unacceptable”.
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