On Thursday evening, Israel issued an evacuation order for the Dahieh neighborhood of Beirut, and after causing a panicked evacuation, it carried out airstrikes hitting eight buildings. At the time, we had reports of Lebanese soldiers being deployed to inspect the buildings, which Israel claimed were the targets, before the attack was carried out.
It wasn’t clear at the time what happened with those troops, though Israel alleged there was an underground Hezbollah drone factory under the residential neighborhood. The Lebanese Army is now detailing the situation, saying they never actually entered the buildings they wanted to inspect because Israel refused to hold off the strikes to let that happen.
So the Lebanese troops who were sent to inspect were never actually in danger because they never entered the struck sites, but on the other hand, no inspection to verify Israeli allegations was ever allowed, and after the strike, presumably any evidence would have been destroyed.
The ceasefire deal, initially signed in November, involves a mechanism whereby Israel is meant to report Hezbollah violations to the monitoring committee, headed by the US and France, and Israeli officials bragged that they retained the right to attack if the Lebanese Armed Forces didn’t address the matter they reported.
The problem here is not only that it’s not clear they directly informed the committee of the putative drone factory, but that by all indications, the Lebanese military found out about it when the IDF issued an evacuation notice, and then actively tried to address the matter, but was rebuffed by Israel, who attacked anyway.
This certainly gives the appearance that this was a pretty substantial violation of the ceasefire, though Israel has carried out literally thousands of attacks on Lebanese soil since the ceasefire went into effect, so it’s far from unprecedented.
It also seemingly undercuts Israel’s repeated claims of Hezbollah activity because once again, they blew something up and left no way to confirm that what they accused of going on there actually was. Israel often makes claims of Hezbollah activity that are demonstrably false.
Israeli officials defended the strike, insisting that attacking the Lebanese capital doesn’t violate the ceasefire with Lebanon, and they threatened more. Former IDF Chief and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, whose faction is expected to fare well in the event of an early election in Israel, says he supports normalization with Lebanon and would withdraw troops from the occupied zones in southern Lebanon as part of a normalization deal.
Lebanese officials have warned that if the attacks continue, they may stop cooperating with the ceasefire committee since they don’t seem to be doing anything anyhow. Israel continued its attacks Sunday, striking a motorcycle near the town of Kfar Dounine in the south, killing one. Israel has made no statement about the attack, nor has the person killed been identified yet.
