While Israeli officials continue to try to present their ongoing war in Lebanon as aimed exclusively at attacking Hezbollah, the focus is increasingly on religion-driven forced population in southern Lebanon, and the destruction of Shi’ite villages.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz was quite open about that being a long-standing military goal, saying “it was clear during Operation Silver Plow that the Shia villages along the contact line had to disappear.”
Operation Silver Plow was first publicized in April, when Israeli soldiers testified that despite public framing, the war’s goal was exclusively the destruction of Shi’ite homes and villages near the blue line, saying individual IDF commanders are required to provide daily reports as to how many homes they’ve destroyed.
Smoke rises following an Israeli strike in Zebdin, Lebanon May 18, 2026. REUTERS/Stringer
Katz’s comments were followed by reports out of Lebanon that the villages of Ayta al-Jabal and Beit Hanoun, in the Bint Jbeil District, have seen a number of homes set on fire, reportedly by Israeli troops.
Katz has been playing up the idea that the “Yellow Line” area Israel has defined during the course of their invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon will remain entirely depopulated, and he’s repeatedly been quoted in the press as saying hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians will never be allowed to return to their homes.
Katz’s argument for this is that the resistance by Hezbollah came when those villages had civilians living in them, therefore since that situation cannot be allowed to continue, the villages “have to disappear.”
Amnesty International warned a few weeks back that Israel is almost certainly committing war crimes with their mass force displacement of civilians and prohibition of them returning to their homes. Israel rejected those allegations at the time, arguing that they were not engaged in illegal population transfers. Their own defense minister, however, seems not only to be conceding this point, but actively bragging about it as one of the primary goals on the ongoing war.
