After a week of some of the most intensive attacks on Lebanon since the ceasefire was reached in November 2024, the IDF is carrying out a massive ground exercise along the border and continuing to carry out attacks on southern villages.
The IDF fired on the town of Sheeba, and also the villages of Blida and Kfar Chouba. Drones also dropped sound bombs on Blida, Marwahin, and Khiam. Israeli ground troops also crossed the border near Aitaroun.
On the outskirts of Aitaroun, the ground troops installed concrete barriers along the roads with signs warning the area was “no entry” and cautioning “danger of death” to anyone who enters. That effectively blocks farmers from multiple of their fields near the border.
While most of the people killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon have been by way of drone strikes, it is not unusual for the IDF troops inside northernmost Israel to open fire on Lebanese civilians who are, in their estimation, too close to the border area.
UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions Morris Tidball-Binz, however, warns that the Israeli attacks on plainly civilian targets almost certainly amount to war crimes, unless there is “compelling evidence” that those targets have dual objectives.
Though Israel, to the extent it comments on its attacks on Lebanon at all, more or less always claims the targets were Hezbollah, it has offered no evidence for the overwhelming majority of cases, just a blanket assertion.
In one of the attacks last week, which mostly targeted an asphalt factory and adjoining quarry, the IDF said it targeted the environmental group Green Without Borders, claiming they aimed to use the asphalt to reconstruct “terrorist facilities and infrastructure.”
Green Without Borders is a forestation group operating in southern Lebanon, and since southern Lebanon is also a Hezbollah stronghold, it was pretty quickly accused of being secretly in league with Hezbollah, as effectively all civilian NGOs are. Green Without Borders denies such a connection, insisting they are an independent group.
