Amid Pope Leo XIV’s high-profile visit to Lebanon, the lines are being drawn for a new war against the small Mediterranean country. The pope’s prayers for peace are contrasted by US Ambassador Tom Barrack informing Iraq that a new war is imminent.
Barrack reportedly told Iraq that there would be an “imminent Israeli operation” in Lebanon, and warned them that if any of the Iraqi Shi’ite militias interfered in any way, they would face a “harsh” Israeli strike on Iraq itself.
The reason to suspect this is more than just another minor escalation from Israel is that there were no reports of the US going around warning regional countries at all amid previous operations. Indeed, Israel tends to carry out attacks on Lebanon almost daily, though for the past couple of days, they have held back, likely because of the optics of attacking during a papal visit.
US Ambassador to Turkey Thomas Barrack | Image from Reuters
Israel and US officials have both been issuing threats of a new war against Lebanon for months, with growing calls for a UN investigation into the large number of Lebanese civilians Israel has killed since the “ceasefire” was put in place at the end of Israel’s 2024 invasion.
Indeed, since that ceasefire never really saw Israeli fire cease, a new war must inevitably be viewed as much as just a continuation of the same old war, presumably with the same US backing Israel can always expect, irrespective of the pretext.
In the past two weeks, Israel has launched multiple major attacks on Lebanon, including a strike on a refugee camp mosque that killed 13 civilians, mostly children, a strike on a school bus in southern Lebanon, and an attack on an apartment in the capital city of Beirut, which killed a Hezbollah figure along with several other unidentified people.
Narratively, the Israeli escalation is about forcing Hezbollah to disarm. In practice, Hezbollah had not fired a single missile at Israel since the ceasefire went into effect in November 2024, and the extent to which the Lebanese Army has struggled to dismantle Hezbollah structures in the south, as the ceasefire mandates, it’s because those areas are too dangerous to consistently operate in, with the constant Israeli strikes.
The Pope praised Lebanon’s multi-faith society as one of tolerance and peaceful coexistence that could serve as an example to the rest of the world. As ever, it seems that society is about to be marred by yet another war.
