Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz formalized the plan for a military occupation of southern Lebanon today, announcing the intention of the Israeli military to take full military control of a “buffer zone” spanning southern Lebanon from the border with Israel all the way to the Litani River. Before the latest war this region was home to several hundred thousand people.
Now, very few people remain, as Israel issued evacuation orders for the entire region in the early days of their invasion, and Katz now says Israel will not allow any of the “hundreds of thousands of residents of southern Lebanon who evacuated northward” to return to the area until Israel is satisfied Hezbollah is no longer a threat.
Given the ambiguity of that end condition, this amount to a de facto population transfer on a massive scale, a scale Katz clearly freely admits with his own comments, and which would be wildly illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Map of southern Lebanon | Image from Wikimedia
Katz stopped short of calling for Israel to annex the region outright, though Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich continues to insist Israel should just consider the Litani River to be Israel’s “new border.”
Israel has destroyed all the bridges spanning the Litani River, effectively sealing off anyone from being able to get in or out at this point. Katz said Israel’s intention is to maintain control of all bridges crossing any other bodies of water in Lebanon south of the Litani, though since very few civilians remain in those areas, that means relatively little.
Israel invaded Lebanon in 2024, and never fully withdrew after the end of that conflict in November of 2024. They began a new invasion in early March on the back of a joint Israel-US war against Iran, and have displaced over a million people nationwide in Lebanon since.
In additional to the displacements, Israeli attacks have killed 1,039 people in Lebanon and wounded 2,876 others, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. The most recent included a 15-year-old boy killed in an Israeli raid in Halta and a family of three killed in an airstrike in Beirut, which included a 3-year-old girl.
Israel has also issued a new evacuation order to the Burj el-Chamali refugee camp in southern Lebanon, which hosts some 60,000 Palestinians. Since the camp is itself south of the Litani River, however, it’s not clear where the Palestinians are supposed to flee to, since all the bridges have been destroyed.
