Israeli attacks continued apace in southern Lebanon, with shelling reported overnight in Mansouri and a number of other strikes reported against Houla. Powerful explosions were similarly reported in Marjayoun and Nabatieh Districts, and the Marjayoun ones were powerful enough they actually collapsed part of the Qantara Mountain.
While collapsing a mountain was a novel incident, it doesn’t appear it was intentional, but rather just a consequence of the constant litany of Israeli attacks across the south, and indeed otherwise the list of attacks was remarkably similar to what would be reported any given day since Israel’s March invasion began.
This ongoing level of attacks is coming as Lebanon’s population attempt to send their children back to school, to the extent that in the south their schools, or indeed their villages, even exist after months of attacks.
A Hezbollah member participating in a 2023 training exercise | Image is CC 4.0
A substantial population in Lebanon remains displaced by the war, and Israel has been rather open about the idea that many of them will never be allowed to return home. That makes the limited measures taken to support the displaced population all the more severe, particularly when there are simply no schools for many of the displaced students to return to.
Israeli troops have been ordered to prepare for a long-term stay in Lebanon, and hawkish Israeli NGO Alma Research Center has issued a new report once again advancing the narrative that Hezbollah remains an enormous military threat that is liable to infiltrate Israeli territory to carry out attacks.
The report also claims Hezbollah to have roughly 40,000 “active operatives” and tens of thousands more reservists they could call upon. The evidence in this case appears to be that IDF troops operating in occupied Lebanon have “encountered individual Hezbollah operatives” in the past several months, and they’ve apparently extrapolated to the point it’s an enormous militia faction capable of invading Israel outright but for the ongoing IDF occupation.
