Anticipating another round of war with Hezbollah despite the fact that the current Israeli invasion of Lebanon hasn’t even ended, Defense Minister Israel Katz laid out a litany of threats against Lebanon that would happen if Hezbollah “joins Iran” in any attack on Israel.
Katz declared that the territory around Nabatieh and the Litani River would become part of “Israel’s permanent security zone,” an occupied territory that already includes parts of Nabatieh District and the Litani River to begin with.
The threats, however, grew substantially from there, with Katz also vowing that over a million Lebanese Shi’ites would be driven from their homes. That too already happened once this year, and several hundred thousand remain displaced from that operation, which includes the military occupation.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz visits southern Lebanon
Katz then talked of the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, accusing him of destroying the Shi’ite community in Lebanon before his killing, and went on to declare that current Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem could lead to the annihilation of Shi’ites in Lebanon “completely” before Israel would eliminate him as well and “send him to the depth of hell.”
Katz’s bellicosity has been a recurring theme in the ongoing Israeli invasion of Lebanon, declaring early this summer that military policy was to make Shi’ite villages “disappear.” He’s followed through on that as well, with recent estimates putting the number of municipalities outright eliminated at 48, and continuing to grow all the time as demolition continues across the south.
Putting aside the myriad war crimes Katz has already committed in the course of the ongoing Lebanon war, his comments appear to directly threaten additional such war crimes against Lebanon’s Shi’ite community to punish Hezbollah if it engages in military operations against Israel in what, again, is already an ongoing Israeli military invasion and occupation of Lebanese territory.
As a defense minister of a nation that has attacked multiple regional nations in recent years, Katz appears to have built his time at the ministry around threatening ever harsher action against civilian populations in targeted nations, bragging about open-ended occupations, exporting the “Gaza model” to Lebanon, and has recently made multiple threats to send perceived enemies to hell.
