Israel Launches The Deadliest Attack On Lebanon Since 1982
Written by Robert Inlakesh
Israel has launched a full-scale bombing campaign against Lebanon, murdering at least 500 Lebanese and injuring upwards 1,600 people in less than 24hrs of its initial air assault. Thousands of homes have been destroyed or damaged. The Israeli government is using the same tired and baseless justification that Hezbollah is using the Lebanese people as human shields. As Western media covers the attack as "Israel strikes Hezbollah targets" it is clear that they are not interested in doing journalism, but rather public relations for the Israeli government.
On Monday, Israel decided to launch an all out assault against Lebanon, calling it "Operation Arrows of the North", using the exact same tactics used against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, prior to their ground invasion. Israel first began by sending threatening flyers and text messages to the phones of civilians living in areas throughout South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, telling them to leave their homes. Then, the bombing began.
Israel launched five phases of airstrike attacks across Lebanon, killing around 500 people and injuring more than 1,600, as it struck civilian buildings indiscriminately. From the video evidence we have available, it is obvious that this is indiscriminate carpet bombing, airstrikes targeting populated villages and without targets. It is likely that there were many Hezbollah related targets hit and there's also some video evidence that appears to show that rocket launchers were hit, although there hasn't been any evidence of large weapons storage facilities going up.
Ultimately, Israel's attack on Lebanon has so far achieved little militarily, especially as Hezbollah was able to fire rockets as far as 120 kilometers deep into occupied Palestinian territory and hit West Bank illegal settlements, in the middle of the Israeli assault on Lebanese territory.
While the Israeli military released CGI-videos which depicted civilian homes inside Lebanon hiding high-tech precision missiles, they actually serve to debunk their claims that Hezbollah is using civilians as human shields, as the videos show weapons stored so ridiculously impractically, that common sense enables the least militarily astute of minds to understand they are nonsensical.
When Lebanese civilians began to flee their homes, due to the large-scale bombing campaign being carried out against them, and following the threats to evacuate or be killed, videos began to emerge which appeared to show Israel launching airstrikes against roads that prevented the displaced from fleeing. This was exactly what happened when Palestinians in northern Gaza were also sent text message and flyer threats to evacuate their homes and head south, where they were also targeted.
Israel's bombing campaign against civilian areas in Lebanon has inflicted the most deaths in a single day since the Israeli invasion of 1982, when Israel killed around 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. To put this into proper perspective, the Israeli military has killed around half of the total number of people it killed in Lebanon during the entire 2006 war that lasted 33-days. The scale of the attack has been so indiscriminate that the true death toll could be much higher than the official numbers given by the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Yet, despite the horrors that are currently being suffered by the Lebanese people, the Western corporate media has labelled the attacks as having been carried out against "Hezbollah targets". In the case of CNN, on one of their live broadcasts that covered the events of Monday, a reporter described the illegal settlements in the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria", this is despite the fact that the US government even continues to consider the territory to be occupied territory. This just demonstrates that CNN is not interested in journalism and neither is any Western mainstream media platform which pretends Israel's attack on Lebanon was confined to "Hezbollah targets"; they are Israeli public relations bureaus and having nothing to do with the profession known as journalism.
The narrative that is being currently peddled by Western governments and media, is that Israel is targeting a "terrorist organization". You will hear about the thousands of rockets and drones fired at Israel since October 8 and how Israel is "defending itself". Part of this is actually true. Hezbollah has fired thousands of guided missiles, rockets, and drones at Israeli settlements and military targets. Yet the part they leave out of this story is that Hezbollah targeted open areas primarily, or deserted buildings inside the northern settlements, while dedicating the majority of their military operations to hitting exclusively military targets. Only a handful of Israeli non-combatant have been killed in thousands of successful attacks that bypassed Israeli air-defenses and struck targets. On the other hand, almost 200 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli airstrikes since October 8, which is the part that nobody wants to mention.
On top of this, the claim that "Israel was attacked first" is also completely false. Israel is currently illegally occupying Lebanese territory in the south of the country, both in the Shebaa Farms area and the northern portion of the Ghajjar village, both pieces of territory are considered illegally occupied or illegally annexed under international law. Technically, both Lebanon and Israel are still at a state of war, neither side recognize each other. In addition to this, Israel is the one that began attacking civilians in Lebanon and not the other way around, even slaughtering journalists, children, and medical workers.
While Hezbollah was careful to manage the escalation, carrying out its military activities with the very specific goal of supporting the armed groups resisting Israel's attack against Gaza, the Israelis have repeatedly attempted to escalate. For instance, in January the Israeli government conducted air strikes against the Lebanese Capital, Beirut, murdering Hamas politburo leader Saleh al-Arouri and several others. In response, Hezbollah hit a military base near the Lebanese border area.
On July 30, Israel then launched airstrikes against a populated building in the Lebanese Capital again and assassinated Hezbollah military commander Fouad Shukr. In response, Hezbollah launched drones against a military intelligence facility and also fired rockets at military bases, again refraining from targeting civilians, even though Israel had murdered women and children in its attack on Beirut.
Following both of these event, Hezbollah's Secretary General, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, spoke publicly and declared that his organization does not want war and is simply providing a support front for Gaza, adding that if Israel signs a ceasefire/prisoner-exchange to end the war, his organization will stop all military activities. Even after the mass detonation of pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon, which injured thousands of people, killing dozens, many of whom were civilians, Hezbollah made it clear that it seeks to respond but that its actions are only intended to aid Gaza. Even former CIA-director Leon Panetta called the pager attacks an act of terrorism, stating that “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism”.
Time and time again, Hezbollah has been provoked and Lebanese civilians have been slaughtered by Israeli missile strikes, yet the organization still stuck to maintaining the same support front for Gaza and not starting a war. On the other hand, Israeli officials have been threatening to "return Lebanon to the stone age" since the beginning of the war in Gaza.
Hezbollah wanted a ceasefire in Gaza; it is also not a terrorist organization anywhere in the world except the West; and in Lebanon it is an elected political party that is allied with Christian and Druze political parties in the country; it also has an armed wing that is used for protecting Lebanon. It is important to understand that the US has a lot of control over the Lebanese army -- despite it being overwhelmingly composed of people who support Hezbollah -- preventing it from acting freely to defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression and depriving it of the military equipment needed to do so. This is why Hezbollah exists, to liberate Lebanese territory and to combat Israeli aggression, which is proved successful at doing in the year 2000 when it forced Israeli occupation forces to abandon its occupation of southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah emerged as a response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, working to expel the Israeli army that had occupied southern Lebanon illegally, just as it occupies the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights today. Israel is the aggressor, not Hezbollah. Hezbollah wanted a ceasefire, Israel decided to expand the war in Gaza to Lebanon instead of ending its genocidal assault. What comes next is completely the fault of Israel and its US backers who fully support its expansion of the conflict.