As the U.S. and Israel expand their war with Iran, Lebanon is once again being drawn into a volatile regional conflict.
Hezbollah launched rockets against northern Israel in solidarity with Iran, triggering a new round of Israeli military operations inside Lebanon and raising fears that the country could become the next major front in the regional war.
Those fears were realized this week when Israel launched a large-scale ground invasion of Lebanon that Israeli officials say will be “similar to the Israeli campaign in Gaza,” according to the Wall Street Journal. This campaign comes after Israeli forces issued unprecedented evacuation orders for Lebanese civilians across southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, while expanding strikes deep into Lebanese territory.
The orders have already displaced over 830,000 people. Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health reported at least 850 people, including 107 children, have been killed and 2,105 injured by Israeli strikes since March 2nd.
International officials have warned that the scale of the Israeli response risks spiraling beyond the limits of self-defense. The European Union recently said that while “Israel has the right to self-defence in line with international law,” its response in Lebanon has been “heavy-handed,” causing “mass displacement” and risking “severe humanitarian consequences,” adding that “Israel should cease its operations in Lebanon.”
Yet Washington’s response has been strikingly muted.
For years, U.S. policy toward Lebanon has followed a familiar pattern: pressure the Lebanese state to confront and weaken Hezbollah, but offer little in the way of security guarantees against repeated Israeli military operations in the south. That approach was always unstable; the war with Iran is now exposing just how unsustainable it really is.
The Lebanese state today sits in an excruciating position between U.S. and Israeli demands on one side and Hezbollah’s resistance on the other. The country is expected to prevent small-scale attacks on Israeli territory while having virtually no control over the regional escalation unfolding around it. At the same time, it faces repeated Israeli strikes and sweeping evacuation orders that effectively place large swaths of Lebanese territory under threat of destruction and Israeli occupation.
Under the terms of the November 2024 ceasefire agreement that ended the previous round of fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah was expected to withdraw its fighters north of the Litani River, while Israel committed to halting military operations and withdrawing its forces from Lebanese territory.
Yet Israeli forces have continued air and ground operations across southern Lebanon, and Israeli troops have remained in several areas near the border. Their tactics increasingly resemble the displacement strategies used in Gaza. Entire Lebanese villages along the border have been evacuated or rendered uninhabitable by months of bombardments.
U.S. officials may insist they support Lebanese sovereignty and the authority of the Lebanese state. But they tolerate, and in many cases actively support, Israeli military actions that undermine that sovereignty.
In May of last year, Lebanon had asked the U.S. to serve as a guarantor to ensure Israel halts military operations in accordance with the November 2024 ceasefire agreement, in exchange for Hezbollah beginning a disarmament process. “Israel’s presence is politically counterproductive. It’s undermining my government,” said Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.”
Washington’s response was blunt. “The U.S. has no business in trying to compel Israel to do anything,” said U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack after meeting with Salam.
That refusal should alarm anyone invested in stability. Despite the ceasefire agreement that took effect in late 2024, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has documented more than 15,400 Israeli violations – what the UN Special Rapporteur described as a “total disregard for the ceasefire agreement.” According to UNICEF, at least 329 children have been killed and 1,632 injured in Lebanon in the last 28 months.
Amid this pressure, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have remained restrained. They stayed out of the previous round of fighting and have again avoided direct confrontation, even after Israeli special forces killed three LAF soldiers in the eastern Bekaa Valley, reportedly while searching for an Israeli military airman who went missing in Lebanon 40 years ago.
Now, Salam is announcing a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities. This appears to be an attempt to distance the Lebanese government from Hezbollah’s actions in hopes of preventing Israel from expanding its campaign to even larger portions of Lebanese territory. But Israel has shown little interest in such restraint.
In effect, the Lebanese state has extended an asymmetric guarantee of security. The threat to Israel from Hezbollah is taken seriously. But what, if anything, guarantees Lebanon’s security?
For many Lebanese, the unfolding campaign carries uncomfortable historical echoes. In June 1982, roughly 40,000 Israeli troops crossed into southern Lebanon in a sweeping invasion that rapidly pushed north along the coast before encircling Beirut. The operation, justified as a response to Palestinian attacks, had in fact been prepared for months within the Israeli government, as a leading Israeli politician later acknowledged.
That history raises an uncomfortable question: was the latest round of rockets into northern Israel truly the decisive trigger for a large-scale campaign inside Lebanon? Or did those attacks merely provide a pretext to pursue a longstanding goal?
Whatever the answer, Israel now appears determined to reshape the political and security landscape of Lebanon itself. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza may only have reinforced the belief among some Israeli leaders that extraordinary force could succeed in Lebanon where earlier campaigns failed.
Some residents, however, are refusing to leave. ”We don’t want to leave our land,” said Samy Hajj, a resident of the predominantly Christian border town of Rmeish in Bint Jbeil District. “All the villagers have decided to stay. If we leave, we will never be able to return. We’ve seen what happened to the Palestinians in 1948.”
In Washington, officials continue to frame Lebanon primarily through the lens of Hezbollah’s containment or final defeat, while ignoring the regional conflict that threatens to engulf the country.
But this was not always the case. During Israel’s 1982 invasion, President Ronald Reagan privately expressed alarm at the scale of the destruction in Beirut. In his diary entry of February 6, 1982, months before the invasion began, Reagan wrote that “Israel has lost a lot of world sympathy.”
By August, after devastating Israeli bombardments of western Beirut, Reagan recorded that Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd had called the White House “begging me to do something.” Reagan wrote that he immediately called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and urged him to halt the attack.
In the call, Reagan said he deliberately invoked the word “holocaust,” warning that the symbol of the war was becoming the image of “a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”
Whether one agreed with Reagan’s policy or not, the episode underscored a basic principle that appears largely absent today: that the U.S. can support Israel while pressuring it to end military operations that risk spiraling into humanitarian catastrophe and regional instability.
If the United States wants a stable Lebanese state capable of exercising authority over its territory, it must recognize that security cannot be one-sided. A sustainable policy would require three things Washington has so far avoided. First, the United States must treat Lebanese sovereignty seriously and press all parties to respect the country’s territorial integrity. Second, it must recognize that Lebanon cannot be insulated from regional escalation while a war with Iran is underway. And third, it must abandon the fiction that Lebanon’s internal political equilibrium can be reshaped through external pressure.
Lebanese politics exist in the shadow of a far more powerful neighbor and a volatile regional order. Calls for unilateral disarmament, absent any credible framework to prevent Israeli military attacks, are little more than wishful thinking.
If Washington continues down its current path, Lebanon will not become more stable or more sovereign. It will simply become the next arena where a regional war plays out, with Lebanese civilians paying the price.
