Israel's Lebanon invasion shows its deadly lack of restraint

Israeli soldiers work on tanks at a staging area in northern Israel near the Israel-Lebanon border on October 1, 2024. AP

Within days of Hamas’s deadly attack on October 7, in which it killed more than 1,000 Israelis and took 230 hostages, people in Lebanon began to brace themselves for the possibility they would be pulled inexorably into the orbit of Israel’s wrath. Over the past year the Israeli government has responded to the attack by laying waste to the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, killing more than 40,000 Palestinians, carrying out a series of deadly raids in the West Bank and heavily bombarding Lebanon from the air.

The nightmare scenario came to pass on Monday night, when Israeli troops launched a ground invasion of Lebanese territory.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, which is also the country’s most powerful political bloc, played no role in the October 7 attack, but has nonetheless backed Hamas by firing rockets regularly into northern Israel. While most Lebanese are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, many are opposed to Hezbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanon’s economy and political system as well as any action that would unleash Israel’s superior military might in their direction.

Hezbollah is aware of this. Although its leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel last week in an air raid on Beirut, was a world-class provocateur, he had spent the past year attempting to calibrate his forces’ attacks on Israel to the degree where they might fall just short of triggering a full-scale war. That strategy, however, may have overestimated the Israeli leadership’s level of restraint, and underestimated its commitment – contentious even within Israel – to wiping out Israel’s enemies even at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent civilian lives.

The nightmare scenario came to pass

In Israel’s telling of events, its actions since October 7 have been entirely defensive, sophisticated and even humane. Reality paints a different picture. Its “limited” objective of freeing hostages and targeting Hamas’s leadership quickly transformed into efforts to starve large numbers of civilians, as the International Criminal Court Prosecutor has alleged, and an open-ended mission to occupy much of Gaza. Israeli “surgical strikes” on Gazan schools and refugee camps have killed hundreds of civilians, as well as UN workers.

In launching its Lebanon invasion, Israel has used similar vocabulary, describing its operation as “limited” and “targeted”, but Lebanese civilians are fleeing the south in droves. Israel’s “precise” strikes in Beirut last week, including the strike that killed Nasrallah, resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties. More than one million people in Lebanon, in a country of fewer than six million, have been displaced since Israel’s recent raids began, according to the Lebanese Prime Minister’s office. In truth, any talk of precision is at best naïve or at worst dangerously dishonest.

Lebanese civilians will bear the highest cost of any continued escalation, though they will not be the only ones bearing a cost. Israel’s own population has seen its military stretched thin, likely to an unsustainable degree, its economy suffer greatly and the hostages Hamas took on October 7 put in further peril. The disaster of Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon in 1982 remains fresh in many Israelis’ – and Lebanese – memories.

The lesson of that war, commonly referred to as “Israel’s Vietnam”, was clear enough: Israel cannot fight its way to peace, and attempting to do so is more likely to breed opposite results.