Once Again the Battlefield

April 9 witnessed the deadliest day of the current Israeli military attack on Lebanon, which killed over 300 people. Israel launched a barrage of strikes on Lebanon on Wednesday despite the ceasefire, a sudden intensification of a campaign it says is directed at the Tehran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Israel’s assault on Lebanon had already killed nearly 2,000 people and displaced more than a million. Now it threatens the collapse of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire that had raised hopes across the Middle East. Just hours after US President Donald Trump had announced that a two-week ceasefire had been agreed to halt the war in the Middle East, Israeli jets conducted a 10-minute blitz across Lebanon.

Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon for around two decades until 2000, has intensified strikes across Lebanon and sent ground troops into the country's south since the latest bout of fighting began. Lebanon was pulled into the Middle East war when Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on March 2 to avenge the killing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Houthis, who control most of northern Yemen, joined the war in support of Iran on March 28. The three allies “launched a barrage of cruise missiles and drones targeting several vital and military sites belonging to the Israeli enemy”.

Benjamin Netanyahu has said there is “no ceasefire in Lebanon” and Israel would continue “to strike Hezbollah with full force” as the country’s military launched fresh strikes. In a written message, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said the Islamic Republic did not want war with the US and Israel, but would protect its rights as a nation. In an apparent reference to Lebanon, he said, "We did not seek war, and we do not want it,” he said. “But we will not renounce our legitimate rights under any circumstances, and in this respect, we consider the entire resistance front as a whole”. Pakistan, which accelerated its mediation efforts after Trump threatened a civilisation-ending onslaught, has said Lebanon had been part of the agreement. The US vice-president, JD Vance, assigned to lead the US delegation to peace talks in Pakistan, suggested there had been a “legitimate misunderstanding” on the geographic reach of the ceasefire deal.

Iran warned that, in response to the Israeli attacks after the ceasefire, it would once more close the Strait of Hormuz, the economically critical waterway it had agreed to open for the two-week duration of the ceasefire. The country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said negotiations were “meaningless” as long as Israel continued to bomb Lebanon, placing in doubt US-Iranian talks in Pakistan scheduled for Saturday. Pezeshkian vowed Iran would not abandon the Lebanese people.

Global leaders denounced the Thursday attacks and demanded that Lebanon be included in the ceasefire. It is "hard to argue" the strikes were carried out in self-defence, European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on X, while French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the attacks were "intolerable" and stressed that “Lebanon must absolutely be covered by this truce.”

Ahead of the US-Iran peace talks in Islamabad, Israel's ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, expressed deep scepticism toward Pakistan, stating that Israel does not trust the country and suggesting that the United States shares this view, merely treating Pakistan's role in the process as logistical facilitation. In a sharp and unprecedented escalation, Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Asif on Thursday called Israel "evil" and a "curse for humanity" for attacking Lebanon amid a US-Iran ceasefire, drawing a strong rebuttal from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a now-deleted post on X, Asif claimed that "peace talks are underway in Islamabad, genocide is being committed in Lebanon".

Lebanon’s troubled history

Lebanon’s history has been defined especially by its prolific ports along the Mediterranean trade routes. The refuge in its mountainous terrain has offered to groups fleeing persecution, and, since the Middle Ages, it has offered religious diversity. Phoenicians- persons who inhabited one of the city-states of ancient Phoenicia, such as Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, or Beirut, were the natives of Lebanon. Located along eastern Mediterranean trade routes, the Phoenician city-states produced notable merchants, traders, and colonisers. By the 2nd millennium BCE, they had settled in the Levant, North Africa, Anatolia, and Cyprus. Lebanon has been an important commercial hub for the Middle East. It has also often been at the centre of Middle Eastern conflicts, despite its small size, because of its borders with Syria and Israel and its uniquely complex communal make-up.

Since the 7th century, Lebanon has served as a refuge for persecuted Christian and Muslim groups. Lebanon as a contemporary state did not come into being until August 1920, when France established the state of Greater Lebanon as part of its League of Nations mandate. “Greater Lebanon,” with its current borders, was established by the French colonial regime governing Lebanon and modern-day Syria. Before World War I, Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans ran their Empire. The Ottoman Empire included Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. In the Mount Lebanon area (which is much smaller than contemporary Lebanon), Christian Maronite and Druze (a small subset of Shia Islam) communities lived in close proximity and relative harmony. This, however, started to change with the expansion of British and French imperialism into the Eastern Mediterranean during the 19th century.

The Republic of Lebanon (1943) — an Arabic-speaking country in Western Asia, is bordered by Syria to the north and east, and Israel to the south. Widely known as the “Switzerland of the East”, Lebanon attracted large numbers of tourists and its capital, Beirut — a major port city on the Mediterranean, became commonly referred to as the “Paris of the East”.

Political analysts argue that Lebanon’s religious and ethnic diversities have complicated the development of a stable political arrangement and impeded the development of a single national identity. Lebanon is a parliamentary democratic republic, which implements a special system known as confessionalism — a type of consociationalism which functions durably despite major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines in which no sub-group commands a majority.

Lebanon is a confessional state where, for example, positions in cabinet, parliament, the civil service, and other institutions are apportioned according to the relative religious populations. About 60 per cent of the Lebanese are Muslim and the rest are Christians. There are six different Muslim sects (in numeric order: Shi'a, Sunni, Druze, Isma'ili, Alawite or Nusayri), and twelve different Christian sects (in numeric order: Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Copt, Protestant) These sects are largely geographically defined. This mosaic of peoples and politics has led the Lebanese to historically seek a balance of power through a political arrangement known as confessionalism.

Most scholars agree that various forms of confessionalism existed in Lebanon as early as the 13th century and later in various forms under Ottoman rule. Encouraged by the Maronite community, the French formed “Greater Lebanon” by melding the old province of Lebanon (i.e. Mont-Liban, largely Maronite) with the coastal regions of Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, and Tripoli, as well as the Bekaa Valley (largely Muslim) The Lebanese Muslims and Syria, however, opposed this, and demanded that the additional territories remain under Syrian control. The Maronite community and the French disagreed, asserting that the new boundaries of “Greater Lebanon” formed the natural frontiers of Lebanon. The resulting stalemate triggered over twenty years of confrontations and turmoil, ending the French colonial presence in 1943, which led to the first conciliatory power-sharing breakthrough between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. In what became known as the National Pact, (a) the Muslim leadership agreed to cease pushing to incorporate Lebanon into a single Arab or Syrian state, and accepted the boundaries of “Greater Lebanon,” while (b) the Christian leadership agreed to cease looking to France or other Western nations for protection or military pacts.

This initial confessional arrangement fixed confessional representation in political positions, public offices, and public funding, among other agreements. Christians and Muslims were represented in parliament according to a 6:5 population ratio, a ratio that was determined according to a 1932 census under the French mandate. The National Pact of 1943 functioned passably for three decades until its collapse in 1975 with the outbreak of civil war. The National Pact of 1943 dictated that the president is a Maronite Christian, the prime minister is a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament is a Shia Muslim, aimed at ensuring representation but frequently resulting in political deadlock and reduced accountability.

The Taif Agreement (1989), officially the National Reconciliation Accord, a treaty signed in Taif, Saudi Arabia, was designed to end the 15-year Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). It restructured Lebanon's political system by reallocating power from the Maronite Christian presidency to a more balanced cabinet and an evenly split (50-50) parliament between Christians and Muslims.

Israeli occupation of Lebanon

Hezbollah, a Shiʿi militia based in southern Lebanon, emerged during the Lebanese Civil War to resist the entrance of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) into the war and its invasion of Lebanon from the south. It was permitted to keep its arms after the war, ostensibly to counter the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (1982–2000). In 1985, Hezbollah called for armed struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory. It has since played a central role in both the sectarian dynamics of Lebanon and periodic conflicts with Israel, particularly during the 2006 Lebanon War (between Israel and Hezbollah) and the Israel-Hezbollah War since 2023.

Israel’s main objective under Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, “Operation Peace for Galilee”, was political in nature; Tel Aviv sought to engineer politics by installing a pro-Israel government in Beirut through an alliance with the Maronite Christian group led by Bashir Gemayel. The ambition at that time was a Lebanon that would become an official peace partner, although this strategy ultimately collapsed after Gemayel’s assassination and dragged Israel into an 18-year occupation.

Compared to 1982, Israel’s military aggression into Lebanese territory since March 2026 has become a manifestation of a far more ambitious shift in Tel Aviv’s security doctrine. The operation, which began following the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader in “Operation Epic Fury,” has developed into a large-scale ground invasion involving the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of personnel, a figure that reflects Israel’s absolute priority to reorganise the regional map. Tel Aviv no longer hides behind narrow defensive rhetoric. The deployment of ground forces that began on March 16, 2026, openly targets control of territory up to the Litani River, which covers around 10 per cent of Lebanon’s total land area. Israel is effectively cutting off the geographic lifeline of southern Lebanon from the rest of the country.

Ecaterina Matoi, a scholar at the Middle East Political and Economic Institute (MEPEI), argues that Israel’s current offensives, particularly its ground incursion in Lebanon, could be seen as part of a broader strategy aligned with the “Greater Israel” concept which which envisions an Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, encompassing parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and beyond. It appears that Israel is no longer preoccupied with seeking local allies to manage Lebanon. Instead, Israel is applying what can be called the “Gaza Model” in southern Lebanon.