Lebanon is being broken in plain sight. Not only by bombs, though the bombs are doing enough. More than 370,000 children have been displaced in three weeks, 121 killed, 399 injured, over 150,000 students driven out of school as classrooms turned into shelters, and roughly 150,000 people cut off by the destruction of key bridges in the south. That comes to about 19,000 children uprooted each day. Anyone daring to call it anything other than the organised erosion of civilian life is whistling past the graveyard and calling it a wartime strategy.
Israel claims that it is only acting in self-defence through “precise and targeted strikes,” and that too, in response to rockets fired from Hezbollah after the attack on Iran. However, high-ranking officials have also spoken of a defensive buffer up to 30 kilometres north of the border, with far-right ministers openly advocating annexation. There’s something far murkier, far blood-chilling at play. No qualms about that. Evacuation orders now cover around 15 per cent of Lebanese territory including the entire south, shelter areas have been struck, hospitals and water stations damaged, and more than 85 per cent of displaced women and girls are outside formal shelters where the risks of exploitation and gender-based violence rise sharply; all of which scream how Israel is deliberately hitting at targets that would make ordinary life steadily harder to sustain. Perhaps, if this continues long enough, people will be forced to leave a society being made unlivable.
A buffer zone carved out through force will not stabilise Lebanon. It will do what such projects have done before: deepen reliance on armed groups among communities that feel abandoned and targeted.
The damage will not stop at ruined roads and broken buildings. More than one million people have already been displaced across Lebanon, over a fifth of the country, many of them Shiite families. In some areas, people looking for rented rooms are being screened because residents fear drawing fire. That is how war seeps into social life.
Lebanon is not only another Middle Eastern tragedy for condemnations and grief. The wider world should stop pretending not to see the pattern. Gaza established a template in which military necessity is invoked while civilian infrastructure is steadily dismantled, and mass displacement follows. What is now unfolding in Lebanon carries the same logic. That is why the issue is larger than one front or one militia. It is about whether the destruction of civilian life has become an acceptable instrument of war. *