israelis destroy Meiss al Jabal in southern Lebanon November 6, 2024.
Israel’s wanton slaughter and devastation across Lebanon intensified over the past week. In southern Lebanon alone, Israeli air strikes, tank fire and demolitions have devastated 37 towns and destroyed more than 40,000 housing units, like these in Marjayoun. Lebanon was already home to nearly 2 million refugees, mainly from Syria. Now some 1.2 million Lebanese have been driven from their homes by Israeli attacks. The UN agency for refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 472,000 people from Lebanon have fled into Syria in recent weeks, with tens of thousands going all the way to Iraq.
You’d never know it from the U.S. media coverage, but Israel is slaughtering Lebanese people every day—sometimes dozens at a time—and wounding many others. Witnesses describe indiscriminate Israeli air strikes that make no distinction between Hezbollah fighters and civilians. The death toll has now passed 3,100, with nearly 14,000 more wounded—three-quarters of them in the last six weeks after Israel massively escalated its campaign against Hezbollah, an Islamic fundamentalist organization backed by Iran. “Since October 4 of this year, at least one child has been killed and 10 injured daily,” UNICEF’s executive director reports.
+++++++++++++++
This video is a window into the cruelty and depravity of Israel’s military and its entire campaign against Lebanon. It shows an Israeli soldier playing the piano in a bombed out Lebanese home, while mocking and celebrating the destruction of this home and much of the entire town of Khiam in southern Lebanon.
Yet, despite these horrors, the New York Times reports that “For now, however, the United States has been unexpectedly tolerant as Israel mounts a devastating assault… Even as civilian casualties mount and the number of displaced Lebanese tops one million… the Biden administration says that Israel is acting in legitimate self-defense.”
In reality, Israel is not waging a war of self-defense. Israel is a Jewish-supremacist outpost for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, founded on the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. For the past year, it has been waging a limited military conflict with Lebanon’s Iran-backed, Islamic fundamentalist organization Hezbollah.1 On September 23, Israel massively escalated this battle to full-on war, and on October 1, it invaded southern Lebanon. Its goal is to crush any resistance to its genocide in Gaza and ongoing atrocities in the Palestinian West Bank, as well as opposition to its existence and U.S. imperialist domination of the Middle East from any quarter.
And the U.S. imperialists aren’t just “tolerating” this—they are actively arming, funding and supporting the slaughter in Lebanon because they feel it’s in their imperialist interests. The U.S. imperialists see Israel’s vicious assault as “an opportunity to reshape the politics of Beirut,” according to the New York Times, “and stand up a stronger [and more pro-U.S.] Lebanese government, reducing the influence of Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran.”
+++++++++++++++
These are some of the many irreplaceable historic ruins in Baalbek, a city of some 80,000 in the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. Now most people have been driven out of the city by Israeli bombs and threats, and many of these precious archeological treasures are being threatened or destroyed.
On November 6, Israel carried out dozens of air strikes across Lebanon in a widening offensive. A strike in Baalbek killed at least 40 people and wounded more than 50. The next day, a strike destroyed the Al-Manshiya, a historic Ottoman-era building very close to Baalbek’s Roman temples which are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Another 23 people were killed in the village of Almat two days later.
+++++++++++++++
On Tuesday, November 5, in the town of Barja south of Beirut, more than 20 people were killed and over a dozen more were wounded by an Israeli air strike which destroyed a high-rise apartment building. The attack came without warning. The same day another person was killed and 20 others were wounded in nearby Jiyeh, a coastal town and popular summer destination.
One man who narrowly survived described the attack, which injured his young son and wife when their home collapsed around them: “We were drinking coffee in the living room. These slabs that you see here weigh 100 kilograms. They fell on a 13-kilogram child. And all of these fell on my wife.”
+++++++++++++++
This video from the suburbs south of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, shows just a glimpse of the massive devastation Israel has brought to Lebanon. As if this weren’t bad enough, Lebanese first responders are being targeted by the Israeli military. More than 178 emergency workers have been killed and some 279 injured over the past year, three-quarters of them in the last six weeks.
“With the death toll from Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah soaring, and airstrikes expanding across the country, the rescue workers who are dispatched to pull casualties from the rubble are increasingly in the crosshairs,” the Washington Post reports.
“Civil defense crews say the attacks—including strikes on or near ambulances, fire trucks, paramedic stations and hospitals—have hampered search and rescue efforts, particularly in the south, forcing some teams to abandon their missions and leave casualties in the rubble.”
Deliberate strikes on rescue workers and medical personnel is a war crime under international law.