During his recent White House meeting with President Donald Trump, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun – referring to heavy civilian casualties and massive property destruction – asserted that Israel is not “fighting smart” in Lebanon. “Fighting smart,” in Aoun’s view, begins and ends with the people associated with the battleground.
Aoun is not alone in believing that people – not cities, hilltops, or even the enemy’s military force – are the center of gravity in the kind of war being waged between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. People – ideally their loyalty and support and at a minimum their cooperation – are the prize to be won. Israel seeks to end forever security threats posed by nonstate actors in Lebanon, threats that have existed for nearly 60 years. Can it do so by thoroughly, permanently, and perhaps intentionally alienating Lebanese Shiites, a sectarian community that represents upwards of 40 percent of Lebanon’s population and dominates southern Lebanon demographically?
Beginning on March 2, 2026, when Iran ordered its Hezbollah proxy to launch rockets and missiles toward Israel, over one-million Lebanese Shiites were displaced from their homes by Israeli military retaliation. And now the homes many of them left behind in southern Lebanon no longer exist, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) go from village to village destroying everything – even ancient olive groves and cemeteries - while Israeli cabinet ministers affirm that a “buffer zone” will be indefinitely occupied in Lebanon, with Lebanese residents not permitted to return.
The strategy and tactics of the IDF seem guided by the assessment that armed Hezbollah elements operate effectively only within a supportive and compliant population. Remove the people, lay waste to infrastructure, reduce dwellings and orchards to dust, and armed Hezbollah personnel become fatally exposed if they seek either to cross into Israel or to employ direct fire from Lebanon against Israeli buildings abutting the “Blue Line” boundary.
Indefinite occupation
Although Israel maintains it has no claim on Lebanese territory, clearly it intends to militarily occupy a significant part of southern Lebanon until it is convinced that there is no Hezbollah threat to its security from its northern neighbor; until the organization is disarmed. And both within that buffer zone and beyond, IDF engineers have employed heavy equipment and powerful explosives to make formerly populated places unlivable.
President Donald Trump has commented publicly on another aspect of IDF methodology in Lebanon. Trump has upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for dropping apartment buildings and killing, injuring, and terrorizing civilians to neutralize a handful of Hezbollah operatives. Israel maintains (as it does in Gaza) that it tries to minimize civilian casualties by making legal judgments as to whether prospective civilian harm is proportional to the value of the military target to be engaged. And no doubt the IDF has killed some loathsome Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, people whose lust for Jewish blood equals that of Hamas in Gaza. But from the points of view of many Lebanese – and not just Shiites – the IDF’s demolition frenzy and perceived indifference to civilian casualties substitute collective punishment for military necessity.
