Israel DM Orders IDF To Escalate Demolitions In Southern Lebanon

Authored by Jason Ditz via Antiwar.com,

A week after ordering the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to prepare for a "long-term stay" in occupied southern Lebanon, Defense Minister Israel Katz has now also ordered them to escalate the rate at which they're destroying what is being framed as "Hezbollah infrastructure" across the south.

The issue with this is the same as it's been throughout the war, that Israel's definition of Hezbollah infrastructure generally boils down to civilian infrastructure at large, with a particular emphasis on the municipalities where Shi'ite Muslims live, but by no means restricting the attacks just to them.

Officials aimed to frame the tiny Shi'ite villages that the IDF already occupies as "Hezbollah fortresses," and presented the ongoing demolition of those villages as "engineering activity." Much of that engineering involves explosions, whether it's heavy artillery fire on the villages or increasingly the deployment of incendiary white phosphorus munitions to set fires in the villages and the surrounding area.

Katz has made clear that a number of the villages in the southernmost parts of Lebanon will simply have to "disappear," and with tens of thousands of homes destroyed in recent months, there are a number of villages which it can be said simply no longer exist.

But Israel has allowed a handful of non-Shi'ite villages to remain in that area, but living under the occupation leaves those villages in a very tenuous situation. Local leaders in Kfar Chouba reported that the IDF warned them that if anyone in the village was armed, the entire village population would be expelled and the buildings destroyed. So far, that hasn't happened.

But obeying the occupiers doesn't mean the villagers can live as they would in peacetime. The village's economy is based heavily around farming and olive orchards, but the Israeli troops regularly restrict villagers' access to those lands. There's no formal rule given to the villagers as to where they're allowed or not allowed at any given time, and even the southernmost parts of the village are "no go" areas, with IDF troops reportedly setting up operations within buildings in that part of the village.

Further north, Israel continues to heavily attack the Ali Taher Ridge, though in the past few days they haven't made any serious attempts to advance on the ground into the area. Israel reportedly sees the ridge as strategically valuable, as it overlooks much of the northern part of Nabatieh District, the northernmost part of Lebanon that Israel intends to occupy, at least at this point.