Israel’s second front: on the ground in Lebanon

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, while the world is looking at Iran and the Strait of Hormuz and Donald Trump's truth social account, Israel is laying siege to southern Lebanon.

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1:07I'm here in the city of Tyre in South Lebanon, right after... Tyre is a jewel of a city on the Mediterranean Sea. It has arguably Lebanon's best beach, ancient ruins, welcoming people. But last week, Guardian journalist Will Christou was there to cover a war. So I got in Tuesday morning, and I was surprised to see that despite the debris over the streets and despite the occasional airstrikes, that there were still a lot of people there. Then Israel issued an evacuation order. Everyone in the city, including journalists like Will, were told to go. The corridors were just filled with people talking to each other, are you going to leave or are you going to stay, grabbing bags, grabbing kids, screaming, trying to run out in time ahead of the bombing.

1:50We decided to stay and we were sitting on a little pier overlooking the rest of the city and waiting for the bombing to come. And it was me and a few other journalists and one of us got a phone call. It was from a Romanian number.

2:08It was an automated voice in Arabic saying, this is the IDF. You're close to Hezbollah installations and you need to leave now for your safety. It really drove home the threat, and it was scary. I went back to my room around 4 a.m., and that's when the bombing started.

2:33And immediately what you feel is you feel the pressure of the blasts. It rocks the hotel room windows, and it sounds loud like thunder outside your room. And it keeps you up. I mean, you can't sleep because you wonder how close it's going to get. and we emerged the next morning and the city which had been full of life and had lots of people there just the day before now it was mostly empty and you could see people also couldn't sleep all night they had day's looks on their faces and the air was filled with that sort of post-airstrike smell which is a combination of burning rubber and what smells like gunpowder

3:13This latest Middle East conflict has been largely an air war. Missiles and drones and rockets across the region. But in southern Lebanon, it's soldiers and fighters from both sides facing off on the ground as well.

3:31That part of the country has essentially been carved off. It's a no-man's land and the only people that are there are Israeli soldiers. and Hezbollah fighters trying to fight them and some people who couldn't leave when they wanted to. Now a fifth of Lebanon's population is displaced and Israeli ministers are saying, if you want to understand what might happen next, look to Gaza. From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in Focus, the second front on the ground in southern Lebanon.

4:04Will Christou, welcome back to Today in Focus. Marcus, welcome back to me also for a couple of days. You're in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, from where you cover the Middle East for The Guardian. It's a city that at the moment is under daily bombardment. What is it like to be there? You know, it's unnerving. The way we found out that there was a war in Lebanon was at 3 a.m. We heard big explosions waking us up two weeks ago. And since then, it's been every night there's bombing. There's people on the streets sleeping in tents. And also, there's sort of an erosion of the sense of safety. You know, it used to be in the last rounds of conflict, there were areas where the war was there and this place is safe.

4:41But now there's been strikes, you know, in central Beirut, hitting hotels, hitting major buildings. So the sense that nowhere is safe is really sort of pervading. Well, I mean, you say that nowhere feels safe. Is that true? Or are there parts of the country, parts of Beirut at least, where life is carrying on as normal? So I think, you know, if you had wanted to go skiing this weekend, you could have. The slopes were still operating. People were up there. Beirut is famous for, you know, partying through the war. It's sort of the resilience aesthetic of the capital. But I think this time, you know, there is a sense of weariness, even in those areas where you can sort of escape and forget about it up in the mountains.

5:21There's a sense that the entire country is suffering from this. Not just that, but the strikes are following displaced people wherever they go. So there is sort of an idea that the front line is not really present. There's no front line. It's the entire country.

5:44Will, you and I chatted a lot during the last big Israeli war in Lebanon at the end of 2024. People may remember Israel blowing up pages and walkie-talkies of Hezbollah members across Lebanon, a campaign of bombings and assassinations. including of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. And then at the end of that war, suddenly this militant group, Hezbollah, that had dominated Lebanese politics for decades looked like a spent force. What happened after that? That moment right after the war, it was as if a page had been turned in the country. All of a sudden you can talk about certain things you weren't able to.

6:21The issue of whether or not Hezbollah had the right to retain arms in the country. Certainly, all of a sudden it was up for debate before as a red line. And then you had the government saying explicitly that the government will disarm Hezbollah, that it's a non-state armed militia, will take back the weapons. And for months, they said that they were doing that. And as they're disarming Hezbollah, Israel was hitting them almost daily. So to me and to many other people, it seemed like Hezbollah was really a force that was on its back foot. It wasn't the militia that people had talked about for years that was bigger than most European armies.

6:54It was battered, it was bruised, and it wasn't ready for another war. And for the Lebanese government, how challenging was it to fulfill this task of disarming Hezbollah, this non-state militia that for many years was thought to be more powerful than the Lebanese army itself? It's very tricky. It's tricky for a number of reasons. The first, like you brought up, is that Hezbollah is better armed, better equipped, better trained than the Lebanese army itself. So they're very careful to try to disarm it without confronting the group directly. And that was a very tricky game. And they had to navigate that while being under Israeli and US pressure to disarm Hezbollah faster.

7:32Then the second point is that Hezbollah is not a foreign imposed force in Lebanon. It's something that was born in the 80s to get rid of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. It has a wide base of support across the country. You know, it's not just a group, it's an ideology. So the government was very careful to try to approach disarming group in a way that didn't alienate large portions of the population. And in my conversation, senior Lebanese officials, they said that they wanted to do it slow, that they wanted to do it in a way that was safe. But what's now become very clear is that they thought they were operating with ample time, but they didn't realize that they didn't have much time to carry out this project.

8:16And so what we now know what happened in the aftermath of that is that they started to reconstitute themselves. And they did that with the help of Iran. The IRGC sent advisors and they started to reorganize the group, change the hierarchy, change the way they fought, and reposition certain leaders. And so when Hezbollah entered the war, even some members of the political wing of the group didn't know that was happening. So when the US-Israeli war on Iran started in late February, it sounds like it wasn't obvious that Hezbollah would weigh in. People just didn't know what was even left of the group on the ground.

8:54And so how did they enter the war a few days in? They entered the war with a barrage of rockets. You know, in the middle of the night, at midnight, they sent out a stream of rockets in northern in Israel with an announcement that they're avenging the death of the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. So, how was that decision perceived among Lebanese people? Because you said Hezbollah has some support in Lebanese society, but it's a very diverse place. It has a significant Christian population, a Sunni Muslim population. How did Lebanese people feel about entering this war that even a few days in was obviously going to be incredibly destructive?

9:33You know, like you said, Lebanon's a very diverse place. But the first reaction, you know, there's this video I remember from the beginning of the war where somebody filmed the Hezbollah rockets going towards Israel. And as he was filming, he just said, no, no, no, no. Because he knew what would happen next.

9:53And, you know, within two hours, Israel just started bombing and pounding the country and announced the beginning of a military operation.

10:03That had obviously been, you know, they'd been prepared for for a while. So even among Hezbollah supporters, in the first few days, there was anger. You know, these are people whose homes have been destroyed, that they haven't had yet time to rebuild from the last war. And all of a sudden, they're thrust into another war. And they know that they are going to be the ones that are going to bear the brunt. So they were pissed, to be honest. I mean, they were very angry. And everyone was angry. Okay, so people are angry because they know Israel is going to retaliate hard. But when that retaliation came, what did it look like?

10:34What have the past few weeks looked like? You know, there's been an expectation that Israel was going to launch a military operation in Lebanon for the past six months or so. They said they wanted to finish off Hezbollah, that the Lebanese government wasn't doing a good job of disarming them. So everyone's expecting at some point a military operation to happen. But they didn't know what the trigger was. When Hezbollah launched those rockets into Israel two weeks ago, that was the trigger. And what happened next was a wide bombing campaign. And quickly, you know, military brigades within Israel were moved to the northern border with Lebanon.

11:06It was clear that they had prepared for this exact possibility. And then a few days later, you know, the wide swaths of south Lebanon were declared no man's zones and people were displaced south. The southern suburbs of Beirut, Daesh, which houses nearly half a million people, also declared a no man's zone. People were displaced. And this is the Israelis basically saying everybody in these suburbs, everybody in whole towns across the south have to go now for their safety? Yeah, they say, you know, they put up announcements over Twitter, either in the middle of the night or during the day saying you are close to Hezbollah facilities, you have to leave and don't come back.

11:42And over time, these evacuation announcements or displacement orders, they become more and more sweeping. You know, for example, in the south, there's an area about 25 miles away from the border that apparently no one's supposed to be living there. And they said, if you move south, you're putting your life in danger. And so how much of Lebanon, what percentage of the country, of the population is now subject to these evacuation orders? So about 15 % of the territory of Lebanon is under evacuation order right now. Wow. Which again is unprecedented. One in five people are displaced. That's over a million people.

12:22And most of those people are out of shelters. They're living on the streets. What does that look like in such a small country to have one in five people without somewhere to live? It's bizarre. It's horrific. I mean, Lebanon right now, it's been raining for the past few days. And when you're in your apartment and you're safe and sound, you think it's nice, it's cozy, whatever. But then you think about those people who are living in tents or they have no shelter, they're living on the streets. I mean, everywhere you go in Lebanon right now, in Beirut and other cities, you see people just lying in the streets.

12:54there's not enough shelters to accommodate them. Again, there's more than a million people that are displaced. Only about 150 ,000 of them are in shelters. And remember that Lebanon, it's a bankrupt country. It doesn't have a banking system. Its government is dysfunctional at the best of times. So this is not a country that can handle a displacement crisis like this that for most countries would devastate them. So it's been very challenging. And, you know, we've seen also that, you know, I went to visit some displaced people living in central Beirut in a place called Ramlat al-Bayda, so on the sea.

13:29And the night before, there was an Israeli strike targeting displaced people. I talked to a man who had five kids living in two tents on the street, and he was from Dahi, the southern suburbs. He had been displaced. And he said, I thought I'd be safe here, but I'm not, so I don't even know where to go now. So it's not just displacement, but it's psychological terror. So even the people who are displaced, who are living in tents, they don't feel safe from the bombing? I mean, they're not safe from the bombing? No. And what this has done is created social tension in the country. Because Israel has been targeting displaced people, people are now afraid to let them into their homes, let them into their neighborhoods, fearful that one of them might be associated with Hezbollah and might bring an Israeli missile with them.

14:11So you've got a lot of people who are slamming the doors shut in front of displaced people, and it's creating social tensions.

14:26As of today, where do we stand with this war? What does it actually look like in Lebanon? So now you have part of the country that is relatively safe from bombing. I mean, you get the occasional bombing in central Beirut, for example, but it's not like the south of Lebanon. Israel has been steadily carving off the south of Lebanon from the rest of the country, isolating it. Over the past week, they've been bombing bridges over the Latani River, essentially cutting off anyone who's still remaining in the south of Lebanon there, and cutting off access to the rest of the country. We were in tear when they bombed the first bridge entering into the city, which just left one more bridge coming out of the city.

15:07And as we left, I remember thinking, you know, if they bomb this bridge, that's it, people are stuck. And there's, To give some context, there are about 30 ,000 people in that city alone. On Sunday, they bombed that bridge twice, leaving a huge crater. Wow.

15:26And also just cutting off the south from the rest of the country. And on the more immediate needs, if you're a civilian or if you're somebody stuck in that city, you can't move now and getting supplies to that city will be very, very tough. just on the more long-term level, this is going to take decades to repair and to reconnect the country. And it's creating real fears that this is paving the way for a long-term annexation of southern Lebanon by Israel. We'll talk about those long-term plans, but I'm really struck by this idea that if you're in this southern part of Lebanon, you're basically stuck.

16:00There's no way, no safe way back to Beirut. We know that some of the people now stranded in the South may be Hezbollah fighters, but I'm guessing a lot of them, maybe most of them are not. They're just civilians or health workers. So what do we know about life and conditions for them? I mean, it's something that's scary. It's something that's new. They're essentially cut off from the rest of the country. How are they going to get food? How are they going to get medical supplies? It's a siege scenario. And not just that, But in the Israeli evacuation orders or the displacement orders, what they constantly say is that if you move south, you're placing your life in danger.

16:37And the implication being is that if you remain there, you slowly become identified as a target, as maybe associated with Hezbollah. And so what we're steadily seeing is the emptying out of the south and sort of a legitimization of targeting of anyone that remains. And what we've seen is sort of a strategy from Israel is to slowly degrade the conditions for life. And part of the way they do that is by targeting medical facilities, targeting medical workers. We recorded over 128 attacks on medical facilities by Israel over the past two weeks, 40 medical workers killed. And we've seen this before.

17:12We've seen this in Gaza, where if they degrade the conditions for life enough, people will be forced to leave. And the echoes with Gaza are really distressing. What is it like to be, say, a medical worker trying to save lives, to do your job in those conditions? You know, I was standing on the ruins of a destroyed medical center outside of the city of Nabataea this week. And I was talking to a first responder and he said that his friends were in the building when they were killed. And he went there to try to pull them out. And I asked him, I said, you know, how do you stomach that? How are you sitting here and still doing your job when you know you might be next?

17:50he said you just can't think about it if you think about it too much you'll start to panic you know just know that you're trying to help people and that's good enough i asked them you know can you do anything to protect yourself from from being targeted and they said yeah we're taking precautions you know we're now we're not sleeping in medical centers we're sleeping in ambulances each one of us parked far away from each other so if a single strike falls doesn't kill all of us at the same time god so better two are killed instead of three so it's grim It's really grim. That's so grim. And do the Israelis, do they admit that they're targeting health workers?

18:25How do they frame this? No, I mean, they didn't respond to our request for a comment. We gave them coordinates of medical sites that we visited that were struck. They didn't answer. We asked them about double tap strikes in five specific instances. They didn't answer. But, you know, this isn't new. I mean, you said it before. We saw this in Gaza. We saw systematic attempts to degrade the health sector, to degrade the conditions of life, targeting medical workers, targeting, you know, civilian infrastructure. This is the Gaza playbook being rolled out in Lebanon.

18:58Coming up, why the war in Lebanon may continue, even after the war against Iran ends.

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20:32So, Will, you said that there was confusion in Lebanon when Hezbollah decided to drag the country into this war over what exactly they were trying to achieve. A few weeks in, do we have any sense of why they did this, what their goal from this is? I think what's increasingly become clear is that Hezbollah views this as an existential fight for its survival. Their calculus was that a war was coming in Lebanon against them at some point, so they decided to take it on the front foot, not be surprised by it. and so they know that the Lebanese government has been trying to disarm for a while they know that Israel will no longer tolerate Hezbollah existing on its northern borders so they're very much viewing this as a war for survival you know many analysts and other people describe Hezbollah joining the war as suicidal and in a sense they might be right you know this is a non-state militia which has been severely degraded over the past two years fighting probably the most powerful military in the region, if not one of the most powerful ones in the world.