By Robert Inlakesh

There is no conceivable way that Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon over the past week can be construed as self-defense unless you are being dishonest and are ideologically committed to defending Israel no matter what it does. 

Israel’s large-scale assault on Lebanon, which has inflicted the highest daily death toll of any conflict since 1982, is not the fault of Hezbollah. The context, in addition to international law and any basic look at the statistics, reveals that the Israelis are clearly the aggressors.

If you were to receive your understanding of the current war between Lebanon and Israel from the Western corporate media, you would probably think that Israel is launching strikes on “Hezbollah targets”: that it is combating a terrorist organization that has been attacking it since October 8 and that the Lebanese people are being used as human shields. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

US Media Cover Up Their Own People Setting Themselves on Fire to Stop the Gaza Genocide

A War on Hezbollah?

Dealing with the first issue of ‘Hezbollah targets’, the numbers speak for themselves. 

Within the space of less than forty-eight hours, Israeli airstrikes killed around 700 people in Lebanon, injuring over 2,000 others according to the Lebanese Health Ministry; many of the casualties were women and children. 

On top of this, thousands of homes across Lebanon have been destroyed or damaged, spanning from the southern villages along the border to the capital, Beirut, all the way to the north of the Bekaa Valley. 

If you listen to Israeli officials who have commented publicly to explain their actions, they don’t hide that they are hitting civilian infrastructure.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, even published his video message to the people of Lebanon, where he says “Hezbollah has been using you as human shields”, stating that “they’ve placed rockets in your living rooms” and “missiles in your garage”. 

On top of these allegations being ridiculous due to them being uttered without a single shred of evidence and literally the same copy/paste arguments to justify their attack on Gaza, the message is in English, not Arabic, making it clear that this is a message to the West and not the people of Lebanon.

‘Setting an Example’ – Why the UK is Hunting Down Pro-Palestinian Voices

Furthermore, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari also made the “missiles in civilian homes” argument, even using a CGI video that depicted the storage of rockets and cruise missiles which defy logic. 

Even the least militarily astute mind can disprove such videos using basic common sense. Storing highly explosive precision missiles that are many meters long in family homes is impractical and so dangerous that we would have seen accidents by now. 

In reality, Hezbollah stores its missiles in a labyrinth of tunnel systems underground.

Both of these examples are key to understanding that Israel is not denying they are targeting civilian homes, instead, they are constructing an argument to justify why their bombing campaign is directly targeting civilian infrastructure. 

In addition to this, they aren’t telling specific people to evacuate their homes in their text messages and flier-dropping missions, they are threatening them with airstrikes if they live in an area they have chosen to bomb indiscriminately.

In many ways, the bombing of Lebanon replicates how the Israeli air force had bombed Gaza in the initial phase of their war, prior to the ground invasion of the occupied territory. 

This is why the civilian death toll has been so high, just as the rate of displacement has been in the hundreds of thousands. 

Therefore, in order to characterize Israel’s attack on Lebanon as being targeted against Hezbollah, you would have to uncritically accept the Israeli argument that missiles are being stored in civilian living rooms and garages en-masse across Lebanon. You would also have to believe that this has been such a well-kept secret for years that there has been zero evidence leaked by anyone, at any time, from within the civilian population of Lebanon.

‘Gathering Intelligence’ – Who is the Mossad Financier Arrested in Turkiye

To say the least, the corporate media’s headlines and reports which claim Israel is simply attacking Hezbollah, would suggest that all of the news outlets are either lying or are populated by journalists who have the cognitive abilities of chimpanzees.

A ‘Terrorist Group’ that Attacked Israel First?

The next element of the framing of this conflict is who started it and why. Again, if you are to consume Western mainstream broadcast, radio or written media, you would believe that Hezbollah began firing thousands of rockets against Israel on October 8, completely unjustified. 

Then the question is normally posed: What would you do?

So, here is the actual context that no Western corporate media outlets will tell you. 

To begin with, Israel currently illegally occupies two portions of Lebanese territory in violation of international law. There is the Shebaa Farms area, which is located in the Golan Heights and is actually claimed by both the Lebanese and Syrian governments, who have a legitimate legal dispute over where exactly their borders are in this area. 

However, Israel has no legitimate claim to the area that they occupied during the June 1967 war and then re-occupied in 1973. 

In 1981, Israel annexed the Golan Heights area, including the Shebaa Farms, in violation of international law, this led to United Nations Security Council resolution 497 that deemed it illegal.

Then there is the illegal occupation of the Ghajjar village area, which is inside what is known as the Blue Line, recognized internationally as Lebanese territory. Israel not only occupies this land in contravention of international law but also violates Lebanese territory thousands of times on a yearly basis, including by land, air, and sea. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupied people have the right to resistance. A State also has the right to reclaim its territory that was seized by war. Which brings us to the next key piece of context.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, under the pretext that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was a terrorist organization that was firing projectiles and shooting at Israel. 

Keep in mind that the PLO would later sign the Oslo Accords with Israel, when both the US and Israelis would drop the terrorist label against them. During the 1982 war, Israel invaded Lebanon and murdered around 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, forcing the PLO to flee to Tunisia.

What were the claims made against the PLO? They were called terrorists, firing rockets, using human shields and hiding in tunnels. When the PLO and allied Leftist Lebanese groups were defeated by Israel, the Israeli military did not leave Lebanon as they claimed they would initially, instead they occupied southern Lebanon. 

Nothing New – Israel Torturing Palestinian to Death in Jenin is Consistent with Its War Policy

It was due to this war that Hezbollah emerged as the primary resistance group that would launch a sustained armed campaign against their occupiers. Hezbollah grew out of the predominantly Shia population that Israel had occupied.

In the year 2000, Hezbollah’s resistance attacks made the Israeli occupation so costly that they were forced to retreat. Then, in 2006, Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid that killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers, with the goal of freeing Lebanese and Palestinian political prisoners, this led to a war and Israeli ground invasion of Lebanese territory. 

Hezbollah emerged victorious from this war, which killed 1,200 people in Lebanon; most of them civilians. Since then, Israel has assassinated Hezbollah leaders and fighters, predominantly in Syria, also running sabotage operations in the country that have killed civilians and they have frequently violated Lebanese sovereignty every year.

Hezbollah is also the largest political Party inside Lebanon, it is part of the Lebanese government and the terrorist label is only attached to it by Western nations and their allies, the rest of the world deals with Hezbollah as a legitimate political party within the fold of Lebanese politics. 

Hezbollah had for instance fought alongside the Lebanese Army to deal with Daesh (ISIS) terrorists who threatened Lebanese sovereignty. It has provided services for and protected Syrian and Lebanese Christians from Daesh and Al-Qaeda, as an example. Therefore, attempts to frame them as an Al-Qaeda or Daesh-style group are wholly inaccurate.

Who is Iran’s New Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi? – PROFILE

But what about October 8?

On October 8, Hezbollah began conducting daily military operations along the Lebanese border area, targeting Israeli army positions and equipment primarily. It did so in support of the Palestinian people in Gaza, who at the time had already endured the beginning of Israel’s mass bombing campaign that had killed hundreds of civilians within the first day. 

The Secretary General of Hezbollah, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, issued a speech in October and laid out the exact nature of his group’s operations, stating clearly that the limited military actions would continue in order to pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire/prisoner exchange. 

Since that time, Hezbollah has conducted thousands of attacks, which have struck Israeli settlement areas, but mostly military targets. However, 80% of the attacks between the two sides were carried out by the Israeli military against Lebanon.

On top of this, Hezbollah’s attacks only killed a handful of Israeli non-combatants, whereas Israeli strikes against Lebanon had murdered nearly 200 civilians. Israel targeted and killed journalists, medical workers, women, children and the elderly in Lebanon, some of these cases were even investigated by international media and human rights groups, determining these actions to be war crimes.

‘Fabricating Evidence’ – Israel’s ‘Terrorist’ Smears against Journalists They Kill are Nothing New

Hezbollah’s attacks only expanded to target settlement areas with rocket fire, following Israeli airstrikes that targeted civilians in Lebanon. On top of this, Hezbollah has endured major attacks that even targeted the Lebanese Capital, Beirut, as far back as in January. 

Yet, each time such provocations occurred, Hezbollah responded with limited attacks on Israeli military targets. For instance, after Israel bombed a civilian building in southern Beirut, back in late July, killing Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr – along with women and children, injuring nearly 90 civilians – they launched a limited response that targeted Israeli military sites.

Each and every time Israel has attacked Lebanon in a major way, Hezbollah has stressed that its role in this war is to support Gaza and achieve a ceasefire. Even after the mass pager detonation attack that injured thousands of people and killed dozens, many of them innocent civilians, Hezbollah still expressed its desire to contain the conflict and not head to a full-scale war. However, Israel decided to then detonate hundreds of walkie-talkie devices during funerals for those killed in the pager attack, then launching a full-scale bombing attack against Lebanese civilian areas.

According to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Israel is committing a plausible genocide in Gaza. Hezbollah, along with Iraqi groups that are part of Baghdad’s security apparatus and Yemen’s Ansarallah, have been the only ones on the planet to militarily intervene in order to pressure Israel to sign a ceasefire agreement. 

The idea that Hezbollah is the aggressor, attacked Israel out of nowhere and must be destroyed for its irrational actions, is simply propagandistic nonsense. Lebanon and Israel have technically been in a state of war for decades. 

Israel is Torturing, Abducting and Using Children as Human Shields in Gaza – Analysis

UN resolution 1701 has been violated by Israel thousands of times since 2006, during which Israel has even stolen more Lebanese land through the construction of a security fence/wall on its territory.

There is no conceivable way that Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon over the past week can be construed as self-defense unless you are being dishonest and are ideologically committed to defending Israel no matter what it does. 

Ignoring the context here is an egregious violation of all journalistic principles. Even worse is that media outlets in the West claim to not have a pro-Israel bias, which makes their propaganda even more grotesque.

(The Palestine Chronicle)