Just after daybreak on Monday, dozens of US-made warplanes began raining bombs and missiles on Lebanon, killing more than 550 people and injuring 1,800 in the hours that followed. By day’s end, Israel had carried out one of the most intense aerial bombardments in modern history. The Israeli fighter jets were sent by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, but they couldn’t have gotten off the ground without the full support and complicity of Joe Biden over the past 11 months.

The Israeli military said it bombed more than 1,600 targets throughout Lebanon that day, claiming it was targeting locations where Hezbollah stored rockets and other weapons it was firing at northern Israel. The death toll, which included 50 children and 94 women, was the country’s highest single-day toll since Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended in 1990. Nearly 500,000 Lebanese civilians fled their homes in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa valley and other regions.

In one day, Israel expanded the brutal tactics of its Gaza war – massive bombardment and displacement of civilians – into Lebanon. Netanyahu also eviscerated one of the last supposed red lines that Biden had tried to impose on his ally: preventing the war that Israel launched after the 7 October attacks by Hamas militants from spreading to Lebanon. There’s little doubt that over the past week, Israel has launched an all-out war against its smaller neighbor, even if that war has not yet turned into a regional conflagration that draws in Iran and its allied militias in the Middle East.

This catastrophic war is being engineered by Netanyahu, who has worked for months to expand the conflict out of Gaza, into a war without end that would enable him to remain in power and avoid multiple investigations into the Israeli government’s intelligence failures leading up to 7 October. If he’s forced out of office, Netanyahu would also face a long-delayed trial on corruption charges stemming from an earlier stint as prime minister. Netanyahu’s strategy to prolong the war – by obstructing a ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza and carrying out escalatory attacks against Hezbollah and Iran, intended to provoke them into a wider conflict – has worked. His Likud party is once again leading national polls in Israel, and it has recovered much of the ground it lost since last year.

Biden also bears significant blame for the unfolding catastrophe – and he will be complicit if Israel tries to turn Lebanon into the new Gaza.........

© The Guardian