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The Genocide of South Lebanon

Israel is carrying out its Gaza strategy in yet another war.

First responders inspect the wreckage of a car reportedly targeted by an Israeli strike in Nabatieh on July 6, 2026. Lebanese state media said an Israeli strike on a car in the country’s south on July 6 killed four people, including three women.

On June 9th, after an Israeli air strike killed at least eight people in a residential block, the Israeli military ordered the Lebanese city of Tyre to be emptied. Tyre has stood for roughly four thousand years, long enough to have survived Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire. Now, Israel sought to clear it all out—the Old City and the churches and the camps where generations of some Palestinian families have lived since they were exiled from their homeland in 1948.   

A few days later, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, urged that for every rocket fired from Lebanon towards Israel, 10 buildings in Beirut’s Dahiyeh district, where hundreds of thousands of people live, should be leveled. He had previously vowed that Dahiyeh, would soon look like Khan Younis in Gaza, and that the villages of the south would be destroyed like Rafah and Beit Hanoun.

Nobody who has witnessed Israel’s annihilation of Gaza should be surprised that it is bringing the same genocidal mission to bear on Lebanon. But just because something is expected does not make it less important—and, now that there is talk of peace in the air between Israel and Lebanon, it is vital to examine what Israel has done and what it still intends to do to its neighbor—with, it would seem, the tacit agreement of the Lebanese government.

Since March, more than 4,200 people have been murdered and over ten thousand wounded. Roughly a fifth of the Lebanese population has been displaced. Sixty-four hospitals and clinics have been hit, and more than 100 health workers have been killed. On April 8th, Israeli strikes hit more than a hundred targets across Beirut and the south in roughly ten minutes, killing 357 people, the deadliest day in Lebanon since its civil war.

The Genocide Convention does not require a body count or a particular weapon. Genocide requires intent to destroy a group, in........

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