Israel has killed nearly 600 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 750,000 in less than two weeks. This is the opening act of Israel’s Gaza doctrine applied to the new front. The formula is consistent: displacement – by ordering people to leave or destroying their means of survival. Demolish civilian infrastructure to reclaim and expand territory through so-called “buffer zones”. Fragment any coherent regime by carving up territory into disconnected enclaves where military action continues at a low intensity.
I worked in Palestine for three years before being expelled by the Israeli authorities. I watched this theory develop in real time. Now, from Beirut, I am witnessing its counterpart.
In the West Bank, Israel has spent decades dividing the region and denying Palestine any contiguous geography. Water wells sealed with cement, houses demolished on impossible to obtain permits, herders pushed off their land by illegal settlement outposts. In Gaza, the same logic has been applied with greater speed and fury.
In October 2023, Israel announced that all Palestinians north of the Wadi Gaza must leave immediately. A few days earlier, Israel’s defense minister had declared a total siege: no electricity, no food, no water. By labeling an entire population as the enemy, Israel created an expendable class of people. The army has divided maps with Gaza into numbered blocks. When your number was called, you were forced to leave. The evacuation orders became an alibi for later crimes. People were ordered to al-Mawasi, a coastal area Israel designated a “safe zone”, a concentration area where hundreds of thousands of people live in tents, where airstrikes continued. Areas known as evacuation zones were depopulated and destroyed.
Classic counter-insurgency logic involves “clear, hold and rebuild.” Israel’s approach was radically different: destroy, displace, uproot. The goal is not to pacify the area, but to empty it. In both Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel considers the civilian population inseparable from the resistance they support. Their relocation is the objective. The decline of their political representation is a condition that Israel seeks to perpetuate. This is colonial-colonial logic in contemporary military form.
The same playbook has now arrived in Lebanon, but here there is a marked difference from previous Israeli operations. In the First Lebanon War of the 1980s, Israel tried to install a sympathetic government. Gaza shows that Israel has abandoned that hope. The goal is no longer to determine who rules a region but to ensure that no coherent governance exists. Israel is not alone in this; The UAE’s approach to Yemen and the Horn of Africa – and its support for Israel in Gaza – reflects the same preference for isolated enclaves. A regional theory of fragmentation shared between the combined forces emerged.
Israel has issued evacuation orders for all of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. The familiar map that appeared on my screen in Beirut last week has the same design and the same lethal distortion as the one we dealt with in Gaza; The declared evacuation zones fail to match the areas shown on the map. In Gaza, those who cross invisible lines are killed.
Millions of people are now on the move. Schools have turned into shelters, health workers have been killed and people are sleeping on the seafront where a tent was bombed two nights ago. Israel has threatened to attack the infrastructure of the Lebanese state if the government fails to act against Hezbollah – expanding its goals from displacement and destruction of infrastructure to forced destabilization of the state. The Lebanese government responded by banning Hezbollah from firing. This is precisely the internal fracture that Israel’s strategy is designed to provoke.
But Lebanon is not Gaza. Hamas is fighting inside the besieged territory with advanced weaponry and is already challenging Israeli forces. Hezbollah commands highly sophisticated weaponry, a hardened infrastructure and decades of preparation for this type of war. It has shown to absorb and repel heavy blows, surprising Israelis and outside observers with the depth of its capabilities. Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa have already met significant resistance. It is here that ideology may encounter its limits – not through diplomatic pressure, which fails to materialize, but through asymmetric military reality. Iran has clearly made Lebanon’s fate part of the calculus of any cease-fire, implying the unification of fronts on which Israel is thought to be weak.
A doctrine built on the assumption of impunity has met some resistance in the conference halls of the so-called rules-based order. The Gaza doctrine is an expanded version of what Israel previously called the “dahiyeh doctrine” — the use of overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure — now weaponized for a greater end: the permanent redistribution of the territory’s geography, demographics, and political order.
This doctrine has developed in a vacuum of accountability. The International Court of Justice is ignored. Security Council is disabled. Governments continue to do business with Israel because it has consistently normalized the unacceptable. Daniel Reisner, head of the international law division of Israel’s military advocate general’s office, was candid in saying, “If you do something for a long time, the world accepts it (…) continues through violations of international law.”
The United States is not a bystander to this failure; Actively participates in deepening it. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the transatlantic alliance in racist terms and cast colonialism as a Western achievement. At an event in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee expressed confidence that Washington would “neuter” both the ICC and the ICJ — institutions that could pursue accountability.
What is unfolding in Lebanon is a political continuation of the ongoing colonial-colonial project. Evacuation orders are precursors to mass destruction, designed to prevent return and change the landscape forever. Stability in the Middle East requires more than cease-fire agreements that maintain divided populations and allow low-grade warfare to continue. This requires the unconditional enforcement of international law, full accountability for those who prosecute this doctrine, and the right of return and reconstruction – from Beit Hanoun to Beirut.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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