Why Israel Targets Beirut’s Dahiya and What the Suburb Means for Lebanon | Israel attacks Lebanon

For years, Beirut’s southern suburbs have been talked about the world apart: a Hezbollah stronghold, a target, a warning or a battleground. But in Arabic, the word “Dahiyeh” simply means “suburb”.

The word itself is common. What makes it unusual in Lebanon is its history.

When the Lebanese speak of Dahiyeh, they do not mean any suburb of their capital. He specifically means South Beirut – a dense belt of villages, farms, informal housing and neighborhoods that have grown from the municipal fringes into a major extension of the city.

Dahiyeh – roughly the size of municipal Beirut – has been shaped by migration and displacement over the past 50 years. While many moved there for work or housing, many others were pushed there by wars, political unrest, evictions and a general sense of being neglected by the Lebanese state.

Gaining independence from French colonization in 1943, the social geography of Lebanon began to transform in 1948, when the establishment of Israel saw more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their land, commonly known as the Nakba. After Israel’s further annexation of Palestinian land in 1967 and the expulsion of Palestinian fighters from Jordan in 1970, parts of southern Lebanon and Beirut became increasingly associated with the Palestinian national movement.

Beirut’s ‘Poverty List’

However, Dahiyeh’s growth accelerated after 1975 when the Lebanese Civil War began. Displaced people from other parts of Beirut moved south. Israeli attacks and occupations in 1978 and 1982 drove many people to the outskirts of the capital. In that sense, Dahiyeh was not just a destination for “immigrants”. It was a refuge for the uprooted, the poor and the repeatedly forced.

Studies by scholars such as Mona Harb, professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut (AUB) show how a common noun—dahiyeh—gradually evolved into a distinct political space: a stigmatized periphery in the Lebanese imagination identified as Beirut’s “difficult social sphere.” Today, it is part of Greater Beirut, geographically, economically and socially woven into the capital, even though the country’s politics consider the area an outlying area.

Herb’s work clearly frames the southern suburb as a politically constructed urban area rather than a space outside of Beirut. To understand how that happened, one must begin with the making of modern Lebanon.

Under the French mandate, and later through the political system after independence in 1943, power in Lebanon was distributed through a sectarian system that heavily favored established elites, especially Maronite Christians, who dominated the presidency and other important positions. The system not only created inequality, but also formalized and reproduced it.

Rural Lebanon, especially the south and the Bekaa Valley, has been underdeveloped and politically neglected for decades. Among the most affected were Lebanon’s Shia communities, who were disproportionately concentrated in poor agricultural areas and had less access to state investments, infrastructure, and patronage than more privileged urban and mountain centers. Scholars argue that this is not just a temporary developmental gap, but a long history of marginalization that defines the country’s politics.

Israeli attacks on Palestinian positions inside Lebanon repeatedly hit surrounding Lebanese communities, mainly in the south. For Shiites in southern Lebanon, these attacks sharpened a bitter realization: they lived on the front lines of a bitter regional conflict, but were denied equal economic rights and meaningful political inclusion within Lebanon itself.

From that reality emerged a new form of Shia political mobilization focused not only on identity, but also on deprivation, dignity, and neglect of the state. That mobilization found its earliest expression in Harakat al-Mahroomin, the movement of the dispossessed, founded by Imam Musa al-Sadr in the 1970s. Al-Sadr became the towering figure of modern Lebanese Shiite politics as he gave social, religious and political forms to grievances for decades. That movement later developed an armed wing: the Amal.

Al-Sadr’s mysterious disappearance during a 1978 trip to Libya remains unsolved and politically contested. His historical significance is not contested. He sought equal rights, representation and a defining national presence to transform Lebanon’s Shia from a neglected rural underclass into an organized political constituency.

The rise of Hezbollah

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon changed the Shia political landscape once again. Israel’s siege of Beirut, the departure of Palestinian icon Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization forces, and Syria’s desire to dominate Lebanon intensified all divisions within Lebanese society.

In the meantime Amal remained a major force, close to Damascus for arms, money and political support. But new Islamist movements emerged in and around it, shaped by the Israeli occupation, disillusionment with the old leadership, and growing support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, particularly in the Bekaa region.

Over time, these currents crystallized into Hezbollah. The division within the Shia movement is less theological and more about political strategy, defined more closely by questions of alignment with Syria, solidarity with the Palestinians, and common resistance against Israeli aggression. Differences between Amal and Hezbollah turned violent in the 1980s, an inter-Shiite struggle that Lebanese often recall as a “war between brothers”.

As Hezbollah grew stronger, Dahi itself became more than a residential belt. It became an urban center of social and political power. Hezbollah built institutions there: offices, schools, clinics, welfare networks and media infrastructure. Amal also existed, but the common acronym that reduces Dahiyeh to a “Hezbollah stronghold” always hides more than it reveals.

Today, Dahi has a Shia majority, but also a small minority of Palestinians and other Lebanese communities, including Christians. It physically bleeds into what is known as Greater Beirut, including both Christian and mixed areas. So when a suburb is bombed, what it hits is not some isolated military island, but a deeply populated part of urban Beirut.

That is why Dahiyeh is central to the thinking of the Israeli military. During the 2006 war, large sections of the southern suburbs, especially Haret Hrek, were destroyed by Israel. The destruction was so symbolic that Israeli military strategists called it the Dahiyeh doctrine: the use of overwhelming force and large-scale destruction of areas associated with an armed group, with the intention of generating deterrence and pressuring residents who support the group. Rights activists and legal scholars say the doctrine violates international humanitarian law, as civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure are not legitimate targets because the armed group is embedded among the population.

However, that Israeli model has intensified since October 2023, when the genocidal war on Gaza and attacks on Lebanon began. Meanwhile, the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli strike in late 2024 destroyed Dahiyeh’s resistance. That erosion is most visible in the ongoing Israeli offensive in Beirut and southern Lebanon, where more than a million people have been registered displaced since March 2. The old formula – that Dahiyeh is the prime red line and any strikes there can be deterred by Hezbollah’s threats of retaliatory attacks – no longer holds for retaliatory strikes on several Israeli cities.

Once again, Dahiyeh has become the epicenter of war, plumes of smoke from repeated bombings that many outsiders still describe as a world, but one that is woven into Beirut’s daily life. Built over decades of the poor, immigrants and the repeatedly uprooted — and shaped by the politics of marginalization against what al-Sadr once labeled “the disenfranchised” — Dahiyeh has long served as a refuge and frontline. Today, he is again being made to bear the cost of a conflict bigger than himself.