Israel this week launched limited military raids to attack specific Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, where the Shiite armed group operates.
But the Israeli army has mobilized more troops and warned hundreds of thousands of Lebanese to evacuate their homes and move to the north of the country.
Meanwhile, Israeli bombings in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, continue and intensify.
All this suggests that the escalation of this new Israeli operation in Lebanon will be greater than initially announced.
Although this is the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon since 2006, past generations remember a history of previous invasions in that country.
Since Lebanon’s independence in 1943, Israel has carried out operations in Lebanese territory on six occasions.
The first invasion took place in 1978 and was aimed at expelling Palestinian militants from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from southern Lebanon.
“It was short, it lasted less than a week, it did not achieve all the Israeli objectives and The United Nations demanded that Israeli forces withdraw“explains Mayssoun Sukarieh, professor of Middle Eastern studies at King’s College London and specialist in the modern history of Lebanon.
Origins of the conflict
The current conflict in southern Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel, like many others in the region, can be said to have its origins in the “nakba” or Palestinian catastrophe.
This is what is known as a historical period in which more than 750,000 Palestinians forced to flee or expelled from their homes after Israel proclaimed its independence from British Mandate Palestine on May 14, 1948 and during the Arab-Israeli war that began the next day and lasted 15 months.
As a result of the “nakba,” more than 100,000 Palestinians, mostly from the northern areas of what was then known as Palestine and the Galilee region, ended up in Lebanon.
They were joined by other waves of refugees who fled East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during subsequent Arab-Israeli wars in 1956 and 1967.
With the Cairo Agreement in 1969, signed by PLO President Yasser Arafat and the head of the Lebanese army, the refugee camps came under the control of a Palestinian military-police body.
So the PLO. which had been created in 1964 with the aim of liberating the Palestinians from Israel through armed struggle, established a kind of state within a state in Lebanon.
In this context, thousands of Palestinian fighters took refuge and were trained in those camps that were outside the jurisdiction of the Lebanese army.
The government of then Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, considered that the presence of PLO militants represented a security problem for his country and decided to act in 1978 and then again in 1982.
The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon occurred in the midst of a bloody civil war sparked by an attack by the Lebanese Phalanxes, a right-wing Christian militia allied with Israel, against to a bus full of Palestinian refugees.
The Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, was a time of increased Palestinian attacks against Israeli targets around the world.
One of these attacks, which occurred in the British capital, would unleash the wrath of Israel.
1982 – the bloodiest invasion to date
Following an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London, Israeli President Menachem Begin began an invasion on June 6 that brought his country’s army to the streets of Beirut.
With its land operation, Israel planned to weaken or even expel the PLO from Lebanon.
Experts say that Israeli leaders also sought to impose their ally Bachir Gemayel, head of the Lebanese phalanxes, as president of Lebanon and thus drag the Arab nation under Israel’s sphere of influence.
Two months of battles and destruction followed until an agreement was reached in August in which thousands of PLO fighters agreed to leave the country.
At the same time, the United States assured that it would guarantee the protection of the civilian population after the evacuation of PLO forces.
Until then, the Israeli plan seemed to be successful.
On August 23, Gemayel was elected president by Parliament for a six-year term.
But Bachir Gemayel would never assume the presidency.
He was killed in an attack on September 14, during a meeting of his party in the Achrafieh neighborhood of Beirut.
Sabra and Shatila: a massacre against Palestinian refugees
Two days after Gemayel’s assassination, Israeli-backed Christian militias entered two refugee camps in Beirut and massacred large numbers of Palestinians.
“Gemayel’s death unleashed the anger of the Falangists. The Israelis surrounded Sabra and Shatila and They let the Falangist militias enter and massacre all the people they found“says Professor Mayssoun Sukarieh.
The Falangists entered the camps at night while many of the refugees were sleeping, after launching flares to illuminate the darkened shelter.
“They killed entire families who were sleeping. Some woke up in time and started waking up others and shouting that the Israelis had arrived and were killing people,” Sukarieh says.
Many took refuge in the local mosque, but the Falangists also took it over and murdered those they found there.
Cases of sexual violence against Palestinian women were also reported.
The stories of the people who managed to escape are shocking.
A nurse who works at the Akka hospital, near Chatila, told the BBC that the Phalangists fired indiscriminately.
“A boy told me that The Falangists kicked the door open and shot his entire family. in front of him; “He was the only survivor,” he said.
The militants also kidnapped two nurses from that same hospital.
One managed to escape and told the press that her colleague was raped before being killed.
It is estimated that between 2,000 and 3,500 people They died only in this massacre.
“What happened was horrible. Some call it a massacre, others argue that it was a genocide,” says Sukarieh.
The Israelis withdrew three months after the invasion began, but created a buffer zone inside Lebanon.
On the Lebanese side, it is estimated that about 20,000 people diedmostly civilians.
On the Israeli side, 654 soldiers died.
Israel continued to occupy most of southern Lebanon until September 3, 1983, when it withdrew south of the Awali River in southern Lebanon due to increasing Israeli casualties from attacks by Shiite guerrillas.
Also in 1983, Israel’s Defense Minister during the massacre, Ariel Sharon, had to resign from his position following an Israeli investigation into what happened in Lebanon.
In 2001, Sharon would be elected head of government of Israel.
A new enemy
One of the consequences of this great Israeli invasion of Lebanon was that it promoted the creation of Hezbollah.
Some Shiite leaders in Lebanon wanted a military response to the invasion and broke away from the Amal Movement, a political group that became one of the most important Shiite Muslim militias during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).
The rebels formed a Shiite military movement that received military and organizational support from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and was named the Islamic Amal.
Shortly after, this organization allied itself with other groups and created Hezbollah.
The founding of this organization would change the objective of future Israeli invasions in Lebanon.
“The initial objective of the invasion was to get rid of paramilitary groups, but what it did was trigger a more severe resistance against Israel with Amal and later Hezbollah,” Vanessa Newby, a Middle East expert at Leiden University, tells BBC Mundo. .
“There is an argument to suggest that the increased use of force has simply generated more violent resistance from the Lebanese population,” he adds.
In April 1996, Israeli forces attacked their new enemy for the first timeHezbollah, in response to a series of rocket attacks.
The raids were limited in an operation that lasted just over two weeks.
But it is estimated that in addition to 13 Hezbollah fighters, Nearly 250 civilians died in Lebanon.
There were no fatalities on the Israeli side.
The raid was stopped, but tensions between Israel and Hezbollah continued.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdrew from southern Lebanon on May 25, 2000, and in June the United Nations established the “Blue Line,” an unofficial border between Lebanon and Israel.
The vacuum left by the IDF was filled by Hezbollah.
2006 Lebanon invasion: a failure for Israel
Hezbollah never recognized the legitimacy of the “Blue Line” drawn by the United Nations.
For the group, Israel continued to illegally occupy Lebanese territory.
In 2006, Hezbollah began a series of rocket attacks on Israeli cities.
On July 12, 2006, a group of fighters from the group crossed the border into Israel, attacked two military vehicles, killed eight soldiers and took two hostage.
The Israeli response was relentless. He undertook a military operation that included a blockade and intense bombing of cities, towns, airports, bridges and many other important structures in Lebanon.
The war lasted 33 days during which Hezbollah also launched a barrage of rockets against Israel.
According to official figures, 1,191 people died in Lebanon, most of them civilians. In Israel, 121 soldiers and 44 civilians died.
Hezbollah was left practically intact.
The Winograd Commission, created by the Israeli government to evaluate the outcome of the war, concluded in 2008 that the operation was a failure and that Israel had started “a long war, which ended without a clear military victory.”
War in development
Nearly two decades later, Israel has launched another invasion that the Israeli government says should be “limited, localized and targeted” in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah targets.
But the evidence on the ground shows that this is not the case.
The IDF has launched a relentless air campaign over Lebanon, attacking more than 3,600 targets linked to Hezbollah, according to IDF statements.
According to analysts, it is the most intense air campaign in the last twenty years.
The bombings have allowed it, among other objectives, to end the life of Hassan Nasrallah, historical leader of Hezbollah.
At least another 1,400 people have been killed and 900,000 displaced since Israel began its cross-border operation, according to the Lebanese government.
Analyst Vanessa Newby believes that the new Israeli invasion could trigger a broader war in the Middle East.
For his part, Mayssoun Sukarieh, from King’s College London, has doubts about whether Israel will be able to eradicate Hezbollah, as it plans.
“Still too early to know if he can achieve it.”
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