Re: Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon ostensibly to counter Hezbollah – These attacks are killing and wounding civilians in densely populated areas. They are not targeted assassinations. Doesn’t Lebanon have an army or air force to defend itself with? How about the United Nations peacekeeping force UNIFIL? Is Lebanon not defending itself for political and strategic reasons, or does it actually not have a military force that’s capable of protecting itself?
Mods, feel free to move. I intend this as a factual question.
from what ive read over the years Lebanon is pretty much the mid-east version of Somalia
in a book about the Mossad there was a chapter about the last Israeli invasion and one of the things that were pointed out was to get from the official residence to his office the president of Lebanon had to pay 5 or 6 terrorist/criminal gangs roadblocks for passage daily
Lebanon can’t keep Hezbollah terrorists from running roughshod around their own country and blasting thousands of rockets into Israel.
If they can’t operate effectively at home, how do you expect them to exert their will over Israel?
If the Lebanese army was functional, there wouldn’t be a Hezbollah threat. Either the Lebanese army itself would be fighting Israel, or there wouldn’t be conflict with Israel.
You make good points. But my question is (I hope) factual. Lebanon’s territory and its civilian population is being attacked (not just Hezbollah). Can Lebanon protect itself?
I believe Lebanon is a fractured state. There is a civilian population but drawing lines is not easy there. I’d barely consider it a country anymore. That is no solace to the civilians.
The idea that Lebanon is a country and has a government is where you’re going wrong.
It was a country and it had a government. But the entity that international polite society still recognizes as that government does not currently really control the country’s territory nor populace. Instead those things are controlled by armed warlord gangs.
The government is more than a polite fiction, but not much more.
According to Hezbollah, which does launch rockets randomly into Israel. Israel claims the attacks on Hezbollah are targeted. Hard to know who to believe- terrorists or a crook who is supported a theocratic consortium. I just assume both are lying.
I assume that if there are bombs dropping in a city, civilians are impacted. Probably some civilians have been killed.
But it’s true that Lebanon, as a nation, has imploded and it is basically being run by Hezbollah, which has been lobbing number into Israel and onto Israel civilians for a while now.
By no means do I doubt that. But I think Israel is trying to target Hezbollah terrorist- and they dont really care if a few civilians get hurt also. So, yeah, I think the attacks are kinda sorta targeted, but by no means does that mean that there arent innocents killed by them.
I think if Israel spots a missile launcher in some park they are bombing that missile launcher. If some civilians live across the street then bad luck for them.
Lebanon’s armed forces, the LAF ostensibly have a role that includes defending Lebanon from outside attack. The LAF is also struggling to support its existence as a legitimate army, which depends in part on U.S. aid. The linked State Dept. release details $3 billion in assistance in recent years to the LAF which includes armament. The official policy is to help the LAF defend Lebanon’s borders, fight terrorism and counter “internal threats”, whatever that means.
If the LAF were to send its military capability against Israel, it would not only be decimated but risk losing U.S. funding and deplete its strength as a counter to Hezbollah, to the extent that exists.
What evidence is there that Israel is targeting civilians in Lebanon, as opposed to focusing on an armed foe that, as in Gaza, is hiding behind an unwilling civilian population?
Thanks @Jackmannii that’s the kind of info I was looking for… And I’m not saying that Israel is “targeting” civilians, just that they’re killing them without caring that they’re innocent bystanders.
Lebanon hasn’t had a president in closing on two years; it has a parliament of sorts but is so fractured that it doesn’t actually pass any useful legislation; the court system in the country can charitably be described as non-functional and existing only to serve the few very wealthy benefactors; the civil authority and infrastructure is all but obliterated, and the domestic banking sector has essentially collapsed to the point that people have taking to robbing their own banks to get a withdrawal from their account. Even before the 4 August 2020 explosion of a massive load of ammonium nitrate taken from the abandoned bulk freighter MV Rhosus absolutely devastated Beruit, the massive corruption and failure of all viable industry and agriculture placed the country, which had already suffered the ravages of a decades long civil war followed by occupation of Hezbollah (supported both financially and with arms and materiel by Iran).
Post-WWII when it became “Greater Lebanon” and then the independent Republic of Lebanon it was a relatively progressive nation, and Beruit a major financial and trading center as well as a hub of education and culture, often referred to as the “Paris of the Middle East”. The Lebanese Civil War, starting in 1975, put an end to that, and it has been in a long slide of corruption (weapons trade, money laundering), terrorism, warfare, and civil strife pretty much continuously since then.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is a truly multi-national force with contributions ranging from a handful to a few hundred (Italy and Indonesia each have around a thousand troops), so you can imagine how well that works. It is mostly infantry and light armor with essentially no anti-aircraft or anti-missile defenses, and their role is essentially to prevent a full scale invasion from not just Israel but various polities in Syria. If Israel did decide to make more than border incursions and lobbing missiles and artillery back into Lebanon, it would be an international incidence but UNIFIL could only put up a token resistance, and likely would just retreat and let Israel duke it out with Hezbollah rather than to get in a three way standoff.