Red Flag Alert for Lebanon - Update #2

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security forcefully condemns Israel’s horrific assault on Lebanon today, in an operation Israel has dubbed “Eternal Darkness.” Within a timeframe of ten minutes, Israel launched 100 simultaneous attacks against 60 targets across Lebanon, including ten densely populated neighborhoods in central Beirut. These attacks came completely without warning. According to a preliminary count from the General Directorate of Civil Defense, 254 people have been killed and 1,165 others injured, many of them women and children. This is the largest wave of airstrikes in Israel’s war on Lebanon. According to Al Jazeera reporter Malcolm Webb, “[m]any of the locations where these weapons hit are also areas where Hezbollah isn’t known to have any significant presence.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam released a statement in which he accused Israel of firing on “defenseless civilians.” He said that Israel “remains utterly heedless of all regional and international efforts to halt the war – not to mention its utter disregard for the principles of international law and international humanitarian law, which it has never respected.” He called on “[a]ll friends of Lebanon … to assist us in bringing an end to these aggressions by every means available. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun called the strikes a "massacre."

Israel decided to commit these new atrocities despite Hezbollah’s agreement to abide by the 2-week ceasefire negotiated last night between the U.S. and Iran. According to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Lebanon was included in the ceasefire agreement. However, earlier today the Israeli Prime Minister announced that Lebanon was not included and launched operation “Eternal Darkness.” U.S. President Donald Trump later supported Netanyahu’s position, telling the U.S. news outlet PBS that Lebanon “is a separate skirmish.”

Already Israel’s attack on Lebanon has challenged Iran’s commitment to the ceasefire. A security source within Iran told the country’s Tasnim news agency that Iran may consider withdrawing from the ceasefire if Lebanon is not protected. Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi posted on X that “The Iran–U.S. Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both. The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”

Sabotaging peace may have been one of Israel's purposes in launching operation “Eternal Darkness.” Israel was apparently not involved in the eleventh hour diplomatic negotiations that led to the ceasefire decision. Israel has made clear that its aim in the war against Iran is a total destruction of the current regime. The ceasefire challenges Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bold promises that that goal would be achieved. Politicians and ordinary people in Israel have responded to the news of the ceasefire with ire. Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid called the ceasefire one of the greatest “political disasters in all of our history.” The Prime Minister may have wanted to use a massive demonstration of violence to project strength at a moment of weakness and force the U.S. back into war.

Israel has committed a bloodbath in Lebanon today. Once again, it has claimed that this bloodbath was targeted at Hezbollah. Such claims make a mockery not only of international humanitarian law, but also of morality, ethics, and human decency. Today’s attacks on Lebanon were a clear atrocity crime no matter how Israel tries to justify it. It is high time that the Western nations, especially the United States, which has blocked any meaningful effort to challenge Israel’s impunity, end their slavish relationship to the state of Israel and work to isolate it militarily and diplomatically to bring it back to sanity. This must happen fast, before Lebanese casualties mount and Israel completely destroys all of Lebanon as it has destroyed all of Gaza.