Peace and Justice Post

In Lebanon, Israel is reusing the same strategy as in Gaza and the West Bank. Demanding the “evacuation” of the population and destroying civilian architecture, it wants to make it impossible for residents ever to return.

By Ahlam Chemlali, June 6, 2026

Source: Jacobin

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People carry their luggage as they cross on foot into Syria through a crater caused by an Israeli air strike to cut the road between the Lebanese and the Syrian checkpoints, at the Masnaa crossing, in the eastern Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, October 4, 2024

In 1895, Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary that the penniless population of Palestine must be “spirited across the border,” discreetly and circumspectly. In 1948, that vision became policy. With the Nakba, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, their land absorbed by the newly declared state of Israel. In 1967 came the Naksa. In 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006, it happened to southern Lebanon. Each time the world called it a “crisis”; each time it was Israeli strategy.

Since Israel’s latest assault on Lebanon began this March 2, more than 1.3 million people — nearly one in four of the entire Lebanese population — have been displaced. More than three hundred thousand of them are children. In the first weeks of the assault alone, UNICEF recorded at least nineteen thousand girls and boys forced from their homes every single day. More than 3,400 Lebanese have been killed and over ten thousand wounded, a toll that surged dramatically when Israel launched Operation Eternal Darkness — over a hundred strikes across the country in a single ten-minute window, killing at least 357 people and wounding over 1,200, with many more believed buried beneath the rubble. At least nine bridges over the Litani River have been struck, seven destroyed, fifty-five primary health care centers and hospitals have been forced to shut down, fuel depots, water stations and schools have been targeted, a systematic severing of the south from the rest of the country, cutting tens of thousands of people off from humanitarian aid.

Israel’s own Defense Minister Israel Katz explicitly described this as the “Beit Hanoun and Rafah model,” invoking the ongoing destruction of Gaza. This is not collateral damage but the same playbook; Israel is not even hiding it. And still it continues: on June 1, Israeli forces struck Tyre — the ancient Mediterranean port city and UNESCO World Heritage Site — triggering a fresh wave of mass displacement as families fled north. A ceasefire, extended for forty-five days and currently being renegotiated in Washington, has stopped nothing.

What is unfolding in Lebanon today is neither new nor an escalation but in continuity with these past offensives. Displacement is not a by-product of this war. It has always been the point. To understand what is happening today in Lebanon, we must understand Gaza. And to understand Gaza, we must go further back.

The Gaza Playbook

Displacement has been a deliberate instrument of Israeli governance since 1948. The historian Patrick Wolfe put it plainly: “Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Elimination, he argued, is “an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off occurrence,” pursued through the annexation of land, the renaming of places, the demolition of buildings and the erasure of historical heritage, all in service of building an entirely new civilization on expropriated ground. “Settler colonialism,” he wrote, “destroys to replace.”

Following the October 7, 2023, attacks, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza produced near-total displacement. By early 2024, Israel had dropped more than twenty-five thousand tons of explosives on Gaza, the equivalent, the United Nations confirmed, of two nuclear bombs. By April 2024, the total had surpassed seventy thousand tons, exceeding the combined tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II. By May 2024, more than 90 percent of Gaza’s population, around 1.9 million people, had been displaced at least once. Many had been displaced ten times or more.

Israel boasted of its evacuation orders as evidence of its humanitarian conduct, distributed by leaflet, SMS, QR code, and radio broadcast, and cited repeatedly at the International Court of Justice as proof that it was protecting civilians. In reality, the orders directed entire districts to relocate within impossibly short time frames, often into areas without food, water, or shelter, and often into areas that were then deliberately bombed. Forensic Architecture’s landmark investigation found that the evacuation system had produced not safety but “mass displacement and forced transfer,” with Palestinians “being bombed, shot at, executed, arrested and tortured” along the very corridors Israel designated as safe. The areas Israel told people to flee to were attacked immediately after they arrived. On July 13, 2024, Israel dropped eight two-thousand-pound bombs on the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone it had itself created, killing at least ninety people, many of them burned alive in their tents.

Human Rights Watch concluded that these evacuations constituted the war crime of forcible transfer. B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reached the same conclusion in its report “No Place Under Heaven,” documenting that displacement was a central tool of the assault on Gaza. The report’s title comes from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s own words, spoken at a government security cabinet meeting in April 2024, calling for the “total annihilation” of Gaza’s cities: “You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven — there’s no place under heaven.” The reference to Amalek, the nation the Hebrew Bible commands the Israelites to exterminate entirely, man, woman, and child, was not incidental. Benjamin Netanyahu had used the same comparison in the first days of the war, and it was cited by South Africa in its genocide case at the International Court of Justice as evidence of genocidal intent. Smotrich also described Gaza City as a “real estate bonanza,” stating: “The demolition, the first stage in its renewal, we have already done. Now we need to build.” This bluntly posed Israel’s agenda in the language of colonial dispossession.

From the West Bank to Lebanon

The same logic has spread beyond Gaza. Since October 2023, scholars and analysts have described the “Gazafication” of the West Bank: the extension of governance practices long characteristic of Gaza — military siege, aerial bombardment, the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure — into the occupied territory. Armed drones carry out targeted killings, fighter jets strike densely populated areas, and homes are demolished.

More than forty thousand Palestinians were internally displaced in the West Bank in 2025, the highest annual figure since 1967. Senior Israeli ministers have called openly for annexation and the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians, language that legal scholars identify as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Leading Zionist figures explicitly discussed demographic transfer in the 1920s and 1930s, using terms like “transfer,” “relocation,” and “voluntary migration” — the same vocabulary in use today.

Settler violence has risen sharply alongside this rhetoric. According to data recorded jointly by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, settler attacks increased by 27 percent in 2025, while severe attacks — shootings, arson, violent assault — rose by more than 50 percent. Accountability remains almost nonexistent. Settlement expansion has accelerated to unprecedented levels, with outposts legalized retroactively and construction advancing deep inside Palestinian territory.

In this, Lebanon is not a new front but an old one, today reopened with new ferocity.

The people in southern Lebanon have been displaced before: in 1978, when Israel first invaded; in 1982, when it laid siege to Beirut and its Palestinian refugee camps, a siege that culminated in the Sabra and Shatila massacre; in 1993, during Operation Accountability; in 1996, during Operation Grapes of Wrath, which culminated in the Qana massacre; and in 2006, when nearly one million people fled, most returning within weeks of a ceasefire. Today, those same communities are being uprooted again.

What we are witnessing is the same architecture of control applied more extensively. Evacuation orders are being issued with the same design as in Gaza, and civilian infrastructure targeted to prevent people ever returning. This means deliberately making the population precarious, unable to settle, unable to rebuild, unable to plan. Here, we see that Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon are not three separate crises.

European Blind Spot

And what has the international community’s response been? The International Court of Justice, in its landmark advisory opinion of July 19, 2024, concluded that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories — the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza — is unlawful under international law and must be brought to an end as rapidly as possible. It has separately ruled that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza. The UN General Assembly followed in September 2024, demanding Israel end its unlawful presence within twelve months. Israel has ignored both. The United Nations Security Council has been rendered structurally incapable of acting: the United States has now vetoed ceasefire resolutions seven times, each time casting the sole vote against resolutions supported by fourteen other members of the council.

Meanwhile, the United States has provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project — the highest annual total of military aid to Israel ever recorded. Arms transfers from several European states have continued alongside this. The weapons that have flattened Gaza’s neighborhoods, bombed its hospitals, and burned civilians alive in tent camps have been supplied, in large part, by those same governments now expressing concern about humanitarian conditions in Lebanon.

I have spent years researching migration, borders, and displacement across the Mediterranean region. Since March, journalists across Europe have been asking me some version of the same question: Will we face a new refugee crisis? Should Europe be worried about the flows?

The question reveals everything. For most European publics and their governments, the primary concern is not what is happening to the people of Lebanon. It is how to keep those people away. How to avoid a repeat of the aftermath of the Syrian civil war and the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. During the carpet bombing of Gaza since October 2023, this anxiety was all but absent, for Gazans had nowhere to flee: they were contained inside the Strip. For some European governments, even medically evacuating critically ill children was not on the table. Denmark refused to do so despite a formal World Health Organization appeal to EU member states, and despite evacuating and treating over two hundred Ukrainian patients — citing, in a written reply to Parliament, migration concerns. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to reassure the public that Palestinian refugees wouldn’t be welcome in Britain under a scheme for war refugees. Europe’s fear of displacement only activates when movement becomes possible.

In May 2024, the European Commission pledged €1 billion in support to Lebanon for the period up to 2027. This package included funding for border management and anti-smuggling operations, with the first €500 million explicitly linked to reducing irregular sea departures toward Cyprus and to exploring “voluntary return” frameworks. Lebanon was positioned not only as a host country in crisis but as a frontline partner in Europe’s own strategy to contain migration flows. This is the increasingly common practice of externalization: the outsourcing of displacement management to third countries outside Europe, while the conditions producing displacement go unchallenged.

Lebanon already hosts one of the highest numbers of refugees per capita in the world, with long-standing Palestinian communities and over a million Syrians displaced since 2011. Funding this state to police its own borders in the middle of an Israeli assault that is actively producing new displacement is the same containment logic that operates in Gaza and the West Bank.

What is unfolding across Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon is not a sequence of emergencies. It is a deliberate and recurring strategy of Israeli governance, rooted in decades of settler-colonial and military control. Evacuation orders, cycles of flight and forced return, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, are today the instruments of war and Israeli expansionism.

The displacement created in Gaza and in Lebanon has been normalized precisely because the international community has consistently chosen migration management over accountability. What looks like crisis is the effect of deliberate policies, and what looks like a humanitarian response is, too often, the infrastructure of containment dressed in the language of protection.

The question is not whether Europe will face a refugee crisis. The question is whether the world will finally treat the deliberate production of displacement as what it has always been, a strategy of governance, and respond with the recognition, accountability, and rights-based redress it demands.

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