(Al Jazeera)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThere are fears among the population that the Israelis may not choose to withdraw this time, though some analysts say they don\u2019t think Israel has much to gain by holding onto the land.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the long run, it is not in Israel\u2019s interest, strategically speaking,\u201d Lebanese political analyst Rabih Dandachli told Al Jazeera. \u201cI don\u2019t think they stay on the land. The presence of an occupation in this way will create another resistance like Hezbollah.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israel has already been harried out of southern Lebanon by Hezbollah in 2000, after an 18-year occupation that began with its invasion in 1982, ostensibly to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) presence in the country. That invasion killed around 19,000 Lebanese and Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Still, analysts believe Israel\u2019s actions in this war are part of its efforts to reshape the region under its hegemony, defanging any real or perceived threat. Those effects would also impact Lebanon\u2019s relationship with Israel and the power and status of Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, Israel\u2019s actions in Lebanon are tied to the political conditions they want to impose on Lebanon once this war is over,\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n
Analysts said those conditions could include imposing a peace deal, in line with Israel\u2019s Abraham Accords, or an economic zone that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has touted regularly.<\/p>\n
Young said the intention could be to \u201cdemilitarise the area north of the Litani\u201d to the Awali River, near Sidon, similar to what Israel has demanded in Syria, insisting the area south of Damascus be demilitarised. He recalled the 1976 Red Lines Agreement, a secret agreement between Israel and Syria, negotiated by the Americans, that decided Syria would not go south of the Awali.<\/p>\n
More than half a million people in Lebanon have been registered as displaced since Israel began its renewed intensive attacks.<\/p>\n
Social affairs minister Haneen Sayed told a press briefing on Sunday that the total number of people who had registered on a website affiliated with the ministry reached 517,000, including 117,228 in government shelters.<\/p>\n
Israel \u2018creating large pockets of internal displacement\u2019<\/h2>\n
For years prior to the 2023-2024 war, Hezbollah was the most powerful force in Lebanon. But the group was badly weakened in that conflict. Israel killed the majority of its military leadership, including its longtime Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.<\/p>\n
Since then, the Lebanese government has promised to disarm the group and recently declared the group\u2019s military activities illegal. When asked if the Lebanese Army is arresting Hezbollah members carrying weapons, an army source told Al Jazeera the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) is arresting anyone and everyone carrying non-state-sanctioned arms.<\/p>\n
With the group at its weakest point in more than 40 years, Israel is now using mass displacement to reshape how Hezbollah exists in relation to its Shia community support base. On March 5, Israel ordered all residents of south Lebanon to move north of the Litani River. The next day, it ordered all residents of the southern suburbs of Beirut to leave the area as well. Hezbollah draws most of its support from those two regions, plus the eastern Bekaa Valley, where Baalbek has been a longtime stronghold.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is something new \u2013 the emptying of the whole of Dahiyeh \u2013 it\u2019s a new phenomenon,\u201d Young said. In 2024, Dahiyeh was bombarded heavily on a nightly basis for nearly two months. At the start of that bombing campaign, tens of thousands fled Dahiyeh for the sea front. But this time, Young said, it is an effort to cut the link between Hezbollah and its base among the populace.<\/p>\n
Days into the US-Israel war on Iran and Lebanon becoming a fierce front, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich threatened to turn the southern suburbs of Lebanon\u2019s capital into another Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n
In a video shared online on Thursday, Smotrich warned that the Dahiyeh area would soon look \u201clike Khan Younis\u201d,\u00a0a city in southern Gaza\u00a0that has been decimated in Israel\u2019s genocidal war against Palestinians in the enclave.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday it seems a policy decision and part of a broader strategy to break Hezbollah\u2019s link with its own society, with Beirut and with the rest of Lebanese society,\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n
Analysts said the threats to evacuate place massive stress on the party, as well as the Lebanese state, as well as impacting the lives of tens of thousands of everyday citizens.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy forcing populations out of southern Lebanon, parts of the Bekaa, and the southern suburbs, Israel is effectively reshaping demographic patterns and creating large pockets of internal displacement,\u201d Imad Salamey, a political scientist at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, told Al Jazeera. \u201cThis redistribution strains host communities and state institutions while raising the economic and social costs of the war for Lebanon.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are fears among many Lebanese that the Israeli invasion into their territory could signal a return to the days of that Israeli occupation that lasted from 1982 to 2000. But even if southerners are allowed to return to their land, the wanton destruction and economic hardship in the deep south will reverberate heavily into the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cA 60-year-old [from the south] has lived through six or seven wars and has had to rebuild three times,\u201d Dandachli said. \u201cAt that age, what can he do now?\u201d<\/p>\n
Dandachli said attachment to the land may not be enough for some southerners.<\/p>\n
Some displaced Lebanese are now in their third year of displacement without having returned home. Even if the land is liberated and they can go back, much of the infrastructure and local economy is destroyed and will take years to rebuild.<\/p>\n
Dandachli said that even those who love the south, their land, and their communities, will be forced to overcome that destruction if they want to return. People with kids, for example, may decide to keep them in an area where they are already in school.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone who has a job and a life now outside of their village [in the south] may choose not to go back,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beirut, Lebanon \u2013 In the past week, the Israeli military has created a mass displacement crisis, killed around 400 people, rained bombs down across Lebanon, including the capital Beirut, and pushed its troops even further into the southern part of the embattled country. Israel is defining a new reality in Lebanon, analysts told Al Jazeera, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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