BEIRUT — The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has engulfed Lebanon, pushing the beleaguered country to a new precipice as Israel expands a ferocious bombing campaign and threatens an invasion of south Lebanon in response to strikes by Hezbollah, Tehran’s most powerful proxy.
More than 630 people, at least 91 of them children, have been killed in Lebanon in the past week, authorities here say. Israeli evacuation orders and airstrikes have forced 800,000 people from their homes.
Lebanon’s government, trying to stave off a disaster that threatens to overwhelm it, has appealed to U.S. and European leaders to intervene, officials said, even offering to engage in once-taboo talks with Israel. Israel rejected the proposal, according to two people familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Lebanese authorities, in a diplomatic scramble from Beirut to Paris to Washington, have called for an immediate ceasefire, support for the Lebanese army to seize Hezbollah’s arsenal, and eventual direct peace talks with Israel “under American sponsorship,” according to an adviser to President Joseph Aoun.
“The president of the republic is desperate and seeking all means to stop the destruction of the country and halt attacks,” the adviser said.
Israeli strikes overnight Thursday pummeled Beirut’s southern suburbs and Lebanon’s southern borderlands, provoking warnings of a humanitarian crisis. Families have crammed into schools and spilled out onto the streets of the Beirut waterfront, and traffic choked off roads needed by ambulances to reach the wounded.
Israel’s sweeping warnings have stoked fears of a crushing offensive in Lebanon. While the Trump administration is attacking Iran, officials say, Israeli leaders see an opportunity to fulfill a long-standing ambition of wiping out Hezbollah and extending Israel’s regional dominance.
Hezbollah, a political and paramilitary group, said it fired dozens of rockets and drones across the border in the past day. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned Lebanon’s leaders on Thursday that if they do no stop Hezbollah’s fire, “we will take the territory and do it ourselves.”
Cyprus, a European Union member, offered to host talks between Lebanon and Israel, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. But the Israeli government has been adamant, this person said, that now is the time to dismantle Hezbollah, whose salvos have driven residents away from northern Israel in past wars. As a result, the campaign in Lebanon “could outlast the conflict with Iran,” this person said.
With Europe nervous about rising oil prices and a potential refugee crisis, French President Emmanuel Macron is working to broker a truce in Lebanon.
France, which had a colonial mandate to control Lebanon before its independence, has close ties to the country, but Macron is also seeking to project influence in the region after the Trump administration sidelined European powers in its decision to unleash a war in the Middle East. Macron sent his army chief to Beirut last week, has dispatched warships to the Mediterranean to help defend Cyprus and Persian Gulf allies from Iranian counterattacks, and has suggested that French vessels could help secure shipping lanes.
Macron has warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against another invasion of Lebanon. France has also suggested its forces could back the Lebanese army in disarming Hezbollah — a mission they say Lebanon can’t complete while under bombardment.
But diplomats say Israel appears intent on finishing the job it started in September 2024. Israeli forces dealt Hezbollah a shocking blow that month with an attack by exploding pagers and the assassination of its longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah.
The United States and France brokered a ceasefire later that year. Lebanon, already battered by an economic collapse, is still reeling.
Israel did not stop bombing or withdraw its military from positions in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah rebuffed calls to surrender its weapons; Israeli officials said the Lebanese government was not doing enough to disarm it.
With U.S. attention focused on Iran, one diplomat briefed on mediation efforts said, Israel sees a window to “get rid of Hezbollah once and for all.”
Asked about the conflict in Lebanon, President Donald Trump said Wednesday: “We love the people of Lebanon, and we’re working very hard. We gotta get rid of the Hezbollah.”
Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel last week to avenge the U.S.-Israeli strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The decision to join the war has deepened the group’s political isolation in Lebanon, as the Shiite community from which the group draws its core support bears the brunt of the war.
Israeli strikes have pounded southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is dug in. Israeli officials say they’re targeting the group’s capabilities, but the offensive has also emptied out diverse, densely populated neighborhoods on Beirut’s edge and agricultural lands in the south. Residents of some Christian villages in the south, who had sought to distance themselves from the war, have been forced to flee this week.
An overnight strike hit Beirut’s public beach, where displaced civilians are sheltering in cars and tents. On Thursday, the Norwegian Refugee Council said an Israeli attack damaged its office in Tyre, on the Mediterranean coast south of Beirut.
The Israeli military in recent days has sent reinforcements to the border, invaded some border villages and clashed with Hezbollah militants. Israel has issued evacuation orders for over 10 percent of the country in an area that Israel occupied until a U.N.-monitored withdrawal in 2000.
At least 800,000 people have been displaced, according to Haneen Sayed, Lebanon’s minister of social affairs, in an exodus greater than that of the 2024 war.
“There is a national emergency,” she told The Washington Post. “We are mobilizing very quickly. … Unfortunately, we have been through emergencies before, and we have not collapsed. But we are facing challenges.”
Joshua Zarka, Israel’s ambassador to France, suggested that Aoun’s openness to direct negotiations and growing criticism of Hezbollah are not sufficient to stop the Israeli campaign. “What would end it is the disarmament of Hezbollah,” he said this week.
In recent months, the Lebanese government has walked a tightrope, under pressure from Trump envoys to force Hezbollah to disarm.
Lebanon’s president, appointed last year after the ceasefire, pledged to establish a monopoly on weapons as the state confiscated some of Hezbollah’s arsenal. But Hezbollah has resisted Israeli demands to disarm completely, and Lebanese officials are wary of reigniting strife. The country teeters on a fragile political, sectarian balance between communities that fought a bloody 15-year civil war.
The United States, France and other Western nations have long backed the Lebanese army as a potential counterweight to Iranian influence in the country. Still, support for the cash-strapped force is no match for U.S. military aid to Israel or Tehran’s backing for Hezbollah.
Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said the Lebanese government had “actually acted against Iranian influence” and sought to degrade Hezbollah’s sway recently, including by seizing weapons and curbing Iranian flights. But, he added, the message from Israel now seems to be: “You have no military power and we dictate what we want. Complete surrender or nothing, that’s what’s on the table.”
Hezbollah, which has long cast itself as defender of Lebanon’s south, grew into the dominant force of the country’s fractious parties, but the last war with Israel depleted its arsenal and influence.
While Hezbollah might be suffering losses, and its Iranian sponsors are under attack, its fighters are steeped in guerrilla warfare. A hard-line Israeli minister has threatened that Israel would destroy Beirut’s southern suburbs, like Gaza.
Peace appears most elusive to those left stranded by Israeli strikes, many of whom fear they might never be able to return home.
Nahida, a 50-year-old mother of two, fled her home in suburban Beirut with her husband and children to shelter with many others at Beirut’s landmark racetrack. They’ve been sleeping on the ground. “I know we cannot go back to our home,” she said. “It is completely destroyed, and who will rebuild?”
Pope Leo, who visited Lebanon on his first foreign trip in December, paid tribute on Wednesday to a Lebanese priest who was killed in southern Lebanon as Israeli strikes intensified.
“We insist on staying in our homes. If we leave, then we will lose them,” said the Rev. Antonios Farah, another priest from the parish. “If we leave, where do we go? … We are attached to our land and we want to preserve it.”
Francis reported from Brussels. Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
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