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 680 people, at least 98 of them children, have been killed in Lebanon in the past week, while Israeli evacuation orders and strikes have forced 800,000 people to flee, authorities here say.
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 officials, 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 airstrikes on Thursday pounded the capital, Beirut, 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 has choked off roads needed by ambulances to reach the wounded.
Israel’s sweeping warnings on Thursday, pushing Lebanese residents out of their towns and cities, have stoked fears of a long, crushing offensive. While the U.S. 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 not 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 displaced residents of northern Israel in past wars. So the campaign in Lebanon “could outlast the conflict with Iran,” this person said.
As the Israeli assault intensifies, there is no sign of an off-ramp in the war spiraling across the region. Iran’s newly appointed supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, pledged Thursday that Tehran would keep retaliating and said the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for the world’s oil supply, would remain closed. Khamenei, who made the comments in a written address, has not been seen in public since the Feb. 28 U.S.-Israeli attack killed his father.
The new leader said that Iran had warned its Persian Gulf neighbors of fierce retaliation and that they should shutter the U.S. bases on their territories, where Iran has directed many of its missile and drone counterattacks.
With Europe nervous about rising oil prices and a potential refugee crisis, French President Emmanuel Macron is working to broker a truce in Lebanon, separate from the Iran war.
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 the army says Lebanon can’t complete while under bombardment.
But diplomats say Israel appears intent on finishing the job it started in September 2024, when Israeli forces dealt Hezbollah a shocking blow with an attack that involved exploding pagers and the assassination of its longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah.
The United States and France brokered a ceasefire 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 to avenge the Feb. 28 killing of Iran’s supreme leader. 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 pummeled Beirut’s southern suburbs and southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is dug in. Israeli officials say they’re targeting the group’s capabilities, but the offensive has emptied out diverse, densely populated neighborhoods on the capital’s edge and agricultural lands in the south.
An overnight strike hit Beirut’s public beach, where displaced civilians are sheltering. Residents of some Christian villages in the south, who had sought to distance themselves from the war, have been forced to flee this week.
The Israeli military in recent days has sent reinforcements to the border, invaded some border villages and clashed with Hezbollah militants. With the threat of bombardment, Israel has sought to clear out more than 10 percent of Lebanon, in a part of the country that it occupied for nearly two decades until a U.N.-monitored withdrawal in 2000.
Haneen Sayed, Lebanon’s minister of social affairs, said the exodus was far 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 arms 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 remains fragile, with political sectarian balance between communities that fought a bloody 15-year civil war.
The U.S., France and other nations have long backed the Lebanese army as a potential counterweight to Iranian influence in the country. Still, Western 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 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 a defender of Lebanon’s south, grew into the dominant force of the country’s fractious politics, 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 his country 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 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 in December on his first foreign trip, paid tribute Wednesday to a Lebanese priest who was killed as Israeli bombed southern Lebanon.
“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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