Beirut, Lebanon – “Lebanon, as we know it, will not exist.”
That is what Yoav Kisch, Israel’s education minister, told a local news programme in early July.
His threat followed similar statements by far-right Israeli ministers that called for the destruction of Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.
A year ago, Israeli ministers supported Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ostensible war aim to “eradicate” Hamas in Gaza, after the Palestinian group’s armed wing led an attack on southern Israel in which 1,139 people were killed and about 250 were taken captive on October 7, 2023.
Under that pretext, Israel has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, uprooted nearly the entire population of 2.3 million people, destroyed all civilian infrastructure and generated conditions for mass famine.
Since stepping up its war against Lebanon in late September, ostensibly to defeat Hezbollah, Israel is now deploying similar tactics in south Lebanon, according to civilians, analysts and rights groups.
“We can’t compare the severity of [south Lebanon] with Gaza, because what Gaza is going through is historically unprecedented and it is a genocide,” said Amal Saad, an expert on Hezbollah who is originally from south Lebanon.
“But it does look like Israel is adapting tactics that it used in Gaza,” she told Al Jazeera. “[The campaign] is still less than Gaza because what’s happening in [Lebanon] is not ethnic cleansing, yet. It’s not genocidal, yet.
“But it could head there.”
Kill zones
On September 23, Israel’s military chief Daniel Hagari called on the villagers of south Lebanon to move away from “buildings and areas used by Hezbollah for military purposes such as those used to store weapons”.
The warning did not specify which villages needed to be evacuated and which areas – if any – would be safe, rendering the notices ineffective, according to Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch.
What’s more, he said, the warnings suggest that Israel is treating everyone who does not or cannot leave their villages as a military target – just as it did in Gaza, where the Israeli army considered anywhere that Palestinians were told to evacuate as “kill zones”.
Anyone that stays behind in these zones is often shot or bombed.
“Just because you give a warning doesn’t give you free reign to treat everyone as a combatant,” Kaiss said.
Al Jazeera spoke to four people from south Lebanon who said most villages and cities beyond Sidon – a city about 44km (27 miles) south of Beirut – are almost empty.
However, Israel has killed nearly 2,000 people before they left their homes since September 23 – including more than 100 children, as well as dozens of medics and rescue workers.
Despite the danger, Ahmed, a young man from a small village near Nabatiya in south Lebanon, said he did not evacuate in order to look after his grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s.
While speaking to Al Jazeera, he said, an Israeli bomb hit an area close to his home.
“There is a 50-50 chance that somebody [still here] will stay alive,” he said in a voice note.
“[The Israelis] don’t care if you are a civilian,” he added. “They just assume [you are a fighter] and there are a lot of houses [destroyed around me by Israel] and I know there were no weapons in them.
“I knew all the people [the homes belonged to].”
Domicide
Israel has damaged or destroyed about 66 percent of all structures in Gaza, according to the most recent figures obtained by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT).
This extensive damage indicates that Israel has intentionally conflated structures such as civilian homes, medical facilities and aid warehouses with legitimate military targets.
This seems to be a playbook Israel is replicating on some level in Lebanon, civilians and analysts told Al Jazeera.
An elderly man from a predominantly Christian village in southern Lebanon said Israel bombed his home and his neighbour’s house on September 30.
The latter attack killed his wife and children, including a baby that was not yet one week old.
The man said he fled to Beirut, but did not specify when he arrived. He just stressed that Israel is targeting everything, and sometimes giving civilians delayed warnings.
“They didn’t give us a warning before they started firing with air attacks on our village,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is not correct. The warning from them came after.”
A recent video circulating on social media shows the border town of Yaroun, a predominantly Shia village, reduced to wasteland from Israeli bombing over the past year.
The images are indistinguishable from those taken in Gaza and raise fears that countless more civilians will die, said Kaiss from HRW.
“From what we’re seeing on the ground, there is significant risk that civilians in the country are going to face atrocities or the risk of being subjected to atrocities,” he told Al Jazeera.
Protracted displacement
As Israel carpet bombs large swaths of Lebanon, people live in fear of how long they may be displaced – just like Gaza, where Israel has largely cleared the north and is still ordering those remaining there to flee south.
Nobody in Gaza knows when or if they will ever be able to return to the north to rebuild their lives.
The possibility of protracted – even permanent – displacement also unsettles Jad Dilati, whose family fled from Nabatieh to Beirut when Israel escalated its war on Lebanon two weeks ago.
Buildings and shops that were part of his daily life and childhood now lie in rubble, he said, such as the neighbourhood vegetable market and barber shop.
He fears his home could be next.
“They may target our house just because they feel like it,” Dilati, 23, told Al Jazeera. “I feel like I’ll be going back to a town that I don’t recognise any more.”
Dilati contemplated the possibility that he may not return to Nabatieh for some time, because the war may drag on or because Israel could again try to occupy parts of the south, as it did from 1982 to 2000.
On October 8, a video circling on social media showed Israeli soldiers raising their flag on Lebanese land.
“This is the price we are paying living next to an expansionist ethno-state,” Dilati told Al Jazeera.
Despite Israel’s invasion and mass destruction of south Lebanon, Dilati still believes that he will return to Nabatieh to help his community rebuild homes and livelihoods that have been torn apart by Israeli aggression once again.
“We will rebuild [Nabatieh] to make it even better than it was before. My parents work in Nabatieh. My sister goes to school in Nabatieh. Everything I know, I learned in Nabatieh,” he said.
“I cannot imagine not being able to go back. I know Palestinians went through it and I know it might be a possibility, but I can’t imagine it.
“I believe we will win [the war], even if it takes time.”
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