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In less than two weeks, Israel has killed around 600 people and displaced more than 750,000 people in Lebanon. This is the beginning of the application of Israel’s Gaza doctrine to a new front. This equation is consistent. Displace people, either by ordering them to leave or by destroying their means of subsistence. It destroys civilian infrastructure to prevent returns and expands its territory through so-called “buffer zones.” Dividing territory into isolated enclaves and continuing low-intensity military operations fragments coherent governance.
I worked in Palestine for three years before being expelled by the Israeli authorities. I have watched this doctrine develop in real time. Now I’m witnessing a reenactment of that from Beirut.
In the West Bank, Israel has spent decades carving up territory and denying Palestinians recognition of its contiguous geography. Wells sealed with cement, houses demolished due to unobtainable permits, nomads forced off their land by illegal settlement outposts. The same logic was applied in Gaza with much greater speed and ferocity.
In October 2023, Israel announced that all Palestinians north of Wadi Gaza must leave immediately. Days earlier, Israel’s defense minister declared a complete siege, cutting off electricity, food and water supplies. By labeling the entire nation as an enemy, Israel has created an expendable class. The military has released a map that divides Gaza into numbered blocks. When your number was called, you were forced to leave. The evacuation order became an alibi for subsequent crimes. People were ordered to enter al-Mawashi, a coastal town designated by Israel as a “safe zone” and a concentrated area where hundreds of thousands of people live in tents, where air raids continued. The so-called evacuation zones were depopulated and destroyed.
Classic counterinsurgency logic would have called for “clearance, maintenance, and reconstruction.” Israel’s approach was fundamentally different: destroy, expel, and dismantle. The goal was not to pacify territory, but to empty it. In both Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel has treated civilians as indistinguishable from the resistance forces they support. The purpose is to move them. The collapse of their political representation is a condition that Israel seeks to make permanent. This is the logic of the settler colony in its modern military form.
The same strategy has arrived in Lebanon, but with clear differences from previous Israeli operations here. During the first Lebanon War in the 1980s, Israel sought to establish a sympathetic government. Gaza showed that Israel had abandoned its aspirations. The goal is no longer to decide who governs a territory, but to ensure that there is no consistent governance at all. And Israel is not alone in this. The UAE’s approach in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, and its support for Israel in Gaza, reflect the same preference for isolated enclaves. What has emerged is a regional principle of fragmentation shared among allied countries.
Israel has issued an evacuation order for all of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. The familiar map that appeared on my screen in Beirut last week had the same design and the same deadly ambiguity as the one I dealt with in Gaza. The announced evacuation zones did not match the areas shown on the map. In Gaza, people who crossed the invisible line were killed.
Hundreds of thousands of people are currently on the move. Schools have become evacuation centers, medical workers have been killed, and people are sleeping on beaches where their tents were bombed just two nights ago. Israel has threatened to attack Lebanon’s national infrastructure if the government fails to take action against Hezbollah, expanding its objectives from forced displacement and infrastructure destruction to the forcible destabilization of the state itself. The Lebanese government responded by banning Hezbollah from firing. This is exactly the internal rift that Israel’s strategy is designed to cause.
But Lebanon is not Gaza. Hamas was fighting inside the besieged land using an improvised arsenal of weapons, which was already proving difficult for Israeli forces. Hezbollah commands more sophisticated weapons, hardened infrastructure, and decades of preparation for this type of war. It showed itself capable of absorbing heavy blows and counterattacking, surprising Israelis and outside observers with the depth of its capabilities. Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa have already met significant resistance. Here, the doctrine may encounter limitations not so much due to unfulfilled diplomatic pressures as to asymmetric military realities. Iran has made Lebanon’s fate explicit as part of its ceasefire calculations, suggesting a unity of front that Israel considered weakened.
Doctrines built on the premise of impunity have met with little resistance in the chambers of the so-called rules-based order. The Gaza Doctrine is an extension of what Israel once called the “Dahiya Doctrine,” in which the overwhelming use of force against civilian infrastructure is now weaponized toward the larger goal of permanently redrawing the region’s geography, demographics, and political order.
This doctrine has developed in a vacuum of responsibility. The International Court of Justice has been ignored. The Security Council is paralyzed. Governments have continued to trade with Israel as Israel steadily normalizes an unacceptable situation. Daniel Reisner, head of the international law division of Israel’s Office of the Chief Military Justice, put it bluntly: “If you do something long enough, the world will accept it (…) International law progresses through violations.”
The United States will not be a bystander to this failure. We are actively participating in deepening this understanding. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the transatlantic alliance in ethno-nationalist terms and cast colonialism as a Western achievement. At an event in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee expressed confidence that the US government would “neutralize” both the ICC and the ICJ. This agency should have been held accountable.
What is unfolding in Lebanon is a political continuation of the ongoing settler colonial project. Evacuation orders are a harbinger of mass destruction, aimed at preventing return and permanently altering the landscape. Stability in the Middle East requires more than a cease-fire agreement that manages fragmented populations while allowing low-level wars to continue. This requires the unconditional enforcement of international law, full accountability for those who prosecute this principle, and the right of return and reconstruction from Beit Hanoun to Beirut.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
