This past Thursday, at a press conference, Firas Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, said that he intends to file a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, concerning assaults on nine hospitals and forty-five medical centers across the country. At least a hundred and two health workers have been killed. “International laws are clear in protecting these people,” he said. More than a hundred fire engines and ambulances have also come under attack. Some hospitals have closed after being bombed. (Israel says it only attacks military targets.)
Abiad spoke on the same day that the Lebanese Red Cross announced that four of its paramedics working to evacuate people from the south were wounded in an Israeli strike, which killed a Lebanese Army soldier who was accompanying the convoy. The Red Cross said that it had coördinated the mission with U.N. peacekeepers. Just after midnight that morning, an Israeli air strike hit an apartment that since 2016 had been used as a clearly designated medical center in a residential building a short walk from Parliament, in the heart of Beirut. (The tower, though damaged, remained standing.) Nine paramedics belonging to the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Authority were killed. Kamal Zhour, an administrator in the Islamic Health Authority’s operation center, was present at the scene early the next morning. He told me that there had been no Israeli warning ahead of the attack and that his organization was part of the local humanitarian response effort, coördinating with the Red Cross and others. The strike that killed the paramedics “directly targeted their bedroom,” he said.
In the month of September, there were more than seventeen hundred Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to data collected by ACLED, a conflict-analysis and crisis-mapping initiative. Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars, a British conflict monitor, told the Washington Post that, aside from Gaza, Israel’s offensive in Lebanon was “the most intense aerial campaign that we know of in the last twenty years.”
In the aftermath of the 2006 war, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot, then the I.D.F.’s chief of staff, told Haaretz, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases.” He added, “This is a plan that has already been authorized.” The plan became known as the Dahieh Doctrine, and many in Lebanon see the widespread bombing campaign of the past few weeks as an example of it. But Israel is not just targeting Shiite areas that are home to presumed Hezbollah partisans. Last week, Israel struck locations in Rmaych and Ibl el-Saqi, two Christian villages in the south that are predominantly anti-Hezbollah, and ordered residents of a third, Ain Ebel, to evacuate. (Sectarian groups are not political monoliths; some Christians are pro-Hezbollah.)
Amal Saad, a Hezbollah expert and lecturer in politics and international relations at Cardiff University, told me that she thinks Israel’s attacks are “Dahieh Doctrine plus,” not only because of their greater intensity and scope but because of the tactics, such as the mass detonation of communication devices. She and other analysts also see an Israeli bid to foment intra-Shiite and inter-sectarian tensions, reinforced by Netanyahu’s comments, aimed at not only turning “the resistance community”—Hezbollah’s base of supporters—“against Hezbollah but also turning other communities against the Shiites,” she said. “We are seeing attempts at intimidating people in communities that host the displaced and trying to get them to expel Shiites” based on fears that the men might be Hezbollah and thus targeted by Israel. “This has become commonplace,” she said. Still, she doesn’t expect Hezbollah’s base to turn against it. “What happens to the resistance community is whenever Israel aggresses against Lebanon, they become much, much more steadfast in their political views,” Saad said. They’re also watching what’s happening in Gaza and “noting how this could be replicated against them.”
There was less than thirty seconds between two volleys of Israeli missiles that demolished a six-story apartment building in Ain al-Delb, a sleepy village in the hills above the city of Sidon, some forty-five kilometres south of Beirut. Abu Malek, an active-duty soldier stationed in the south who was home on leave, saw and heard the projectiles whoosh above him as he rode his motorbike to his parents’ home behind a nearby mosque. It was not quite 4 P.M. on September 29th, a Sunday afternoon. After relaying urgent pleas for help via WhatsApp groups, Abu Malek—a pseudonym, because he was not authorized to speak to the media—rushed to rescue people from the pancaked structure. “My neighbors, friends, people I used to play with as a child were killed in front of me,” he said. He rescued two women, but he said that “otherwise I didn’t remove anybody alive. They were mainly body parts. There was a child of about seven we retrieved in pieces. I put him in a bag.”
By the time Abu Malek went home, twelve hours later, the death toll was fifty-three. It would climb to seventy-one, with fifty-eight wounded, one of the highest single-event death tolls of the conflict so far. I stood by Abu Malek the following morning as he watched teams of rescuers working with heavy machinery. There were units from the national Civil Defense and fire brigade, the Red Cross, rescue outfits affiliated with political parties, and a team of Palestinians from the nearby Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. “This is our Lebanon,” Abu Malek proudly told me.
Anxious neighbors milled around. Three middle-aged women sat in the car park of an adjacent building, waiting for news of a relative who’d been invited to her uncle’s home for lunch. “Her husband’s phone is ringing. There is no answer,” one of the women told me. Rumors swirled about why the building, which is situated in an area home to many different sects, was targeted, and whether there were any Hezbollah members inside. It was also providing temporary shelter to citizens displaced from elsewhere. The Israelis “are trying to create conflict among the Lebanese, but by God’s grace we are one hand, whether Shiite, Sunni, Christian, or Druze,” Abu Malek said.
A few days later, I returned to Sidon to meet Achraf Ramadan and his father, Abdelhamid, who were receiving condolences. Ramadan’s twenty-eight-year-old sister, Julia, and his mother, Jenan, had been killed. They’d lived on the fourth floor.
