A Welcome Ceasefire in Lebanon, But No End to Gaza’s Genocidal Agony

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While I was overjoyed, on Wednesday, to see displaced Lebanese people returning to their homes — or the ruins of them — in southern Lebanon as a fragile ceasefire began, following ten weeks of brutal attacks by Israel, my heart sank with the realization that it would make no difference whatsoever to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, where, predictably, the non-stop atrocities of the last 14 months have continued.

Political maneuvering — particularly on the part of the Biden administration — brought about the ceasefire in Lebanon, harking back to earlier, pre-genocidal days, when it was acknowledged by all sides, however begrudgingly, that military conflicts almost always, eventually, have to come to an end through negotiation. For Gaza, however, no such option seems to exist anymore.

After a brief break in hostilities last November, when Israeli and foreign hostages taken to Gaza after the October 7 attacks in southern Israel were exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s brutal, lawless prisons for Palestinians, attempts ever since to broker another, more permanent ceasefire have persistently failed. Even though Hamas has regularly agreed to the terms, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has deliberately scuppered any deal, although the twisted western media and its politicians have relentlessly spun this as either being Hamas’ fault, or, if they’ve been feeling slightly less deceptive, a failure on both sides.

Shorn of a deal, the carnage in Gaza continues relentlessly, with Israel’s western supporters persistently refusing to use any of the leverage that they undoubtedly have — via bans on arms sales, or sanctions, for example — to curb Israel’s sickening addiction to the endless slaughter of Palestinian civilians.

Emboldened by a year of genocidal slaughter with full western support, Israel has largely given up on even bothering to spout false claims about “military necessity” as it has gleefully continued to relentlessly slaughter civilians, replacing its customary lying and dissembling with an almost openly-declared project of ethnic cleansing and extermination in northern Gaza over the last two months, while rabid settlers, including the government’s two despicable far-right settler ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have been emboldened to talk ever more openly about colonizing Gaza’s war-polluted, corpse-drenched soil with new settlements.

Even the arrest warrants issued last week by the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant — laying out an unassailable case that their actions in Gaza since last October have involved numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity — have failed to significantly alert western leaders, or their dutiful mainstream media mouthpieces, that a noose of accountability is inching ever closer towards them.

Instead, all eyes have been focused — to the extent that the west cares at all — on Lebanon, where President Biden has been allowed to congratulate himself on a deal that ostensibly brings peace to Lebanon — for 60 days, at least.

Israel’s ten-week campaign of terror in Lebanon

Israel’s exhausting catalog of crimes in Lebanon began on September 17, when, like the villain in a James Bond film, they remotely detonated tiny bombs covertly installed into thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies, killing 42 people and injuring at least 3,500, including numerous civilians. Israel claimed that it was only targeting individuals associated with Hezbollah, the Shia political party, founded after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose military wing has a long history of firing rockets and missiles at Israel, and who, since Israel’s attacks on Gaza began last October, have repeatedly engaged in attacks on Israel in support of the Palestinians, with the stated aim of continuing its operations until Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.

However, reports on the ground confirmed that, in fact, all kids of civilians were the victims of the attacks, because, of course, Israel had no idea who was holding the devices when they exploded, and didn’t care at all that they were used, for example, by doctors and other medical staff.

According to Al Jazeera, between October 7, 2023 and September this year, over 10,000 cross-border attacks took place, with 83% of these undertaken by Israel, displacing over 110,000 people from southern Lebanon, and nearly 100,000 from northern Israel. Israel’s escalation of actions against Lebanon was aimed partly at trying to make northern Israel safe for these displaced Israelis — without any thought given to the fact that only peace secures safety — although other clear motivations involved eliminating Hezbollah’s leadership, and, more generally, sowing terror amongst the Lebanese population, with no regard for the civilian cost.

Israel’s shameful pager attacks were followed by the implementation of brutal and fundamentally lawless tactics drawn from its actions in Gaza over the previous eleven months, as evacuation orders were issued for various areas in southern Lebanon and Beirut, which were followed by devastating attacks on residential areas, on the alleged basis, as in Gaza, that prominent individuals were hiding there. Without any concern for collateral damage, Israel succeeded in killing numerous significant figures in Hezbollah, including, on September 27, Hassan Nasrallah, its Secretary General.

However, whereas Israel’s western supporters had merely shrugged when Israel massacred hundreds of civilians in allegedly targeted attacks on prominent Hamas members in Gaza, in Lebanon the same tactics made some of these supporters slightly uneasy. In a hierarchy of human worth, Lebanese civilians at least made it onto the west’s radar, unlike Gaza’s Palestinians, whose lives have persistently been regarded as having absolutely no value at all.

Israel followed up by invading southern Lebanon, with a giddy enthusiasm for ordering everyone from their homes, and then planting explosives in the empty villages and detonating them remotely — and, as usual, filming themselves gleefully doing so. The intention was either to create a sterile buffer zone, destroying Hezbollah’s capability to fire any more rockets or missiles, or, in the more unhinged dreams of its more rabid colonizers, taking over the whole of southern Lebanon, south of the Litani River, as the first stage of its deranged vision of a “Greater Israel” incorporating Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Over the last two months, Israel has repeatedly attacked residential areas in Beirut and other cities, repeating its Gaza template, as it has with its attacks on hospitals and ambulances (which have also involved lies about them housing militant bases), and has also attacked UN representatives — in this specific case, international members of UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping force established in 1978.

On the ground, however, as In Gaza, Israeli troops have regularly found themselves unable to overcome armed resistance, which, at least in part, is a reason that Israel was amenable to the ceasefire deal — a concession of military defeat that they will want to keep well hidden, to disguise the fact that their supposed “strength” only comes from their ability to rain down death from above and from afar, via weapons that are largely supplied by its biggest western supporters, the US and Germany.

The ceasefire deal

Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, Israel is required to withdraw entirely from southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah is required to move its fighters and its heavy weaponry north of the Litani River, to be replaced by contingents of the Lebanese army, working alongside UNIFIL.

While both sides can, in some sense, claim victory, an important concession was extracted from Hezbollah, when its leadership was persuaded to drop its demand that a ceasefire was contingent on ending the fighting in Gaza.

Announcing the deal on Tuesday, President Biden alleged that he was still interesting in securing a ceasefire in Gaza, stating, “Just as the Lebanese people deserve a future of security and prosperity, so do the people of Gaza,” although when he was asked if he thought he would be able to secure a ceasefire in Gaza before leaving office, his response was considerably more sketchy. Crossing his fingers, he said, “I think so. I hope so. I’m praying.”

The most noticeable reverberation from the ceasefire deal, beyond the immediate return of something resembling peace to Lebanon, was a disgraceful statement issued by the French foreign ministry, which claimed that Netanyahu had immunity from the ICC arrest warrants because Israel is not an ICC member. As numerous commentators pointed out, however, this is patently absurd, because, as former UN official Craig Mokhiber described it on X, “No, France, you are not permitted to grant immunity to the Israeli perpetrators. [The Statute of] Rome Art. 27 denies such immunity, and Art. 98 grants you no such exception.”

He added that the Netanyahu and Gallant arrest warrants are “the highest obligations, and in a situation where the criminal conduct is ongoing, triggering higher duties on your part. You are bound, as well, under the Genocide Convention and the provisional orders of the ICJ. And the UN has long rejected the granting of impunity agreements in peace negotiations. Your deal with the devil will not hold.”

As the former colonial power in Lebanon, it seems that France hadn’t wanted to be left our of the ceasefire deal, showing just how much western powers continue to believe that their blood-soaked colonial histories should be no impediment to further high-handed interference. However, according to reports, the price it had to pay was to capitulate to Joe Biden, who was taking his orders from Netanyahu. One report indicated that Biden had personally called Macron, on behalf of Netanyahu, and had told him that Netanyahu was “right to be angry” at the French government for promising to enforce the ICC’s arrest warrants.

Outside of the sordid machinations of western politics, all eyes are on Lebanon to see whether the fragile ceasefire will hold, and to see if, by some miracle, any of its positive aspects will somehow spill over into Gaza — the recognition, for example, that no war is unending, even a genocidal assault on civilians in an occupied territory, for whom the term “war” shouldn’t even be used.

On the former, there are already worrying signs of Israel ignoring aspects of ceasefire to address “security concerns” near the border, and its announcement that, for two nights running, it has imposed a night-time curfew on the whole of the southern Lebanon — hardly the behavior of a withdrawing invader.

And on the latter, as usual, sadly, everyone who could act to bring the slaughter in Gaza to an end is still resolutely looking the other way, murmuring mildly troubled platitudes when provoked, but still doing nothing to suggest, forcefully, to Benjamin Netanyahu that his time is running out, and that the slaughter in Gaza — under the endless cover of his permanently unattainable “total victory” — must come to an end.

End the occupation

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the very future of our shared humanity depends on it, and yet, just today, the Guardian reports that Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister for food security and a member of the Israeli security cabinet, has said that the Israeli military will “remain in Gaza for years”, even though he had no suggestions for how the almost entirely displaced population of over two million people, reduced to the barest subsistence-level survival, would be provided for. 

No reconstruction plans were mentioned — just discussion of the establishment of security “corridors” and military bases, which are well underway — and no way forward was provided regarding Gaza’s governance, except for an insistence that Hamas would have no role in it. In perhaps the most telling comment, Dichter stated that it was understood that, despite every effort to eliminate Hamas, it had “recruited more people.” 

“They have less capabilities but they have new people”, he said, failing to reflect on the fact that it was inevitable that Israel’s unprecedented violence over the last 14 months would create new recruits. Israel has always insisted that the Palestinians should endure whatever is inflicted on them without offering any kind of resistance, but that has always been a futile dream, because occupied people will always defend their land and their homes, and are entitled to do under international law.

Israel, however, still seems no closer to understanding that, and to recognize that the only viable long-term solution is for them to withdraw entirely from Gaza, and to allow the Palestinians their own sovereignty and self-determination, as demanded by the International Court of Justice in a groundbreaking opinion in July that condemned Israel’s 57-year occupation of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and called on them to finally abandon their long, lawless colonial project.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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