Lebanon: Israel’s War Machine Rolls On

The Israeli War machine continues its blitzkrieg while preparing for a ground offensive.

The Israeli war machine rumbles on, its gears greased with the blood of innocents and the oil of Western complicity. As we watch this macabre dance unfold, You can’t help but feel we’ve slipped into some dystopian alternate reality, where the oppressed have become the oppressors, and the world looks on in mute acceptance.

You could be forgiven for thinking they’ve stumbled into an episode of “The Man in the High Castle”. The sheer audacity of Israel’s actions would be almost admirable if it weren’t so horrifying. Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, Israel’s military chief, speaks of “entering enemy territory” with all the casual disregard of a man discussing his weekend plans. “We keep striking and hitting them everywhere,” he boasts- as if describing a video game rather than the wholesale destruction of lives and livelihoods.

Israel’s strategy is as old as warfare itself, as predictable as it is brutal: decapitate the leadership, scramble communications, and sow chaos with a relentless barrage of artillery. It’s the opening act of a grim play we’ve seen before – next comes the ground assault, tanks rolling in under the cover of superior air power, carving out a buffer zone with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It’s blitzkrieg with a Star of David by another name, a land grab dressed up as self-defence. And now, Lebanon finds itself in the crosshairs of this juggernaut.

Gen Halevi, speaking during a visit to the border, said: “You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day. This is both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah.”

“The sense is that your military boots, your manoeuvre boots, will enter enemy territory,” he said.

“Your entry there with force… will show (Hezbollah) what it is like to meet a professional combat force,“ he said.

Lt Gen Herzi Halevi’s words to his troops drip with the cold pragmatism of a conqueror: “We keep striking and hitting them everywhere.” The goal, he claims, is to “safely return the residents of the north.” You have to wonder if the irony is lost on him – displacing thousands of Lebanese to return hundreds of Israeli settlers.

IDF chief: We must continue to attack Hezbollah; we’ve been waiting years for this opportunity

The army “has been waiting for years for this opportunity to attack Hezbollah,” IDF Chief of Staff Hertzl Halevi said on Thursday during a situation assessment meeting. He added that the IDF is “constantly working to reach achievements and continues to attack the organization in every region of Lebanon.”

Meanwhile, the international community plays its usual role of ineffectual bystander. Biden and Macron call for a 21-day truce, a proposal that Netanyahu swats away with the contempt of a man who knows he holds all the cards. “The news about a ceasefire – not true,” his office sneers, as if peace were a dirty word.

Prime Minister Starmer urged all British citizens to leave Lebanon immediately, saying the situation was deteriorating “hour on hour”.

He did not rule out deploying troops on the ground to evacuate stranded citizens if necessary after sending 700 extra soldiers to Cyprus, why is a big question?

Border Force officers are being deployed to help up to 6,000 trapped Britons flee Lebanon, it emerged on Wednesday that some UK officers have been sent to Lebanon to work with consular and military staff in helping Britons seeking to leave the country after appeals to do so by Sir Keir.

A bigger contingent of Border Force officers are on 24-hour notice to fly to the region in the event that Britain has to evacuate stranded workers and families.

Chloe Lewin, a 24-year-old freelance journalist from London who is based in Beirut, told BBC News that it was not possible to book commercial flights out of the country. “Keir Starmer’s telling everyone to get out but we can’t,” she said.

“You can’t get out this week because they’re [flights] all full and every time you get to the last page of the booking, it just crashes and it says you can’t book a flight. And then people I know who have had flights, they’re all getting cancelled. My friends were meant to leave this morning on Egyptair – that got cancelled, so they can’t get out.”

According to multiple reports, the US is engaging in a last-ditch diplomatic effort to secure a ceasefire in both Lebanon and Gaza.

Qatar‘s foreign ministry said that no formal mediation efforts had been launched to secure a ceasefire in Lebanon. The US and France’s temporary truce proposal was endorsed by the UK, Australia, Canada, the EU, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. 

Macron called “strongly on Israel to stop the escalation in Lebanon and on Hezbollah to stop the shooting”, and conveyed his “fraternal thoughts” to the Lebanese people. He also called for an end to the war on Gaza, which had “gone on too long” and caused “tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties”. 

However, in this theatre of the absurd, the calls for peace are drowned out by the drumbeat of war. Yair Golan, the so-called Israeli opposition leader, rejects even a three-week ceasefire. Gideon Sa’ar urges more airstrikes on Beirut. He wrote on X that an apparent “slowdown” in Israeli attacks on Beirut, compared with strikes on southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley, were “mistakes”.  It’s a chorus of hawks, each trying to out-screech the other.

Weapons of War, Words of Peace: The Stark Reality Behind Israel’s Assault

The toll of this madness mounts daily. More than 600 people have been reported killed across Lebanon since Monday, when Israel began an intense air campaign to destroy what it said was infrastructure built up by Hezbollah since they last fought a war in 2006. Twenty-three Syrian souls, mostly women and children, snuffed out in an Israeli strike on Lebanese soil today. Hundreds more across Lebanon since Monday. The UN reports 90,000 newly displaced, adding to the existing 110,000 refugees.

Gaza, meanwhile, has become a charnel house of biblical proportions. Over 41,000 dead, millions displaced, a people corralled and slaughtered like cattle. Israel stands accused of war crimes, yet is feted in Western capitals as if it were a paragon of virtue rather than a rogue state drunk on its own impunity. Yet in the face of this humanitarian catastrophe, the West continues to arm Israel, all while tut-tutting about Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas.

It’s a testament to the world’s collective moral bankruptcy that we can witness such carnage and still debate the finer points of “proportional response”.  As the conflict threatens to engulf the region, one is reminded of Stalin’s chilling observation: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” These are the words of the detached propagandist whose life is not touched by the realities of war.  Yet the reality of each life lost here is not merely a statistic – it’s a war crime, a stain on our collective conscience.

In this biblical land, people are fond of quotes, it’s often said “an eye for an eye,” but also that “an eye for an eye leaves us all blind.” Yet there’s another quote that comes in the form of an equation, often ignored, it asks:

“When does 32,200 – 60,000 = 109,000? That seemingly inaccurate equation represents the estimated number of Islamist-inspired terrorists when the war on terror began, how many the U.S. has killed since 2015, and the number that fight today. And it begs the question of just how can the terror ranks grow so fast when they’re being depleted so rapidly.

That underscores the brutal cycle of violence we’re seeing now. As Israel unleashes its assault on Gaza and Lebanon, it’s worth recalling General Stanley McChrystal’s observation from 2009 on the counterintuitive effects of warfare. He coined the term “COIN Mathematics” to explain how military operations can backfire”.

Picture this: there are 10 insurgents in an area, and after a strike, two are killed. Traditional thinking would say eight remain. But McChrystal argued that warfare doesn’t follow such simple math. Six of the remaining fighters might decide the risk isn’t worth it and walk away, but the reverse is more likely. By killing those two, you may not weaken the insurgency—you might actually grow it. Every person killed leaves behind grieving families, friends, and communities who don’t necessarily believe their loved one deserved to die. It doesn’t matter whether they were insurgents or not. To those left behind, they are martyrs. And instead of fewer insurgents, you could end up with 20 new ones, all fueled by anger and revenge.

This is the tragic irony unfolding in Lebanon. Each civilian death, each bomb that levels a neighborhood, doesn’t just eliminate a threat—it sows the seeds for future conflict. As we watch this war escalate, we should remember that, in modern warfare, the brutal calculus of military operations often leads to anything but peace.

And so, the dance of death continues. The West wrings its hands and issues stern statements, all while keeping the weapons pipeline flowing. Israel pushes on, secure in the knowledge that its actions will face no real consequences. And the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and beyond? They’re left to count their dead and wonder when – if ever – the world will remember its humanity.