“The Gaza Playbook”: Israel Brings Displacement, Death and Destruction to Lebanon

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Lebanon. The United Nations says Israel’s war on Lebanon has displaced 1.2 million people, including 400,000 Lebanese children. Earlier today, the Israeli military attacked the Beqaa region in eastern Lebanon after ordering more people to flee their homes.

This comes as the death toll from Israel’s attack on a municipal building in the city of Nabatieh has risen to at least 16. Lebanese officials denounced the attack, which killed the city’s mayor and five other city workers who were holding a meeting to discuss distributing aid in the region.

Meanwhile, the U.N. says its peacekeeping forces in Lebanon came under, quote, “direct and apparently deliberate fire” from an Israeli tank on Wednesday. The tank fire damaged a U.N. watchtower and destroyed two cameras.

In other developments, video has emerged of Israel blowing up a historic neighborhood in the Lebanese village of Muhajbib. On Wednesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was questioned about the attack by Matt Lee of the Associated Press.

MATT LEE: I want to go just to Lebanon for a second, because there was this footage that appeared, I guess overnight, of Israel blowing up an entire village in southern Lebanon. What do you make of that?

MATTHEW MILLER: So, I’ve seen the footage. I cannot speak to what their intent was or what they were trying to accomplish, what their targets were. I don’t know what they were. Obviously, we do not want to see entire villages destroyed. We don’t want to see civilian homes destroyed. We don’t want to see civilian buildings destroyed. We understand that Hezbollah does operate at times from underneath civilian homes, inside civilian homes. We’ve seen footage that has emerged over the course of the past two weeks of rockets and other military weapons held in civilian homes. So, Israel does have a right to go after those legitimate targets, but they need to do so in a way that protects civilian infrastructure, protects civilians.

MATT LEE: All right. I’m not sure I understand “I cannot speak to what their intent was or what they were trying to accomplish.” Isn’t it pretty clear that they —

MATTHEW MILLER: So —

MATT LEE: — what they were – what their intent was and what their —

MATTHEW MILLER: So — so —

MATT LEE: Whether they had a specific target in mind or not, blowing up an entire village, that seems to be pretty self-revelatory.

MATTHEW MILLER: So, I don’t — I don’t know what was in those buildings. I don’t know what was potentially underneath those buildings. That’s why I said I can’t speak to what they were trying to accomplish.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller being questioned by Matt Lee of the Associated Press.

Well, we go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Rania Abouzeid. She’s a Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Her new piece for The New Yorker is titled “War Comes to Beirut.”

Rania, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could respond to the latest news, the places and the scale of the Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, actually, a month ago today, the war in the south became the war in Lebanon with Israel’s mass detonation of thousands of pagers across the country. And that was followed the next day with a similar triggering of explosives in walkie-talkies. And it heralded an escalation that continues to this day. So, Israeli attacks have been ramped up in terms of the scope of the attacks, in terms of the frequency, the geographical location and also the targeting.

You mentioned in your intro the attack yesterday on Nabatieh’s municipal building. Now, Nabatieh is a provincial capital in southern Lebanon. The Israelis had earlier called on its residents to evacuate. Some were unable or unwilling to. And the local councilmembers, some of them, including the mayor, stayed behind to provide aid, bread, to distribute bread to those people, and they were killed.

Just in this past week, you know, we have seen airstrikes on homes that have been sheltering displaced people. This week, there was an attack on a house in northern Lebanon, which is the opposite end of the country from the Israeli border, and it killed more than 20 people. So we are seeing a definite escalation that started a month ago and doesn’t show any sign of letting up.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Rania, if you can talk about Israel saying they are only targeting Hezbollah? Talk about the map of who is getting bombed. And also talk about what Hezbollah is responsible for, not only a military wing.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Yes, no, Hezbollah is not only a military wing. It is also a political party. It has members of Parliament, more than a dozen of them. It has ministers in this government and certainly in governments over many years past. It has a very vigorous and active social services arm, which includes first responders. They have also come under attack by the Israelis, and many of them have been killed. So, it’s a multi-armed organization which is an integral part of Lebanon’s social and political and military fabric.

In terms of the victims of these Israeli strikes, I mean, I can tell you that the death tolls, the daily death tolls, are in the double digits. And most of those people who are killed are women and children. In that attack in northern Lebanon that I mentioned, there was an 80-year-old woman who was killed, along with two babies. So, it’s not just going after Hezbollah. We’ve heard this before. We’ve heard this in Gaza, that they’re only going after Hamas. And it’s the same thing that we’re hearing here. I mean, yesterday, as you mentioned also in your intro, Israeli troops rigged an entire village in southern Lebanon which is very close to the border, and they blew it up. This is the Gaza playbook.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: You are in Beirut. For your latest piece for The New Yorker, you’ve been speaking to people who have been displaced. There are tens of thousands. If you could tell us what they were saying and what the situation in Beirut is as more and more people are displaced from areas around Lebanon?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, first of all, the Israeli drones don’t seem to leave the air. They don’t seem to leave the skies over Beirut. And they’re not just over the southern suburbs, which is where Hezbollah had offices and a presence. It’s everywhere, across the city. It is this incessant buzzing.

The displaced are being housed in more than a thousand facilities across the country, including more than 700 schools and educational facilities. There are also many people who are still on the streets. Just yesterday, I was with a group of hundreds of displaced people who are in an area very close to the coast, to the Lebanese coast, in an area called Biel. And they’re staying — I can’t even call them tents, because the four sides were completely open to the elements. It was just a piece of canvas overhead. And these people are displaced from all over Lebanon, not just from the south. They were displaced from the southern suburbs of Beirut, an area known as Dahiyeh, and as well as the Beqaa, which has also come under bombardment, and elsewhere. There were Syrians among them, too.

So, yes, the government has opened more than a thousand shelters, but it’s not enough, given the sheer volume of people who have been displaced. Many have also been taken in by Lebanese into their homes. And that is why some of these houses — you know, we’ve seen some of these displaced people who were taken in by Lebanese in other parts of the country — come under Israeli attack.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Rania, if you could talk about the number of people you spoke to who consider themselves anti-Hezbollah? How are they feeling now?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, it’s definitely — the sentiment here is that this is now a war on Lebanon and that there is no safe space. When Christian villages in the north and in the south can also be targeted, there is a sense that you just don’t know who Hezbollah — sorry, who Israel is targeting. They claim that they are chasing Hezbollah operatives. Who knows? There are question marks about that. Is there any proof of that? Like yesterday, when they blew up the village in the south, they said that there were Hezbollah tunnels under this. You know, they seem — again, this is part of the Gaza playbook. They can say that there is a command center, Hamas command center, under one of the hospitals and blow it up.

So, there is a sense that, you know, there are certainly Lebanese who disagree with Hezbollah’s decision to open what it called a support front to ease the pressure of Gaza. That was how Hezbollah described its support front. There are Lebanese who disagree with that. There are Lebanese who blame Hezbollah for dragging — for, they say, dragging the country into the war. And there are many others who see Hezbollah as the frontline defense against Israeli not only airstrikes and attacks, but also there have been attempts over the past two-and-a-half weeks or so for Israeli ground troops to enter southern Lebanon. And they have faced very fierce resistance from Hezbollah fighters in the south.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, if you could respond, Rania, to what Netanyahu has said about Israel’s intentions in Lebanon? He said that the Lebanese basically need to eliminate Hezbollah. Unless people of Lebanon, he says, quote, “take the country back” and free themselves from Hezbollah, Lebanon would be turned into Gaza. I mean, your response? People are saying, suggesting that what he wants, what Israel really wants, is to instigate a civil war in Lebanon. Is that the general sentiment?

RANIA ABOUZEID: That is the general sentiment, and that is a sentiment that was conveyed from some of the country’s top politicians down to some of these displaced people who are still on the streets of Beirut. That is very — I mean, that’s how it was interpreted, that he’s basically saying, “Turn on each other, or we will turn you into Gaza.”

And, you know, we see these efforts to try and foment this suspicion among Lebanese. There are — in all of those cases that I mentioned, when displaced people who were taken into homes in other parts — and let me be frank, in non-Shiite areas of Lebanon, were targeted by the Israelis, there is this sense that the Israelis are trying to make Lebanese fear each other, to try and make people of the south almost outcasts and to make people afraid to take in the displaced into their homes and into their communities.

This is compounded by the fact that in recent days Israeli journalists just casually tweet something, saying, “Hey, you know, what’s happening in a garden in a particular neighborhood?” And that causes widespread panic, when the Lebanese fear that perhaps that garden — they’re saying that because that garden or that facility might be targeted. Just before we went on air, there was a report that the Al Jazeera offices in central Beirut have also received a similar warning and that they have now been evacuated. So, there is this panic and this sense Israel can target whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and that they’re — with complete immunity.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response also to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Rania, saying that he’s demanding UNIFIL soldiers get out of combat zones, alleging their presence is providing a human shield for Hezbollah? And overall, talk about the significance of saying that the peacekeepers — I think there are about 10,000 of them in southern Lebanon — should get out of the way, many saying they want them — that Israel wants them out because they don’t want international observers describing what’s happening there. But how UNIFIL is seen in Lebanon?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, I’ll tell you how UNIFIL has responded to those threats. And UNIFIL has said that they’re not going anywhere. UNIFIL is the peacekeeping force that is stationed along the U.N.-delineated Blue Line, which is the border between the two states. It is their role to stay there and to monitor what is happening there.

We’ve seen four, I think five, attacks now, direct Israeli attacks on UNIFIL bases. They have wounded peacekeepers. They have taken out surveillance cameras on some of these bases. They’ve also, on one occasion, actually used a bulldozer to try and bring down a wall on one of these UNIFIL bases.

So, it’s all part of this effort to sort of intimidate and to attempt to discredit not just UNIFIL, but the U.N. We’ve seen the same thing with UNRWA, which is the U.N. agency which is tasked with dealing with Palestinian refugees. Beyond that, I mean, we saw Netanyahu himself at the U.N. General Assembly stand on the podium there and call the U.N. antisemitic. Israel has declared the U.N. secretary-general persona non grata in Israel. So, it’s all part of this coordinated effort to try and discredit the U.N. if it points out things like international law and the laws of war and international humanitarian law, and, in fact, UNIFIL’s mission and why it is in southern Lebanon.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Rania, could you explain, you know, this idea, this doctrine, the Dahiya doctrine, and whether — which is named, of course, after the area outside Beirut which has come under fire from Israel, and whether you think that’s actually in effect now? And I just want to just quote a brief passage from your New Yorker piece where you point out — I mean, just to give a scale — a sense of the scale of Israel’s assault, you know, a number of health workers have been killed, health facilities targeted. You quote Airwars, a British conflict monitor, who told The Washington Post that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon was, quote, “the most intense aerial campaign that we know of in the last 20 years” — of course, with the exception of Gaza. So, if you could explain the Dahiya doctrine and your sense of whether it’s in effect now?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the Dahiya doctrine was created, basically, after the 2006 war. And to put it very bluntly, the idea is that you cause so much pain to a community that you try and pry public support from the group, from the nonstate actor — in this case, Hezbollah. So, the idea is that you inflict so much pain on Hezbollah’s support base, on what is known here as the resistance community, that it turns against the group.

And this is why we’re seeing, you know, the scope of the targets is so wide. It is not just — you know, Israelis are not just targeting Hezbollah infrastructure and military targets. They are also targeting, as I said, people, displaced people who escaped parts of the country that are very far away from the border. They’re targeting — Lebanon’s public health minister has said that he — you know, there are hospitals that have been bombed and closed their doors because of the threat of Israeli strikes. More than a hundred paramedics have been killed. Medical centers have been targeted. So, it is a very — the targeting is very broad.

And the idea is to try and, as I said, pry that support, to say — actually, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said this, not in his last speech, which was a few days ago, but in the one before that. He said this is the war about who screams first. So, it’s about inflicting pain on the other side and who is going to say “enough” first. And the Dahiya doctrine thinks that if you inflict enough pain on Hezbollah supporters, you will pry them away from the party.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Rania Abouzeid is a Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll link to your piece for The New Yorker, “War Comes to Beirut.”

RANIA ABOUZEID: Thank you.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Coming up, as aid groups warn Israel is wiping northern Gaza off the map, the Biden administration is threatening to cut military assistance to Israel in 30 days if more aid is not allowed into the area. We’ll speak to former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest last year. Back in a minute.