Apartheid Israel Is Invading and Colonising Southern Lebanon in Plain Sight

US president Donald Trump pulled back from his threat to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure and further to wipe out its entire civilisation on Tuesday, 7 April 2026, due to a Pakistan-brokered two week ceasefire. But despite this, Israel, Washington’s partner in the war against Iran, has launched a plethora of airstrikes against Lebanon, despite many considering the truce to cover the entire region.

Israel struck positions across Lebanon in the hours following the ceasefire, and Tel Aviv boasted that it was the most devastating attack so far, with missiles striking 100 sites in 10 minutes. But despite ministers globally, including Australia’s Penny Wong, insisting the pause should cover Lebanon, it’s well understood that Israel is engaged in aggressive expansionism into its neighbour’s territory.

After the US and Israel launched a war of aggression on Iran on 28 February, Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group fired rockets on northern Israel in solidarity with Tehran on 2 May, and in response, Tel Aviv has launched a massive air and land offensive that’s displaced 1.2 million people, or a fifth of the Lebanese population, and its killed more than 1,500 locals, as well as injuring around 4,600.

In terms of its military operations in southern Lebanon right now, Israel is openly carrying out the same playbook it launched on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, which means it is purposely attempting to level housing and civilian infrastructure in southern Lebanon, in order to permanently displace its residents, so that it can take over part of the sovereign nation of Lebanon.

So, when Australian foreign minister Wong released a 9 April statement, with Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Jordan, Sierra Leone and the UK, citing concerns about the “worsening humanitarian situation and displacement crisis in Lebanon”, it failed to indicate that Israel is causing the crisis, while these nations are well aware that Tel Aviv is engaging in its long-term colonising mission.

Landgrab by any other name

Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz explained on 24 March that Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah has the end goal of taking control of southern Lebanon, up to the point of the Litani River, which would mean usurping 10 percent of the neighbouring country. The minister has framed this as creating a “security zone” to prevent missiles from being launched at Israel from the area south of the river.

Over the past 30 months, Israel has razed the Gaza Strip to the ground. Tel Aviv has long maintained that this was done out of self-defence following 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on southern Israel. But the United Nations and numerous other organisations have determined that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza and is too attempting to ethnically cleanse the region of Palestinians.

The tactics the Israeli Defence Force used to completely destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and population are now being employed in southern Lebanon. So, as in Gaza, Israel is mass murdering the civilian population, including children, and it’s destroying Lebanese homes, schools and hospitals.

Indeed, Tel Aviv has been issuing evacuation notices to Lebanese people to leave their homes for good, and it’s even been employing its tactic of dropping propaganda leaflets upon targeted populations, calling for these Lebanese people to evacuate the areas in which they live or even suggesting that they might defect and assist the IDF as it invades their homeland.

Israel has been occupying Gaza and the West Bank since 1967. In mid-2024, the International Court of Justice ruled this an illegal occupation. However, despite Katz’s rhetoric about forming a buffer zone between Israel and Lebanon, via the seizing of some of the latter’s land and shifting Israel’s border north, this is just another blatant attempt to take control of other people’s land.

The clear issue for the Netanyahu government is the framing of its settler colonial designs on a good portion of Lebanon, as despite Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories being illegal, Tel Aviv making attacks upon the land it has illegally occupied for six decades doesn’t raise the eyebrows of the international community, in quite the same way that invading a sovereign nation does.

The Bible says it is so

Despite Israel being so blatant in its genocidal rhetoric over the last 30 months of the mass slaughter and starvation program that it continues to perpetrate in the Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv does attempt to conceal its colonising intentions, which fly in the face of the post-World War II era of decolonisation, behind diplomatic rhetoric, such as the “security zone” it is constructing in someone else’s country.

Right before the 7 October Hamas attacks on southern Israel, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was becoming more blatant in exposing Israel’s desires for expansion, as in September 2023, he appeared before the UN General Assembly holding up a map of Israel, which distinctly erased the occupied Palestinian territories, so that Israel appeared to encompass the entire region.

However, as the Gaza genocide has progressed and the US Trump administration has commenced its own tearing down of post-World War II norms, Netanyahu and the extremist ministers in his cabinet have become increasingly open about their desires for a “Greater Israel”, as while the state was established on Palestinian land in 1948, there has always been an aim to expand its borders further.

Zionism is the 1880s European political doctrine advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland on historic Palestine, although other regions were contemplated as well. But Palestine was most attractive as in the Hebrew Bible, God established a covenant with Abraham, leaving the “Holy Land” to some of his descendants, which are today understood to be the Jewish people.

This biblical “Promised Land” covers modern day Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and some of Lebanon, Jordan, parts of Egypt and southwestern Syria. But “Greater Israel” is a larger political concept also sourced from the Bible that includes parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Netanyahu said in an August 2025 interview that he’s on an “historical and spiritual mission”, as he’s attached to the visions of the Promised Land and Greater Israel.

Don’t mention the perpetrator

The ceasefire in respect of the US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran is supposed to hold for two weeks. The insistence of global leaders, like foreign minister Wong, that the truce should apply to Lebanon as well, tends to ignore the fact that Israel has embarked upon this invasion of southern Lebanon, as part of its supposed “god-given right” for its people to own that land.

Both the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government have proclaimed that the pause in fighting has nothing to do with Israel’s plans in Lebanon, while Tehran is now warning that the attacks on Lebanon must end or there will be reprisals, and it’s too stated that shipping has again ceased in the Strait of Hormuz, despite the ceasefire being predicated on it being open.

But whilst Wong and other Labor ministers appear to have misgivings about Israel’s blatant expansionism and its genocidal tactics being applied in Lebanon, when being questioned about the Netanyahu government’s intentions, they seem incapable of properly answering, as they’ve been so shackled by the Israel lobby and its combatting antisemitism agenda, that they can’t criticise Israel.

When ABC News Breakfast host Emma Rebellato asked Wong on Thursday morning, 9 April, about the humanitarian situation in Lebanon, as overnight Israel’s devastating attacks had killed at least 254 people and wounding 1,165, the foreign minister referred to the joint statement she’d released the night prior about protecting humanitarian personnel in warzones.

“We’ve seen Indonesian peacekeepers killed in the conflict in Lebanon and it’s extremely important that the international community speaks with one voice about international humanitarian law being observed by all parties,” said Wong, in a response that distinctly skirted around the fact that Tel Aviv is killing off and displacing large numbers of innocent Lebanese civilians in order to steal their land.