Oved Lobel: Hezbollah, not Israel, is the enemy of the Lebanese people

For those joining this movie halfway through, on October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’ October 7 atrocities, Hezbollah, a listed terrorist organisation in Australia, declared war on Israel, bombarding the country’s north and forcing the evacuation of more than 60,000 Israelis.

This conflict dramatically escalated after a Hezbollah rocket attack killed 12 Druze children playing soccer.

Since October 8, Hezbollah has fired approximately 9000 rockets, drones and missiles at Israel, killing dozens of soldiers and civilians and causing extensive damage.

Returning the displaced Israelis safely to their homes is a strategic aim of Israel’s Government.

Hezbollah’s rejection of any diplomatic deal has forced Israel to progressively escalate attacks on it, striking 1600 targets over 48 hours as part of Operation Northern Arrows.

This is both Israel’s legal right under international law and moral duty to its citizens. To paraphrase Sir Arthur Harris, Marshal of Britain’s Air Force during World War II, Hezbollah entered this war under the rather childish delusion it was going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb it.

Hezbollah, like Hamas, makes human shields a core element of its strategy, intertwining itself with civilian infrastructure throughout Lebanon, storing explosives and weaponry in residential areas and firing rockets from them.

Videos from various Israeli strikes show obvious secondary explosions as the munitions Hezbollah stores in civilian homes and buildings detonate.

Despite Israeli warnings to evacuate before the strikes commenced — warnings Hezbollah countermanded to ensure as many civilian casualties as possible — the death toll is already reportedly over 500, with nearly 2000 wounded.

While many are likely Hezbollah operatives and most Lebanese heeded the evacuation warnings, civilian casualties are an inevitable tragic by-product of embedding munitions and operatives among civilians.

Not that this matters to some journalists, analysts, politicians and UN officials, who suddenly seem to care deeply about the Law of Armed Conflict — or their warped reinterpretation thereof — only when Israel responds to attacks against it.

Such people not only seem to know little about the legal principles involved but also have a warped notion of chronology and cause and effect.

In their view, Israel is always the aggressor and everything it does is illegal, while Hezbollah, the terrorist group which, unprovoked, started the war by indiscriminately bombing Israelis and illegally embedding in Lebanese villages and neighbourhoods, is rarely even mentioned.

Even the detonation of thousands of pagers specially manufactured for Hezbollah by Israeli intelligence — and of Hezbollah walkie-talkies the following day — which killed dozens and injured thousands of Hezbollah operatives in the most targeted mass attack against a terrorist group in history, was widely condemned as a “war crime” and “terrorism”.

Those who genuinely care about international law would focus less on alleged Israeli violations and far more on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the previous war Hezbollah began in 2006.

That unanimous resolution demanded Hezbollah disarm so “there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese State,” and explicitly barred Hezbollah from operating along Israel’s border.

Had international law as represented by this binding resolution been enforced, Lebanon would be safe and sovereign today.

Instead, Hezbollah never pulled back from the border, and rapidly rearmed and began openly planning an October 7-style invasion of Israel’s north in 2011.

This war was postponed solely because Hezbollah was deployed to Syria at Iran’s request to help starve, displace and murder hundreds of thousands of Syrians to keep the dictator Bashar al-Assad in power.

Far from being a Lebanese organisation protecting Lebanon, Hezbollah is a jihadist occupation force, a direct outgrowth of the Islamic Revolution that took over Iran in 1979.

It’s an organic part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose officers, having helped found Hezbollah, used it to convert Lebanon into an armoury, fortress and collective human shield to enable it to destroy Israel, its raison d’etre.

Hezbollah is also among the world’s most prolific transnational organised crime syndicates, engaged in drug trafficking, human trafficking, including children, and every other criminal enterprise to help fund its jihad to destroy Israel.

It pioneered suicide bombings in the 1980s and has been conducting mass casualty terrorist attacks against civilians, not to mention Western and Israeli soldiers, regionally and globally for decades.

Thanks only to Israeli intelligence, it hasn’t had a successful transnational attack since blowing up a bus full of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012. However, the attempts continue.

The organisation has assassinated numerous Lebanese critics, officials and potential adversaries of the joint IRGC-Syrian control of the country, including influential former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and more than 20 others in a 2005 car bombing.

Hezbollah, not Israel, is the enemy of Lebanon and Lebanese sovereignty and is grossly violating multiple elements of international law, not least by its indiscriminate, unprovoked attacks on Israelis that sparked the conflict.

Oved Lobel is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council