Although long used to all manner of wars, Lebanon is watching in stunned disbelief as catastrophe strikes with an unprecedented violence. Everyone here remembers that in 2000, under pressure from Hezbollah, Israel withdrew from the south of the country, which it had occupied for eighteen years. The Shiite organization earned its nickname “Resistance” there, becoming the only Lebanese militia to keep its weapons — allowing it to become the Iran-backed “state within a state” that we know today.

The terrifying return of the Israeli army to Lebanese territory thus takes on the air of revenge, but with a key difference: it’s no longer only about occupying but also about emptying the south of its population (8 percent of the country’s land area) and ordering residents in the southern suburbs (some 800,000 in a country of five million) to evacuate as well — before the bombings.

In both regions, the panicked populations immediately fled their houses without looking back. Pursued by Israel’s watchful eye (and bombs), which nothing escapes, men, women, and children took refuge further north in schools emptied of their pupils, in rentals whose prices suddenly became prohibitive, or else outside, during this winter month, on the pavements of Beirut and elsewhere.

The truth is, the war in Gaza has taught Israel one simple thing: there’s no longer any need to conquer a territory by force; all it takes is WhatsApp or an X account to sow terror by ordering evacuations, on pain of suffering — in the words of Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich — the fate of the Gazan city of Khan Younis (400,000 inhabitants), almost entirely razed to the ground in 2024.

One man whispers in another’s ear, and his flattering murmur precipitates a cataclysm of global proportions. It’s like this that the diabolical Benjamin Netanyahu managed to drag the president of the world’s greatest power into a devasting war without cause or defined objectives.

The chain reaction was immediately set in motion: decapitated in the first hours of conflict, the Iranian regime lashed out far and wide, particularly against Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, all of which are close allies of the United States and hosts of its military bases. One can imagine the Israeli prime minister gloating: Iran’s retaliation has established his country as an objective ally of the oil monarchies.

In Lebanon, under the pretext of avenging Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death, Hezbollah made the improbable decision to fire several rockets at northern Israel, offering Netanyahu the ideal pretext to massacre it — and massacre the unhappy Lebanon along with it. And so finished the race that had been underway for a year between Israel and the new Lebanese government over the question: Who will disarm Hezbollah?

President Joseph Aoun and his prime minister, Nawaf Salam, had committed to doing so and more or less managed to in the south. But they were moving slowly — too slowly? —  in the rest of the country in order to avoid a direct confrontation between a still-fragile national army and a still-formidable Shiite militia. For although weakened by the war waged against it by Israel and the fall of its Syrian ally, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah remained capable of resisting the Lebanese government and even of carrying out its threat to spark a civil war.

The aim appears to be the same. But if it’s Israel rather than the government of Beirut that incapacitates Hezbollah, the situation changes completely. Conscious of the danger, the Council of Lebanese Ministers decided — a little late — to formally ban all of Hezbollah’s military activities and arrest members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards present in Lebanon with a view to extraditing them. The latter, who likely fired the rockets that set the powder keg ablaze — since Hezbollah’s Lebanese leaders were not really in control — had, for the most part, left the country once their crime was committed.