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Long History of Warfare on Israel-Lebanon Border

Smoke billows from the sites of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon's southern plain of Marjeyoun along the border with Israel on September 24, 2024. (AFP)
Smoke billows from the sites of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon's southern plain of Marjeyoun along the border with Israel on September 24, 2024. (AFP)
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Long History of Warfare on Israel-Lebanon Border

Smoke billows from the sites of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon's southern plain of Marjeyoun along the border with Israel on September 24, 2024. (AFP)
Smoke billows from the sites of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon's southern plain of Marjeyoun along the border with Israel on September 24, 2024. (AFP)

Escalating hostilities between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah group are the latest episode in decades of conflict across the Lebanese-Israeli border. Here is the history:

1948

Lebanon fights alongside other Arab countries against the nascent state of Israel. Around 100,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in what had been British-ruled Palestine during the war arrive in Lebanon as refugees. Lebanon and Israel agree to an armistice in 1949.

1968

Israeli commandos destroy a dozen passenger planes at Beirut airport in response to an attack on an Israeli airliner by a Lebanon-based Palestinian armed group.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) relocates to Lebanon two years later after its expulsion from Jordan, leading to increased cross-border flare-ups.

1973

Disguised Israeli special forces shoot dead three Palestinian militant leaders in Beirut in retaliation for the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Palestinian raids into Israel and Israeli military reprisals on targets in Lebanon intensify during the 1970s, leading many Lebanese to flee their country's south and aggravating sectarian tensions in Lebanon, where civil war is starting.

1978

Israel invades south Lebanon and sets up a narrow occupation zone in an operation against Palestinian fighters after a militant attack near Tel Aviv. Israel backs a local Christian militia called the South Lebanese Army (SLA).

1982

Israel invades Lebanon all the way to Beirut in an offensive that followed tit-for-tat border fire. Thousands of Palestinian fighters are evacuated by sea after a bloody 10-week siege of the Lebanese capital involving heavy Israeli bombardment of West Beirut. Lebanon's newly elected Maronite president is killed by a car bomb. Iran's Revolutionary Guards establish the Shiite armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

1985

Israel pulled back from central Lebanon in 1983 but retained forces in the south. It establishes a formal occupation zone in southern Lebanon, about 15 km (nine miles) deep, controlling the area with its SLA ally. Hezbollah wages guerrilla war against Israeli forces.

1996

With Hezbollah regularly attacking Israeli forces in the south and firing rockets into northern Israel, Israel mounts a 17-day "Operation Grapes of Wrath" offensive that kills more than 200 people in Lebanon, including 102 who die when Israel shells a UN base near the south Lebanon village of Qana.

2000

Israel withdraws from southern Lebanon, ending 22 years of occupation.

2006

In July, Hezbollah crosses the border into Israel, kidnaps two Israeli soldiers and kills others, sparking a five-week war involving heavy Israeli strikes on both Hezbollah strongholds and national infrastructure.

While Israeli ground forces move into southern Lebanon, much of the conflict is conducted by Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah rocket fire. It ends without Israel achieving its military objectives and with Hezbollah declaring it a "divine victory".

At least 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 158 Israelis, mostly soldiers, are killed.

2023

On Oct. 8, Hezbollah begins trading fire with Israel a day after the Palestinian group Hamas attacked communities in southern Israel and sparked the Gaza war.

Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, says its attacks aim to support Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli airstrikes pound border areas of south Lebanon and target sites in the Bekaa valley while Hezbollah strikes northern Israel. Tens of thousands flee their homes on both sides of the border.

2024

In July, a strike on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights kills 12 youths. Hezbollah denies involvement, but Israel kills a senior commander from the group in a strike near Beirut.

In August, Hezbollah retaliates with hundreds of rockets and drones onto Israel, saying it targeted a base north of Tel Aviv.

The conflict escalates further in September when thousands of Hezbollah's wireless communications devices explode in an apparent Israeli attack, killing dozens and wounding thousands. An Israeli strike in Beirut kills senior Hezbollah commanders.

Days later, Israel launches its biggest bombardment of the war, killing more than 500 people in a single day and driving tens of thousands to flee the south, according to Lebanese authorities.

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Is All-Out War Inevitable? The View from Israel and Lebanon

Smoke billows after an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese village of Al-Mahmoudiye on September 24, 2024. (AFP)
Smoke billows after an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese village of Al-Mahmoudiye on September 24, 2024. (AFP)
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Is All-Out War Inevitable? The View from Israel and Lebanon

Smoke billows after an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese village of Al-Mahmoudiye on September 24, 2024. (AFP)
Smoke billows after an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese village of Al-Mahmoudiye on September 24, 2024. (AFP)

The relentless exchanges of fire between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah of recent days have stoked fears the longtime foes are moving inexorably towards all-out war, despite international appeals for restraint.

AFP correspondents in Jerusalem and Beirut talked to officials and analysts who told them what the opposing sides hope to achieve by ramping up their attacks and whether there is any way out.

- View from Israel -

Israeli officials insist they have been left with no choice but to respond to Hezbollah after its near-daily rocket fire emptied communities near the border with Lebanon for almost a year.

"Hezbollah's actions have turned southern Lebanon into a battlefield," a military official said in a briefing on Monday.

The goals of Israel's latest operation are to "degrade" the threat posed by Hezbollah, push Hezbollah fighters away from the border and destroy infrastructure built by its elite Radwan Force, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Israeli political analyst Michael Horowitz said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to pressure Hezbollah to agree to halt its cross-border attacks even without a ceasefire deal in Gaza, which has been a prerequisite for the Iran-backed armed group.

"I think the Israeli strategy is clear: Israel wants to gradually put pressure on Hezbollah, and strike harder and harder, in order to force it to rethink its alignment strategy with regard to Gaza," Horowitz said.

Both sides understand the risks of all-out war, meaning it is not inevitable, he said.

The two sides fought a devastating 34-day war in the summer of 2006 which cost more than 1,200 lives in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and some 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

"This is an extremely dangerous situation, but one that for me still leaves room for diplomacy to avoid the worst," said Horowitz.

Retired Colonel Miri Eisen, a senior fellow at Israel's International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University, said that the Israeli leadership saw ramped-up military operations against Hezbollah as an essential step towards striking any agreement to de-escalate.

"The language they (Hezbollah) speak is a language of violence and power and that means actions are very important against them," she said.

"I wish it was otherwise. But I have not seen any other language that works."

For now, Israeli officials say they are focused on aerial operations, but Eisen said a ground incursion could be ordered to achieve a broader goal: ensuring Hezbollah can not carry out anything similar to Hamas's October 7 attack.

"I do think that there's the possibility of a ground incursion because at the end we need to move the Hezbollah forces" away from the border, she said.

- View from Lebanon -

After sabotage attacks on Hezbollah communications devices and an air strike on the command of its Radwan Force last week, the group's deputy leader Naim Qassem declared that the battle with Israel had entered a "new phase" of "open reckoning".

As Lebanon's health ministry announced that nearly 500 people had been killed on Monday in the deadliest single day since the 2006 war, a Hezbollah source acknowledged that the situation was now similar.

"Things are taking an escalatory turn to reach a situation similar to" 2006, the Hezbollah source told AFP, requesting anonymity to discuss the matter.

Amal Saad, a Lebanese researcher on Hezbollah who is based at Cardiff University, said that while the group would feel it has to strike back at Israel after suffering such a series of blows, it would seek to calibrate its response so that it does not spark an all-out war.

While Hezbollah did step up its attacks on Israel after its military commander Fuad Shukr was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut in late July, its response was seen as being carefully calibrated not to provoke a full-scale conflict that carries huge risks for the movement.

"It will most likely, again, be a kind of sub-threshold (reaction) in the sense of below the threshold of war -- a controlled escalation, but one that's also qualitatively different," she said.

Saad said that whether or not war can be avoided may not be in Hezbollah's hands, but the group would be bolstered by memories of how it fared when Israel last launched a ground invasion and the belief that it was stronger militarily than its ally Hamas which has been battling Israeli troops in Gaza for nearly a year.

"It is extremely capable -- and I would say more effective than Israel -- when it comes to ground war, underground offensive, and we've seen this historically, particularly in 2006," she said.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said last week that his fighters could fight Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and fire rockets at northern Israel at the same time in the event of an Israeli ground operation to create a buffer zone.

In a report released Monday, the International Crisis Group said the recent escalation between the two sides "poses grave dangers".

"The point may be approaching at which Hezbollah decides that only a massive response can stop Israel from carrying out more attacks that impair it further," it said.