The Levent

Lebanon is on the brink. Yesterday, Wednesday 8 April, Israel conducted a vicious attack on civilian targets across the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Hundreds of people were killed. Thousands lost their homes, adding to the hundreds of thousands already displaced in the last three weeks. An already fragile Lebanon is now on the brink. The international community - and especially Europe - must now step up to save Lebanon. In this op-ed for commonspace.eu, Alexandra Dumitrescu says  Israel has made claims that it intends to continue its occupation and possibly even annex southern Lebanon. Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on 23 March that Israel should extend its border with Lebanon up to the Litani ​River. Since then, all of the Litani’s main bridge crossings have been bombed and severely damaged, if not fully destroyed. As Maha Yahya, the Director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, put it in her article for Foreign Affairs, “By joining the battle, Hezbollah inextricably tied Lebanon’s fate to the larger war. But it is also clear that Israel is using the war and Hezbollah’s provocations to justify a much larger—and potentially devastating—assault on Lebanon itself.” (Click the image to read her op-ed in full).

Israeli forces destroyed 17 surveillance cameras linked to the United Nations peacekeepers’ main headquarters in southern Lebanon in 24 hours, a UN security official told AFP on Saturday. Since the start of the Israel-Hezbollah war on March 2, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has been caught in the crossfire in the country’s south, with Hezbollah launching attacks on Israel and its troops, and Israeli forces pushing into border towns. The official, who requested anonymity, said “17 of the headquarters’ cameras have been destroyed by the Israeli army” in the coastal town of Naqura. UNIFIL spokeswoman Kandice Ardiel told AFP on Saturday that “the cameras appear to have been destroyed by some kind of laser.” She added that “(Israeli) soldiers are present in Naqura and have been undertaking massive demolitions of buildings in the village this week.” Earlier this week, Ardiel told AFP that “not only have these demolitions destroyed civilian homes and businesses, but the strength of the blasts have caused damage to UNIFIL’s headquarters.” Three Indonesian peacekeepers from the UN force have been killed in two separate incidents over the past week. UNIFIL also reported Friday an “explosion” in one of its bases near Odaisseh in south Lebanon that wounded three personnel, adding that they “do not yet know the origin of the explosion.” The Israeli army accused Hezbollah of firing “a rocket that landed in a UNIFIL outpost.” The UN office in Jakarta said on Saturday the wounded were Indonesian. Indonesia condemned the incident as “unacceptable,” saying “these events underscore the urgent need to strengthen protection for UN peacekeeping forces amid an increasingly dangerous conflict situation.” According to the UN, 97 force members have been killed in violence since its establishment in 1978 to monitor the withdrawal of Israeli forces after they invaded Lebanon.