Just after daybreak on Monday, dozens of US-made warplanes began raining bombs and missiles on Lebanon, killing more than 550 people and injuring 1,800 in the hours that followed. By day’s end, Israel had carried out one of the most intense aerial bombardments in modern history. The Israeli fighter jets were sent by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, but they couldn’t have gotten off the ground without the full support and complicity of Joe Biden over the past 11 months.
The Israeli military said it bombed more than 1,600 targets throughout Lebanon that day, claiming it was targeting locations where Hezbollah stored rockets and other weapons it was firing at northern Israel. The death toll, which included 50 children and 94 women, was the country’s highest single-day toll since Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended in 1990. Nearly 500,000 Lebanese civilians fled their homes in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa valley and other regions.
In one day, Israel expanded the brutal tactics of its Gaza war – massive bombardment and displacement of civilians – into Lebanon. Netanyahu also eviscerated one of the last supposed red lines that Biden had tried to impose on his ally: preventing the war that Israel launched after the 7 October attacks by Hamas militants from spreading to Lebanon. There’s little doubt that over the past week, Israel has launched an all-out war against its smaller neighbor, even if that war has not yet turned into a regional conflagration that draws in Iran and its allied militias in the Middle East.
This catastrophic war is being engineered by Netanyahu, who has worked for months to expand the conflict out of Gaza, into a war without end that would enable him to remain in power and avoid multiple investigations into the Israeli government’s intelligence failures leading up to 7 October. If he’s forced out of office, Netanyahu would also face a long-delayed trial on corruption charges stemming from an earlier stint as prime minister. Netanyahu’s strategy to prolong the war – by obstructing a ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza and carrying out escalatory attacks against Hezbollah and Iran, intended to provoke them into a wider conflict – has worked. His Likud party is once again leading national polls in Israel, and it has recovered much of the ground it lost since last year.
Biden also bears significant blame for the unfolding catastrophe – and he will be complicit if Israel tries to turn Lebanon into the new Gaza. Since October, Biden has shown absolute support for Israel and given Netanyahu virtually everything he’s asked for. The US administration rushed at least $6.5bn in weapons and other supplies to Israel that allowed the Israeli military to sustain its war on Gaza. In addition to bombs and missiles, the US has provided massive shipments of jet fuel that enable Israeli warplanes to keep flying. Washington also used its veto power at the UN security council to block multiple resolutions demanding a ceasefire, and provided political cover to tamp down criticism of Israel at other international bodies.
And what has Biden received for his unwavering support of Israel? He’s been humiliated at every turn by Netanyahu and members of his extremist government, who refuse to accept a truce with Hamas that would lead to the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, instigated a widespread famine and displaced nearly 90% of Gaza’s population. The Gaza war – and his inability to restrain Israel – has turned into Biden’s biggest policy and moral failure, and overshadowed any success he had at restoring US credibility after Donald Trump’s disastrous presidency.
Biden’s failure will only grow if the conflict intensifies and expands beyond Lebanon in the coming weeks. After 7 October, the Biden administration insisted that one of its main goals was to prevent the Gaza war from spreading into a regional conflict that would draw in Iran and its so-called “axis of resistance”, a network of regional militias that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and several Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.
As most Arab regimes abandoned the Palestinians besieged in Gaza, Iran’s allies tried to offer a modicum of support by targeting Israel and US troops in the region, hoping to increase pressure for a ceasefire. Hezbollah, which is the most powerful military force and political party in Lebanon, began firing rockets into northern Israel on 8 October – a strategy its leaders said was intended to divert Israeli military resources from Gaza.
All of Iran’s allies have said they would stop their attacks once Israel ends its bombardment of Gaza. In late November, when Israel and Hamas agreed to a week-long truce, Hezbollah ceased its strikes on northern Israel, and the Houthis stopped firing missiles and drones at shipping vessels sailing through the Red Sea.
But rather than seeing the conflicts as interconnected, the Biden administration has avoided pressuring Netanyahu to accept an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and instead allowed him to sabotage the negotiations for months. Biden could have prevented the war from expanding into Lebanon – and possibly spiraling into a regional conflict – if he had used the most effective leverage he has over Israel: stopping the flow of weapons (and jet fuel) that enables Israel to continue bombing Gaza and Lebanon.
Biden not only squandered any influence he could have exerted to change Israel’s behavior, the US president decided to reward Netanyahu’s defiance by sending him even more weapons. At the height of Netanyahu’s obstinacy over ceasefire negotiations, the Biden administration last month approved $20bn in new arms deals to Israel. It’s one of the largest weapons transfers to Israel in US history, and will include dozens of F-15 fighter jets, tactical vehicles, missiles and tens of thousands of mortars and tank cartridges. These arms will largely be funded by US taxpayers, since Washington provides Israel with at least $3.8bn in military assistance a year. After months of lobbying by Biden, Congress in April approved an additional $14bn in military aid to Israel, which will underwrite the latest weapons package.
With Biden failing to pressure Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, the Israeli premier escalated the conflict with Hezbollah in recent weeks. Netanyahu’s security cabinet expanded its war goals to include the return of more than 60,000 residents of northern Israel to their homes, after they were evacuated in response to Hezbollah’s attacks.
Over the past 11 months, Hezbollah absorbed severe Israeli retaliation with airstrikes and targeted assassinations that killed hundreds of the group’s fighters. While engaged in near-daily exchanges of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, Hezbollah had tried to calibrate its response to Israeli strikes by avoiding a large-scale attack on Israeli civilians or infrastructure that would precipitate a full-scale war.
That détente largely held, even after Israel assassinated one of Hezbollah’s most senior leaders in an airstrike on southern Beirut in late July.
But on 17 September, Israel unleashed a brutal attack over two days that remotely blew up thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies of Hezbollah members across Lebanon. Many western analysts and media outlets marveled at Israel’s ingenuity and technological prowess – comparing the attack to a plot pulled out of a James Bond thriller or dystopian movie. That framing obscured the terror inflicted by Israel on thousands of Lebanese who witnessed or were affected by the explosions, which went off in hospitals, grocery stores, restaurants and buses and on crowded sidewalks.
The coordinated detonations, in which Israel seemingly managed to rig thousands of pagers and hand-held radios with explosives before they were shipped to Lebanon, killed at least 37 people and wounded more than 3,000. For several days, hospitals across Lebanon were overwhelmed with thousands of victims, many of whom had sustained life-altering injuries to their eyes and limbs. The bombings were an insidious and indiscriminate form of warfare – and they likely constituted a war crime under international law.
The booby-trapped device explosions humiliated and weakened Hezbollah – and Israel took advantage of the chaos by dramatically escalating its attacks on the militia and Lebanon. On 20 September, an Israeli airstrike destroyed two buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing 45 people and wounding dozens. Hezbollah confirmed that the bombing killed two of its top military commanders, along with 12 other fighters, who were meeting in one of the buildings.
Israel continued escalating its attacks over the weekend, carrying out hundreds of airstrikes on southern Lebanon. Hezbollah retaliated on Sunday by firing more than 100 rockets into northern Israel, and striking deeper into Israeli territory than it had since October. By Monday morning, Israel had launched its most intense aerial bombardment of Lebanon in decades, killing more than 550 people in one day.
After Israel launched its devastating pager explosions against Hezbollah last week, the Biden administration was virtually invisible. The US became a bystander in a spiraling conflict that it could have prevented months ago if only Biden could have mustered the will to stand up to Netanyahu.
On Wednesday, the US, along with several European and Arab states, announced a proposal for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, which would provide time to negotiate a wider deal. That same day, Israel’s top military commander said his troops were preparing for a possible ground invasion of Lebanon.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University. He is also a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn)
