Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted UN forces along the Blue Line between Israel and Lebanon.
Thirty Irish peacekeepers are currently manning a small United Nations outpost overlooking a parcel of land in south Lebanon that has long served as a hotspot in the border region. From UN outpost 6-52, the Israeli village and base of Avivm are visible across the Blue Line that separates Lebanese and Israeli territory. UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping mission that has operated in south Lebanon for nearly five decades, oversees the withdrawal line.
On the other side of the outpost lies the Lebanese village of Maroun al-Ras, which Israeli forces occupied in the 80s and 90s. The village has since become a bastion of support for Hezbollah, the Iran-backed paramilitary organization that drove Israeli forces from south Lebanon in 2000.
Scores of young men from Maroun al-Ras died fighting for Hezbollah during the group’s short but ruthless war with Israel in 2006. The Iranian government funded the construction of a public park called Iran Garden on a hilltop by Maroun al-Ras to mark the village’s sacrifice during the six-week long war that ended with an internationally brokered ceasefire.
Ceasefire Terms Ignored
UN Resolution 1701 enshrined the ceasefire’s main terms and boosted UNIFIL to a nearly 10,000-strong international UN force, provided that only its peacekeepers and the Lebanese army would be active in south Lebanon.
This intended to provide some reassurance to Israel that Hezbollah would no longer be a threat to its northern communities, while strengthening the hand of the Lebanese state, which had exercised little control over the border area since the 1970s, when the country erupted in a bloody civil war.
Ultimately, neither side ever fully adhered to the terms of UN Resolution 1701: Hezbollah quickly re-established its military capabilities in southern Lebanon after the 2006 war. Meanwhile, Israel routinely violated Lebanese airspace.
Almost Daily Exchanges of Fire
Near daily exchanges of fire that began in October 2023 with Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel, after Israel’s war on Gaza began, spiraled into an all-out war in September. Israel’s widespread bombing campaign across Lebanon has since killed more than 2,500 Lebanese, according to the Lebanese health ministry, including Hezbollah fighters, civilians, and medical personnel. According to estimates, the violence has displaced nearly a quarter of Lebanon’s population. Meanwhile, Hezbollah-led attacks have killed 31 Israeli civilians and 55 soldiers, and 60,000 residents of northern Israel remain unable to return home.
The same week that Israel once again occupied Maroun al-Ras, its forces fired on several UN outposts including UNIFIL’s headquarters in Naqoura and injured several peacekeepers. For several days, Israeli Merkava battle tanks were stationed just 60 meters from Outpost 6-52 with their armaments trained at the Irish troops hunkered down inside. While on Oct. 16, UNIFIL said an Israeli Merkava tank fired at a UN watchtower in Kfar Kela, destroying two cameras and damaging the tower.
Thanassis Cambanis, the director of The Century Foundation’s center for international research and policy, says there seems to be a clear campaign by Israel to discredit the UN as an interlocutor in South Lebanon. “I interpret these direct attacks on UN positions as adjunct to the political campaign that Israel has been undertaking to attack and discredit every single UN agency involved in any way in the region,” says Cambanis.
“Battle Zones Near UNIFIL”
During a press briefing, an IDF spokesperson said the Israeli military is in regular contact with UNIFIL and that any strikes on UN positions had not been intentional, and added that Hezbollah had “decided to bring the battle zones near UNIFIL posts.”
Meanwhile Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on the UN to withdraw its peacekeepers three miles from their positions along the Blue Line. “Your refusal to withdraw UNIFIL forces makes them hostages of Hezbollah,” said the Israeli premier in a video published on Oct. 13. “This also endangers them as well as the lives of our soldiers.”
In early October, a video began circulating on social media of Israeli soldiers raising an Israeli flag in the park, against the backdrop of an emptied and debris-strewn Maroun al-Ras, a provocative sign of Israel’s latest invasion of Lebanon.
Israel’s demands for the withdrawal of UNIFIL, whose troops come from countries including France and Italy, which Israel has strong links with, raises the question of which country could better serve as an alternative peacekeeper.
The US has rejected calls from Israel to deploy its troops on the ground as peacekeepers in south Lebanon. Suggestions that Arab states somehow allied with Israeli interests — such as Gulf countries or Egypt — would send soldiers to occupy and secure Gaza or southern Lebanon, serving as “enforcers of an Israeli hegemony,” are “fantastical,” according to Cambanis.
The current environment for UNIFIL peacekeepers will be “tense and nerve wracking,” says Declan Power, a defense analyst and former Irish soldier. Power says troops deployed along the Blue Line will regularly hear the sound of strikes and small-arms fire nearby. If a soldier doesn’t experience a “sense of powerlessness” when a strike hits nearby they’re telling a lie, he argues. But then the training kicks in: “You have to start thinking of those around you. Bonds get created — it’s no mythology.”
“A Woeful Record”
UNIFIL’s mandate from the UN Security Council allows peacekeepers to monitor and record violations of UN Resolution 1701, but not enforce the terms of the resolution by, for example, confiscating weapons or detaining Hezbollah militants. The peacekeepers can only use force in self-defense and to prevent their area of operations or bases from serving as sites for hostile activities.
With this more limited mandate, UNIFIL has helped to diffuse minor escalations and flare-ups for nearly two decades, but it was effectively a temporary deterrent to the inconclusive 2006 war, which has now angrily come to the fore between Israel and Hezbollah.
“Bonds get created — it’s no mythology.” – Declan PowerWhile the strikes have killed several Lebanese soldiers, the Lebanese army, which the US and a consortium of foreign governments fund, has thus far stayed out of the fighting. International pressure for the Lebanese army to intervene against Hezbollah or play a role in disarming the paramilitary group could cause it to fracture along community lines, particularly in the short term and while the Lebanese state remains so weak.
“A solid majority of Lebanese oppose Hezbollah,” wrote Lebanese analyst and journalist Kim Ghattas in the Financial Times. “But while its opponents, and even its allies, see an opportunity to curtail its power, no one in Lebanon is looking to ride an Israeli tank to a victory crushing another political party or community.”
Eoin MacNamara, a research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs says that “training up local armed forces like the LAF often seems like a good idea in theory. But, in practice, despite good intentions, the West has a woeful record when attempting to train effective forces in the Middle East and Africa. The Western ‘train-and-equip’ approach fails to build allegiance, commitment and motivation in local and state militaries that receive training.”
“Impossible Expectations”
The influential speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, Nabih Berri, a Lebanese-Shia politician and Hezbollah ally, has called for the full implementation of Resolution 1701. The country’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, vowed to enforce Resolution 1701 once a ceasefire is reached, and to deploy increased numbers of Lebanese soldiers in southern Lebanon. Meanwhile in New York, the UN Security Council is discussing the possibility of adopting a new resolution on Lebanon, what Lebanese journalist Jeanin Alkh has described as “1701 plus.”
Yet, with an estimated 15,000 Israeli troops now inside Lebanese territory, Israel no longer seems content to settle for the terms of the 2006 ceasefire deal. Instead, the current Israeli government sees an opportunity to achieve some “sort of fantastical, absolute security,” says Cambanis.
Israeli officials have spoken about a demilitarized “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon to allow residents of northern Israel to return home, while an Israeli rabbi has outright called for the settlement of southern Lebanon.
Israel has relatively secure borders with Jordan and Egypt due to longstanding political agreements with their governments. In Lebanon and Gaza, Israel has opted for another approach: “total military victory over its adversaries and essentially Israeli-controlled buffer zones in the territory of its adversaries,” says Cambanis. Israel has set up “impossible expectations” for its Jewish citizens, and also set “impossible targets” for how it’s defined security in a political settlement that could reliably end the conflict.
“Lengthy, Destructive Process”
Historically, Cambanis says, Israel “turns from war to diplomacy under two conditions: when it is defeated militarily, as it was in South Lebanon in 2000 [by Hezbollah], or when the US says ‘enough’ and cuts support, as happened [at] the end of the 2006 war.”
In his view, “The US is going to support Israel having quite a long war in Lebanon,” and he expects that to be “a lengthy, destructive process, probably involving a six-to-12-month plan.”
However, targeting Hezbollah’s leadership and striking Lebanon’s infrastructure from air are easier tasks than a prolonged occupation of Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Hezbollah militants remain willing to fight on home terrain. “No matter how much destruction Israel visits on Lebanon, there is going to be national resistance,” says Cambanis.
In the meantime, UNIFIL and countries supplying troops to the UN mission have, so far, rejected Israel’s calls for peacekeepers to withdraw further from the Blue Line.
“Terrible Consequences”
Ireland’s deputy prime minister Michael Martin said that the Irish Defence Forces is part of a UN peacekeeping mission that involves many countries contributing troops. “We’ve seen in the past in environments where troops were unilaterally pulled out, the consequences were terrible,” he argued.
As the war in Lebanon rages on without an end in sight, Power says there will be a sense of professionalism and teamwork among the Irish peacekeepers at Outpost 6-52: “You wanted to soldier professionally; you wanted to experience this. Now you’re experiencing it for good, bad or ill.”
Lieutenant Colonel Tom Fox, the commander of the Irish-Polish battalion currently deployed with UNIFIL in southern Lebanon said, that “now more than ever” there is a need for the UN mission: “We are the eyes and ears of the world to report on the facts of what is happening on the ground.”