On Sunday, 31 May 2026, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz published on his social media accounts a photograph of Israeli troops raising their flag over Beaufort fortress in southern Lebanon. The same fortress Israel had occupied for eighteen years, from 1982 to the year 2000. The same fortress to which UNESCO had granted enhanced protection in 2024, the highest level of immunity that international humanitarian law can confer on a civilian site. The same fortress that now, a quarter of a century after the Israeli withdrawal, once again holds soldiers from the same army within its walls. Nobody pretends to be surprised. That is precisely what should concern us.
The Mechanism
Seven times since 1978, the Israeli army has entered Lebanese territory. Seven times it has destroyed civilian infrastructure, displaced entire populations and negotiated or accepted withdrawal agreements. Seven times it has left late, incompletely, retaining positions the agreements did not authorise. In each cycle, the justification is security; in each cycle, the destruction far exceeds any verifiable military objective; in each cycle, Western mediators produce a signed document that Israel begins violating before the ink dries. This is not a pattern that repeats by accident. It is a doctrine in refinement.
What this doctrine produces on the ground is documented. In the municipality of Maroun el-Ras in southern Lebanon, Amnesty International recorded, through satellite imagery analysis, that 67% of structures were destroyed or heavily damaged between September 2024 and January 2025. The destruction continued for two months after the ceasefire signed on 27 November 2024 came into effect; not during the fighting, but afterwards, when the Israeli army was supposed to be withdrawing. Military bulldozers were demolishing buildings on territory Israel should have vacated weeks earlier. An army that razes homes two months after a ceasefire, on territory under unauthorised occupation, is not responding to any threat. It is executing a programme.
According to the satellite imagery analysis published by Amnesty International, in the municipality of Maroun el-Ras, 67% of all structures were destroyed or heavily damaged between September 2024 and January 2025. The destruction continued throughout January 2025, two months after the 27 November 2024 ceasefire entered into force, on territory from which Israel should have withdrawn.
In statements on Sunday, Minister Katz announced that Israel plans to destroy thousands more homes in southern Lebanon. He did not frame this as an inevitable side effect of combat. He framed it as an objective. On the same day he declared that, twenty-six years after the Israeli withdrawal, his country’s flag had returned to fly over the peaks overlooking the towns of Galilee. He did not say the previous occupation had been a mistake. He said the position he was now recovering was a victory that belonged to him. The distinction matters because it reveals the unit of time by which this state measures its operations; not years, but decades.
Since the start of this new war on 2 March 2026, more than 3,400 people have been killed in Lebanon and over one million displaced, according to Lebanese authorities. Israel ordered the evacuation of the entire southern strip of the country between its border and the Zahrani River, some forty kilometres to the north. Netanyahu described the capture of Beaufort as a “decisive turning point” and ordered troops to cross the Litani River, which had served as a tacit boundary. A medieval fortress under UNESCO protection, turned into a symbol of what the Prime Minister calls victory. This is not a metaphor Israel uses inadvertently.
The Signature as Cover
The doctrine of destruction described above could not function without a mechanism to protect it from consequences. That mechanism has a diplomatic name. It is called a ceasefire. On 27 November 2024, Israel and Lebanon signed one, brokered by France and the United States. Under its terms, the Israeli army was to withdraw from southern Lebanon by 26 January 2025. Israel did not withdraw. It obtained an extension to 18 February. It did not fully withdraw by that second deadline either, maintaining five military positions on highlands in the south of the country. By January 2026, the United Nations had documented at least 2,036 Israeli violations of the agreement. This is not a figure that produced any appreciable consequences.
On 26 January 2025, the date by which the withdrawal should have been completed under the original agreement, displaced Lebanese civilians attempted to return to their villages in the south. The Israeli army opened fire on them. Twenty-six people were killed. A further 147 were wounded. The dead were non-combatants exercising the right of return guaranteed by the very agreement Israel had signed. They died on the day when, under that agreement, the troops who killed them had no legal right to be in that territory. This is not a paradox of international law; it is international law’s actual content under present conditions of power.
In April 2026, a new ceasefire came into effect, brokered this time by the Trump administration. The agreement was signed on 17 April. By the end of May, Israel had resumed operations on a scale that Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam publicly described as a “scorched earth policy” and “collective punishment” against the civilian population of the south. Netanyahu ordered troops to cross the Litani. The April ceasefire, like the one of November 2024, fulfilled its real function. It offered Western mediators a presentable diplomatic product, provided political cover for the continuation of operations, and gave Israel the reorganisation time between one phase of destruction and the next. Peace was not the objective. It was the packaging.
The Accomplices in Suits
On Monday, 1 June 2026, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot convened an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council. He declared that the Israeli offensive was “contrary to international law” and described Israel’s conduct as a “major fault”. The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom and Germany joined in condemning it. The Council met that same day. The meeting produced no binding resolution. It could not have done so, because the United States holds a veto on the Council and has used it systematically to block any decision imposing consequences on Israel. Since October 2023, Washington has vetoed at least four resolutions relating to the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. The mechanism is designed to produce exactly this.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam denounced on 30 May 2026 that Israel was applying a “scorched earth policy” and “collective punishment” against the civilian population of southern Lebanon. The statement was made as Israel completed the capture of Beaufort and ordered the evacuation of the entire zone between the Israeli border and the Zahrani River, some forty kilometres to the north.
Collective punishment is prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, the treaty establishing the norms for the protection of civilian populations in wartime. The deliberate destruction of civilian property without military justification constitutes a grave breach of the same instrument. Salam is not employing a political metaphor; he is using the technical designation of a practice specifically prohibited by international humanitarian law. None of the countries presenting themselves as guarantors of that law has made their relationship with Israel conditional on compliance with those norms. They have issued statements. They have taken no measures.
In January 2026, the Trump administration approved an arms sale to Israel worth 6.67 billion dollars. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked an emergency clause to approve an additional package of 3 billion dollars, including 35,500 heavy aerial bombs, bypassing normal congressional scrutiny. The bombs were approved while the new war in Lebanon was already under way, weeks after the April ceasefire was signed. The emergency clause exists for situations in which United States national security requires an immediate response. Rubio used it to expedite the delivery of bombing material to a state that was at that moment destroying civilian infrastructure in a country with which it had signed a peace agreement forty days earlier.
Barrot says “major fault”. Rubio approves 35,500 bombs under emergency conditions. These two actions do not contradict each other. They are part of the same foreign policy. France negotiates the ceasefires that give Israel the time it needs to reorganise; the United States supplies the weaponry with which the destruction resumes. Each plays its role with the precision of those who know the script well. The system works.
The Name
What the international community refuses to pronounce is not, at this point, a matter of disputed legal interpretation. The facts are available, documented and published by bodies of the UN itself, by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch, by the International Criminal Court, whose arrest warrant against Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity has remained unexecuted since 2024. The 2,036 ceasefire violations are on record. The 26 civilians killed on the day of the withdrawal that never happened have names, families and villages they were trying to reach.
There is a word for what occurs when a state systematically destroys the civilian infrastructure of a population, displaces over one million people, violates the agreements it signs and kills the civilians who attempt to exercise rights those agreements guarantee. Lawyers know it. International organisations know it. Governments that convene emergency meetings know it. None of them pronounces it, because doing so would impose obligations incompatible with the relationships they maintain with the state that practises it. Silence is also a political decision. And its consequences, like Rubio’s bombs, are perfectly material.
Beaufort has stood for nine hundred years on that hill in southern Lebanon. The Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the French Mandate, the PLO, the Israeli army from 1982 to 2000, and now the Israeli army for a second time have all occupied it. Each raised their flag. UNESCO granted it the highest level of protection in 2024. The Israeli army took it on 31 May 2026 and Katz published the photograph. The Security Council met the following day. The fortress remains in Israeli hands…
G.S.
Sources
- Israel’s Extensive Destruction of Southern Lebanon – Amnesty International
- 2024 Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire Agreement – Wikipedia
- January 2025 Southern Lebanon Attack – Wikipedia
- Israeli Troops Seize Strategic Castle in Lebanon – PBS News
- What to Know About Beaufort Castle – SBS News
- Israeli Offensive in Lebanon – Touteleurope.eu
- Netanyahu Wants to Intensify Offensive in Lebanon – Le Devoir
- US Government Approves $3 Billion Arms Sale to Israel – Yahoo News
- US Approves $6.67 Billion Arms Sale to Israel – Fox News
- Israel’s Wars on Lebanon, 1978-2024 – Institute for Palestine Studies
- Beaufort Castle, Lebanon – Wikipedia
- Israel Has Invaded Lebanon Six Times – The Conversation
- 2024 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon – Wikipedia
