On April 17, President Donald Trump, using what Reuters termed “an unusually harsh tone,” told Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they would be prohibited from attacking Lebanon. “Enough is enough!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Within two days of Trump’s declared prohibition, the Israelis issued fresh forced displacement orders in southern Lebanon, accompanied by home demolitions and airstrikes that killed civilians.
It was not the first time the Israelis had ignored ostensible directives from Washington. Vice President J.D. Vance had said in October that the Trump administration would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. Yet Israel is continuing its inroads into the West Bank anyway.
But unlike the situation in the West Bank, which the U.S. and Arab governments have effectively ceded to Israeli settlers, Israel’s ambitions in Lebanon face a serious geopolitical obstacle. Iran has, since March, made a ceasefire in Lebanon one of its stated conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the broader war—a conflict, now in its fourth month, which has substantially depleted American munitions stockpiles and hit Americans at the gas pump.
“For us, a ceasefire in Lebanon is just as important as a ceasefire in Iran,” Iran’s Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Ghalibaf said in April. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, reports that Iranian security officials are now openly discussing a “UAE for Lebanon” strategy involving costly retaliation on Emirati territory for every Israeli strike on Lebanon.
Parsi identifies several reasons why Iran has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a strict term of any deal, with “perhaps the most consequential issue” being “what Lebanon reveals about Washington itself.” For Iran, Parsi says, binding Israel to the ceasefire is “a test of America’s willingness—and ability—to restrain its closest regional ally.”
Indeed, Lebanon, more than anything else, could be a lasting obstacle to resolving the Iran War. When reports circulated in late May that the U.S. had moved closer to a deal with Iran that included a ceasefire in Lebanon as a term of the agreement, Netanyahu quickly phoned Trump to secure his personal assurances that Israel would retain “freedom of action” in Lebanon regardless of any agreement the American president signs.
But Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon is more than a spoiler for the ongoing Iran War. It is rapidly becoming a sequel to the brutality in Gaza before it, and is likewise one in which all Americans, whether they like it or not, have a stake through their tax dollars.
Courtney Bonneau, an American-Dutch journalist who has reported from southern Lebanon throughout Israel’s ongoing assault, told The American Conservative that the destruction she has documented is neither incidental nor impacted by ceasefire agreements.
“The destruction has been systematic,” she said. “They’ve destroyed between 37 and 40 towns and villages so far, and they started that destruction during the last ceasefire period.”
Bonneau says she has personally documented extensive structural damage across roughly 140 towns. From where she lives near the border, she can see and hear Israeli forces carrying out demolitions across the frontier on a daily basis.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz gave orders on March 22, 2026 to “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes” following the “model in Gaza,” and footage posted by journalists like Courtney Bonneau demonstrates that is exactly what Israeli soldiers and civilian volunteers have done.
Bonneau says the most “arduous” demolitions she has witnessed involved Israeli forces rigging Lebanese homes in the ancient town of Yaroun during the supposed ceasefire that followed the 2024 war: “We watched them for weeks rigging homes with C4, going house to house. It takes all day because they go on foot, rigging them all together with wire hooks. And at the end of the day, they would detonate them.”
Israeli officials have been explicit about how broadly they define their target in Lebanon. During his September 2024 address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu said Hezbollah had “a missile in every kitchen, a rocket in every garage” in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health reports that Israeli attacks since March 2 have killed around 3,500 people. Journalists from Lebanon say that total does not include Hezbollah militants. The Beirut-based photojournalist Mohamad Kleit told TAC that the death toll from the Lebanese Health Ministry “excludes active Hezbollah fighters since the civil defense can’t reach the areas where clashes occur like the border towns,” so the count is composed exclusively of civilians.
The bombs killing them, in many cases, bear American markings. “A lot of the military waste that I personally photographed after the last war in 2024 said ‘made in the USA’ right on the boxes,” Bonneau told TAC.
Among the weapons Bonneau has documented Israel using against Lebanese civilians is white phosphorus, an incendiary chemical that ignites on contact with air and inflicts severe burns on humans. The deployment of white phosphorus against civilian targets has long been banned under the laws of war. “They’ve been using that at least since 2024,” Bonneau said, describing Israeli deployment of white phosphorus in the olive groves of border villages and, most recently, in Nabatieh. The Washington Post confirmed in December 2023, through analysis of munition fragments collected in southern Lebanon, that the white phosphorus Israel was firing into the country was U.S.-supplied. Lebanese media reported a further white phosphorus attack on the southeastern town of Shebaa on May 26, 2026.
The international relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that the broader Israeli project in Lebanon, which at one point may have been Jewish settlement of the land, is now the destabilization of the country itself. “Israel is number one interested in creating a Greater Israel, expanding and creating an almost purely Jewish state,” Mearsheimer told TAC.
“What I think Netanyahu wants to do is to foment civil war in Lebanon, a war with the government on one side and Hezbollah on the other, as a way of weakening them both,” Mearsheimer said. “The Israelis can’t disarm Hezbollah, so they want the Lebanese government to do it.”
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Israeli officials are openly calling for the conditions that would produce such a collapse. On April 12, Israel’s Energy and Infrastructure Minister Eli Cohen called for Israel to bomb Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for Israel “to cut off the electricity in Lebanon.”
Israel has demonstrated a clear will to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon; Iran, by conditioning the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on an end to those hostilities, is seemingly their main obstacle. What happens next depends entirely on Trump’s willingness to restrain the foreign government he sponsors.
