26/03 • SOUTHERN LEBANON

This week, senior Israeli officials publicly stated for the first time their intention to permanently occupy a significant portion of Lebanese territory — and the international community is grappling with what to say about it.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced on Tuesday that Israeli forces would establish a "defensive buffer zone" stretching to the Litani River — a waterway cutting through southern Lebanon approximately 30 kilometres north of the Israeli border. The announcement followed remarks by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said on Israeli radio that the military campaign in Lebanon "needs to end with a different reality entirely" — and that "the new Israeli border must be the Litani." The territory in question amounts to nearly a tenth of Lebanon's total land area.

The human cost of the conflict so far is stark. More than 1,000 people have been killed across Lebanon since early March, including 118 children. Over 1.2 million people — roughly one in five people across Lebanon — have been displaced, with more than 130,000, including 46,000 children, sheltering in collective sites across the country, most already at full capacity. Israel has also ordered the destruction of all crossings over the Litani River, destroying five bridges since 13 March and accelerating the demolition of homes in Lebanese villages near the border — effectively cutting the south off from the rest of the country.

The international response has been swift, if measured. The UN Secretary-General's spokesperson called the rhetoric "very much concerning," adding: "This is the last thing we would want to see. This is the last thing the Lebanese people in the south would want to see." The UN human rights office has warned that some Israeli strikes on civilian infrastructure may amount to war crimes under international law.

Lebanon has lived through this before. Israeli forces occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 — a period that shaped a generation and left wounds that have never fully healed. For many Lebanese, the language of this week is not new. It is the return of something they hoped was over.

The declared intention to hold southern Lebanese territory permanently — combined with the systematic destruction of bridges, homes and civilian infrastructure — raises serious questions under international humanitarian law, which prohibits the annexation of land by force and the deliberate targeting of civilian life.

For some Israeli political factions, this reflects a longstanding "Greater Israel" ideology — a vision of expanded Israeli sovereignty across the broader region. For the more than one million Lebanese people now displaced, the ideology is less relevant than the reality: they have lost their homes, their communities have been severed, and the path back is unclear.

PRAYER POINTS:

• We pray for the people of southern Lebanon — the families displaced, the communities cut off, the elderly and children sheltering in overcrowded sites — that they would be protected, and that their dignity would be honoured in decisions being made far above their heads.
  
  
• We pray for the international community, that the frameworks of international law built to protect civilians and sovereign nations would be upheld with courage and consistency, and that diplomatic efforts would find traction before further lives are lost.
  
  
• We pray for a just and lasting peace in the region — not simply the absence of war, but the presence of something better: a future where borders are not drawn by force, and where ordinary people on all sides can live without fear.

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