No Peace, No War: How Israel Keeps Lebanon Under Fire

Thousands of ceasefire violations, daily bombardments, and unchecked airspace incursions have turned the 2024 truce into fiction. Under the banner of “security,” Israel wages a war it refuses to name.

By Elijah J. Magnier –

Lebanon stands again at the crossroads of destruction. Since October, Israel has treated the country as both target and testing ground, carrying out near-daily strikes under the guise of self-defence. The truce declared in 2024 survives only in name. Each new bombardment, each incursion across the Blue Line, pushes Lebanon deeper into a condition that is neither peace nor declared war—a strategy that keeps an entire nation under permanent threat while avoiding the political cost of open invasion.

The extension of the Gaza war northward has turned Lebanon into Israel’s secondary front, exposing the same doctrine of deterrence by devastation that has characterised its campaign in Gaza. Since 7 October, Lebanon has once again become the focal point of Israel’s war planning. After last year’s escalation—when Tel Aviv announced and then prosecuted a third campaign against Lebanon—the Israeli war cabinet now treats the country as a laboratory for weakening Hezbollah’s military power short of a formal declaration of war. Using the pretext that “Hezbollah is rebuilding its arsenal and command structures,” Israel has pursued a strategy of sustained coercion: near-daily air strikes, artillery fire, and repeated ground incursions aimed at degrading the movement without crossing the formal threshold into open conflict.

Since the cessation of hostilities announced in October 2024, Lebanese authorities and local sources report that Israel has violated the truce roughly 5,000 times and that around 350 Lebanese have been killed or wounded across the country. From Israel’s perspective, these actions are not breaches but expressions of what it portrays as a legitimate right to maintain “security control” over Lebanese territory, airspace, and coastal waters—a self-granted licence to keep the country trapped in a state of no peace.

The Israeli campaign’s trajectory now risks sliding from intermittent bombardment into a state that is no longer mere policing but just short of open war. Day after day strikes, repeated ground incursions, and near-continuous artillery and aerial fire in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa are eroding the boundary between limited military pressure and large-scale hostilities. Even if both sides avoid declaring war, the cumulative effect of thousands of ceasefire violations, hundreds of civilian deaths and repeated cross-border operations produces the same outcome: destroyed infrastructure, displaced populations, and a destabilised frontier that makes a wider conflagration increasingly likely. What Israel calls calibrated coercion could easily become uncontrollable, each new raid multiplying the risk that limited operations will spill over into a wider confrontation, depending on the seize of damage Israel intends to inflict on the Shia community in Lebanon.