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10:26 12.03.2026 •
Lebanon in fire! Israel kills more than 100 Lebanese as it commands Beirut residents to flee
Photo: Al Jazeera
Israel looks to be establishing a buffer zone in southern Lebanon akin to the one created by the “Yellow Line” that has divided the devastated Gaza Strip in two, a Lebanese cabinet minister says.
The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of all Lebanese living south of the Litani River, a waterway about 25 kilometres north of the Israeli border, displacing some 400,000 people.
“They don’t want this population to come back to their homes, nor allow them to rebuild what has been destroyed,” Culture Minister Ghassan Salamé said Monday in an interview with ‘The Globe and Mail’ at his Beirut residence.
“Israel has also been able to impose buffer zones in Gaza, with the Yellow Line, and now more and more in the West Bank and certainly in Syria and, of late, in Lebanon. One can see the strategy here: domination of the skies and buffer zones to try to avoid a new Oct. 7.”
Mr. Salamé said the new war in Lebanon is inextricably linked to the region-wide war pitting the United States and Israel against Iran.
That leaves Lebanon, whose government and modest army are not formally involved in the conflict, in an even more vulnerable position than during the 2006 and 2024 Israel-Hezbollah wars, when the U.S. put restraints on Israeli military action and pushed for an eventual diplomatic resolution.
With the U.S. and its Sunni Arab allies focused on the conflict with Iran, Israel has faced little international pushback as it has carried out a week of air strikes on Lebanon – killing at least 486 people and injuring more than 1,300 others – while sending soldiers into the country and massing troops and tanks for a widening ground operation in the south.
Mr. Salamé said Israeli troops had already remained in five strategic locations on the Lebanese side of the border after the 2024 war – in defiance of a ceasefire that each side accused the other of violating before its collapse last week – and Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said last week that the goal of the new ground operation in Lebanon was “creating a buffer, as we promised, between our residents and any threat.”
More than 70,000 Palestinians were killed in two years of war in Gaza. Israel has also expanded its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and has taken advantage of the chaotic end of Syria’s civil war to expand its presence on the eastern side of the Golan Heights.
What happens next in Lebanon depends on the wider conflict. Mr. Salamé dismissed U.S. President Donald Trump’s call for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” as unrealistic in a war that so far has involved only air strikes against Iran, with Tehran trying to raise the costs of the conflict with its counterattacks.
“Asymmetrical wars do not go into surrender. In asymmetrical wars, if you survive, you win,” Mr. Salamé said.
The centre of Beirut has been jammed with internally displaced persons since Thursday, when the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the entire Dahiya, matching its call for all of southern Lebanon to leave. Mr. Salamé told The Globe that there were now 700,000 IDPs across the country, a number that included only those who had formally registered with the government.
Most public spaces in Beirut, which was already home to almost half of Lebanon’s 5.4 million people, are now crammed with families living in tents and cars or sleeping on pieces of cardboard despite overnight lows hovering near 10 degrees.
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