Politics
Israel accused of war crime in Lebanon
Israel have been accused of spraying mysterious chemicals inside Lebanon. Now the Lebanese PM and rights groups have called the attack a ‘crime’ after it emerged the chemicals were a potentially cancer-causing compound.
Prime minister Joseph Aoun called it an act of “aggression”:
This is an environmental and health crime against Lebanese citizens and their land.
These dangerous practices that target agricultural lands and the livelihoods of citizens and threaten their health and environment require the international community and relevant United Nations organisations to assume their responsibilities to stop these attacks.
Israel accused of yet another war crime
Unifil, the UN mission in Lebanon, said shortly after the attack that they’d been told about the airborne operation. They also said that it had stopped peacekeepers carrying out their duties:
Peacekeepers could not perform normal operations near the Blue Line along about a third of its length and were only able to resume normal activities after over nine hours.
The Blue Line is a 120km strip which marks the line of Israel withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000. The UN and Lebanese army tested the chemicals. Those tests now seem to have come to a conclusion.
The Guardian said:
Lebanese authorities said that laboratory analysis identified that the spray contained glyphosate, a potent herbicide that was in 2015 classified by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.
Lebanon’s ministries of agriculture and the environment said some samples showed glyphosate at:
20 and 30 times higher than normal [use].
They said such high concentrations would:
damage vegetation in the targeted areas, with direct repercussions on agricultural production, soil fertility and ecological balance.
Others said this was another example of Israel’s scorched earth policy.
War crime?
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the “deeply alarming” attack may constitute a war crime:
The deliberate targeting of civilian farmland violates international humanitarian law, particularly the prohibition on attacking or destroying objects indispensable to civilian survival.
They added:
Large-scale destruction of private property without specific military necessity amounts to a war crime and undermines food security and basic livelihoods in the affected areas.
Euro-Med said they directly observed the spraying, which they considered part of
a systematic destruction of agricultural land.
The NGO warned:
This incident cannot be viewed in isolation from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the Israeli army.
Israel sprayed farmland with “pesticides of unknown composition in Syria in January 2026, causing:
widespread crop destruction, posing a serious threat to economic and food security and violating farmers’ rights to work and to an adequate standard of living by destroying their primary sources of income without military justification.
Strip aways Zionist claims about birthright and indigeneity and you’ll find nothing more mystical, historical or religiously motivated than an old-fashioned settler land grab. From Syria to Lebanon, Gaza to the West Back, the Israeli state will keep displacing locals and expanding its territory by whatever means it can, for as long as it can, until someone stops it.
Featured image via the Canary