Israel’s Lebanon house demolitions are part of an explicitly genocidal doctrine

The BBC has confirmed Israel is demolishing hundreds of homes in southern Lebanon. Yet the corporation left out some key context: home demolitions are a part of an explicitly genocidal strategy know as the Dahiya doctrine.

BBC Verify used satellite imagery to confirm hundreds of homes had been deliberately destroyed with airstrikes or Israeli occupation force (IOF) demolition teams on the ground.

The BBC report said:

BBC Verify analysis found more than 1,400 buildings had been destroyed since 2 March based on verified visual evidence.

This is just a snapshot of the overall damage caused by Israeli air strikes and demolitions, because of limited access on the ground and available satellite imagery.

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The reported acknowledged that the “true scale” is likely to be “much higher”.

The BBC did report some of the context:

Israel’s levelling of these structures comes after Defence Minister Israel Katz’s order on 22 March to “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes” near the Israeli border based on the “model in Gaza” as part of its campaign against Hezbollah.

Adding that:

The systematic demolition of these towns and villages may amount to a war crime, international law experts told BBC Verify.

And to their credit (for once) the BBC noted that Israel provided no evidence:

that Hezbollah has embedded military infrastructure within civilian areas in the region.

But there is still a lot missing from their report…

Lebanon: vital context

Here’s a breakdown of how we actually got here – usually missing from legacy media reporting.

Israel violated the US-brokered Lebanon 2024 ‘ceasefire’ over 15,400 times since it was signed. Must be a world record. Yet a short salvo from Hezbollah in early March 2026 was framed as a signal outrage by legacy media. That attack has been cited by the settler-colonial state as a pretext to invade.

Not satisfied with pulling the US and its allies into a runaway war with Iran, Israeli troops have pushed into Lebanon with airstrikes pummelling the capital Beirut.

The Canary reported the early moments of the new war here. You can read about the secretive Israel-US ‘side letter’ pact which gave Israel carte blanche to keep bombing through the ‘ceasefire’ here. And our extensive coverage of Israel’s ceasefire regular breaches here.

But there’s more…

Dayiha scorched earth doctrine

The so-called Dayiha doctrine was born in Lebanon and sharpened over many years. This scorched earth approach to ‘counter-insurgency’ found its fullest expression in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Now it is back where it began: Lebanon’s combative south.

As the Canary reported on 6 March, just days into the new Israel invasion, peace and conflict expert professor Paul Rogers explained the history and character of the doctrine particularly well in the context of Gaza in December 2023. Surveying the early devastation in the enclave, he said the horror spoke to a:

specific Israeli way of war that has evolved since 1948, through to its current Dahiya doctrine, which is said to have originated in the 2006 war in Lebanon.

Rogers said:

In July of that year [2006], facing salvoes of rockets fired from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah militias, the IDF fought an intense air and ground war.

However:

Neither succeeded, and the ground troops took heavy casualties; but the significance of the war lies in the nature of the air attacks. It was directed at centres of Hezbollah power in the Dahiya area, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, but also on the Lebanese economic infrastructure.

It was there in Dahiya that Israel’s genocidal impulses mutated into a new policy of annihilation.

As Rogers explains:

This was the deliberate application of “disproportionate force”, such as the destruction of an entire village, if deemed to be the source of rocket fire.

One graphic description of the result was that “around a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed, a third of them children. Towns and villages were reduced to rubble; bridges, sewage treatment plants, port facilities and electric power plants were crippled or destroyed.”

This “deliberate application” of massive Israeli violence goes far beyond fighting ‘terrorists’ and aims to destroy the very means of life. 

As we always make sure to point out, Israel’s ambitions in Lebanon are not and have never been ‘defensive’. In the Zionist fever-dream of a Greater Israel, Lebanon is already theirs. So are large parts of other neighboring countries. The application of the latest version of the Dahiya doctrine to Lebanon is just the last expression of this Western-backed colonialist yearning.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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