Israel’s US-backed war against Lebanon has entered a new and bloody stage with the start of a long-prepared ground invasion conducted under the umbrella of the widening imperialist war against Iran.

Humanitarian and press reports confirm that Israel has moved from intensive air and artillery strikes into ground operations across southern Lebanon, expanding beyond the cross-border attacks it has conducted since late 2024.

A humanitarian briefing from Assessment Capacities Project (ACAPS) on March 4 reports that Israel “initiated a military operation within Lebanese borders” on March 1, 2026, concentrating on southern Lebanon and deploying ground troops beyond at least five positions it has occupied since November 2024.

TRT World, citing Reuters and Lebanese sources, has reported that Defence Minister Israel Katz publicly authorized incursions into Lebanon and stated that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the army “to advance and take control of additional strategic positions in Lebanon in order to prevent attacks on Israeli border communities.”

As the offensive escalated, Axios reported that Israeli officials are planning a large-scale invasion to seize the entire area south of the Litani River—roughly the southern third of Lebanon—based on the claim that it intends to “dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure.” Axios described the incursion as the largest operation in Lebanon since 2006.

However, one senior Israeli official, quoted in that report, bluntly stated, “We are going to do what we did in Gaza,” explaining that the goal is “to take over territory, push Hezbollah’s forces north and away from the border, and dismantle its military positions and weapons depots in the villages.”

This statement makes clear that the invasion of Lebanon is not a limited border security action but a planned occupation of Lebanese territory combined with the systematic destruction of entire towns and villages and the murder of civilians modeled on the genocidal campaign in Gaza over the past 29 months.

The same propaganda used during the barbaric destruction of Gaza—claims that “terror tunnels,” “human shields” and the “violence” of Hamas was the reason for the Israeli slaughter of more 70,000 Palestinians—is now being reproduced almost verbatim to justify the onslaught against Lebanon with Hezbollah being held responsible this time.

Israeli political and military leaders are presenting the offensive as a defensive necessity to protect “border communities” and assure the “safe return” of Israelis to the north, just like they invoked “security” and “returning residents to the south” to justify the leveling of Gaza.

The Axios account makes explicit that the objective is to transform the region south of the Litani into a demilitarized cordon under Israeli control. The Zionist regime is tearing up the framework of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war and required Israel’s withdrawal while placing limits on Hezbollah’s presence in the south.

For years, Israeli officials, think-tank strategists and retired generals have argued for a renewed “security zone” in Lebanon, closely resembling the occupation regime Israel maintained through its proxy South Lebanon Army from 1978 until its formal withdrawal in 2000.

The declared strategy of “what we did in Gaza” exposes the propaganda about “precision” targeting of “terror infrastructure” as a fraud. Israel is using mass bombardment and the depopulation of broad swaths of Lebanese territory to create a buffer zone for Israel and a strategic staging ground in the broader war against Iran. 

The offensive of March 2026 is the culmination of more than a year of steadily intensifying Israeli attacks on Lebanon that began in the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023, and then was massively escalated with the onset of the US–Israeli war against Iran. Since late 2024, Israel has carried out near-daily strikes on targets it claims are Hezbollah-linked, while keeping troops in at least five positions in southern Lebanon after the ceasefire that was negotiated in November 2024.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has denounced these attacks as violations of Lebanese sovereignty and “a fully-fledged crime,” emphasizing that they target civilians and force mass displacement. UN agencies estimate that between roughly 750,000 and nearly 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced so far by the latest Israeli offensive and mass evacuation orders.

The cumulative toll on the Lebanese population—especially children—has been devastating. TRT World, citing UNICEF data, reports that over the past 28 months 329 children were killed and 1,632 injured by Israeli air strikes in Lebanon. Child fatalities stand at 412 in the last six days alone.

Behind the pseudo-legal phrasing about “terrorist infrastructure” is a campaign of collective punishment directed at entire communities in southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut—Dahieh—where Israeli strikes have repeatedly hit residential areas under the pretext of targeting Hezbollah.

In one of many such incidents, the BBC has reported on the aftermath of an Israeli strike that killed an entire family, with relatives insisting that the victims were civilians and not Hezbollah fighters, contradicting claims by the IDF. These atrocities are being perpetrated with the full military, political and diplomatic backing from the Trump administration, which has openly welcomed the illegal Lebanese invasion into its expanding regional war against Iran.

The timing and character of the Lebanese ground invasion cannot be understood apart from the broader regional strategy being executed by US imperialism and its Israeli ally. It is in this context that Israeli leaders have authorized what they describe as an “offensive campaign.” Israeli commanders have told news media they intend to conclude the campaign by significantly degrading Iran’s regional position, implicitly presenting Lebanese territory as a battlefield in the war against Tehran.

Israeli officials present the offensive in Lebanon as a necessary means to restore security for northern Israel. However, as international experts and analysts have pointed out, the Lebanon campaign is a reproduction of the logic of the Gaza genocide.

Humanitarian organizations warn that the combination of air strikes, artillery barrages and ground invasion is destroying infrastructure, displacing massive sections of the population and creating conditions of famine, disease and social collapse reminiscent of Gaza.

The present assault is part of a decades-long pattern of Zionist and imperialist crimes against the Lebanese and Palestinian people. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, advanced to the outskirts of Beirut and imposed a brutal siege lasting nearly three months, forcing the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the city under a US-brokered agreement.

Immediately after the PLO’s departure, Israeli forces, in coordination with the Lebanese fascist Phalangist militia, oversaw the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, in which more than 3,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered in the refugee camps of West Beirut.

During this period, the US deployed Marines as part of a multinational force and brought in naval firepower, including the battleship New Jersey that shelled positions in and around Beirut, killing large numbers of civilians and openly aligning US military power with the Israeli invasion and its Lebanese allies.

As it has done consistently since 1948, the US government functions as a direct participant in the attempt to crush Palestinian and Lebanese resistance and secure a client regime in Beirut. While the Democratic and Republican Party supporters of the war against Iran have claimed that Iran is responsible for the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, which killed 241 American servicemen, it was the US-Israeli mass murder in Lebanon that was responsible for the bombing.

The official narrative has always served to cover up the underlying reality that the US barracks were a military target in a country ravaged by invasion, occupation and massacres carried out with US complicity.

The ground invasion of Lebanon marks a significant extension of the genocidal methods in Gaza into another country, under conditions where the US-Israeli axis is driving toward a far wider regional and potentially global conflagration. The talk in Israeli ruling circles of bringing the Gaza genocide to southern Lebanon is not rhetorical excess but a warning of the desperate crisis of the US and Israeli governments, as well as the deadly danger facing the people of Lebanon.