Israel’s Assault on Lebanon, Sept. 2024
It is no wonder that Israel continues to escalate and expand its predatory actions across Palestine and Lebanon, emboldened by Western support in the form of arm shipments and protected impunity (e.g., vetoing UNSC resolutions, interferences in the work of the International Criminal Court). Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 1,600 individuals and wounded over 8,400 in Lebanon (UN-OCHA, 28 September 2024). Almost half of the deaths occurred since Monday September 2024 (Al Jazeera), when Israel began a massive series of air strikes across Lebanon. This assault comes a few days after the now infamous deadly pager and walkie-talkie attacks which killed at least 32 people and injured more than 3,000 (New Line Magazine), many of whom are civilians. Over one million people are currently displaced due to the recurrent waves of attacks (UN-OCHA, 28 September 2024). This violence follows many months of killings, arrests, home demolitions, and settlements’ expansion in the West Bank, and an ongoing relentless genocide in Gaza. As all this savagery and bloodshed continues, Israel continues to receive military aid from its Western allies, most recently an $8.7 billion aid package from the United States (Reuters).
Over the past year, the Beirut Urban Lab has invested in regularly sharing information to counter media misinformation by coding and visualizing data on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon’s southern border. Our findings show unequivocally Israel’s use of excessive and disproportionate violence against civilians. For the first eleven months, Israel launched four times more strikes than those from Lebanon, with regular deployment of internationally banned weapons (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, ACLED), abruptly increasing the intensity of the violence in the past weeks. In Gaza, almost half of all buildings (46.8%) and over two-thirds of agricultural fields (69%) had been damaged or destroyed by July 2024 (UNOSAT July 6, 2024).
These facts have, however, rarely made the headlines of Western media that have instead amplified and justified impunity by manufacturing consent around the Gaza genocide, first, and are doing the same around Lebanon as we write these words. Thus, lies spewed by Israeli generals and decision-makers are reproduced as facts while the bodies of victims that lie now across Gaza and Lebanon are either hidden from public view or carelessly discounted as collateral damage. While 6 Lebanese, 2 Israeli, and 111 Palestinian journalists have been killed (CPJ) trying to report the reality from the ground, many of their Western colleagues have dismissed their plight with blatant racism.
We are publishing today a map-chart that helps locate the unfolding violence in time and place, tracing back the year of fire exchange across South Lebanon’s border. It shows the pattern of almost a year-long relatively steady exchange of fire following October 7 (October 8–September 27), when Hezbollah linked cease-fire on the country’s southern borders to a cessation of fire on Palestine’s civilians. For 11 months, tacit rules of engagement seemed to contain the daily crossfire to a relatively limited region where residents were largely displaced on both sides of the border, despite occasional escalations by Israeli incursions that included two strikes on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut (January 2 and July 30, 2024). The map-chart also shows the abrupt escalation of violence across Lebanon’s territory as Israel expanded its war agenda. In just one week, our data records over 800 Israeli air strikes, killing more people than the entirety of the previous year, and those have been continuing since.
As an Urban Lab invested in working towards just futures, we are deploying our analytic and visualization tools to denounce the horrors perpetuated against people across our villages and cities, country, and region. The brutality of the past days has been countered by hundreds of solidarity initiatives that have sprung to support displaced populations who have been taking refuge in many public schools across the Lebanese territory (see our recent data platform documenting these shelters here). In the coming days, we will further the cause for justice by giving visibility to some of these solidarity initiatives, with a firm belief that collective empathy and mutual support can help shape a better world.
Over the past year, the Beirut Urban Lab has invested in regularly sharing information to counter media misinformation by coding and visualizing data on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon’s southern border. Our findings show unequivocally Israel’s use of excessive and disproportionate violence against civilians. For the first eleven months, Israel launched four times more strikes than those from Lebanon, with regular deployment of internationally banned weapons (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, ACLED), abruptly increasing the intensity of the violence in the past weeks. In Gaza, almost half of all buildings (46.8%) and over two-thirds of agricultural fields (69%) had been damaged or destroyed by July 2024 (UNOSAT July 6, 2024).
These facts have, however, rarely made the headlines of Western media that have instead amplified and justified impunity by manufacturing consent around the Gaza genocide, first, and are doing the same around Lebanon as we write these words. Thus, lies spewed by Israeli generals and decision-makers are reproduced as facts while the bodies of victims that lie now across Gaza and Lebanon are either hidden from public view or carelessly discounted as collateral damage. While 6 Lebanese, 2 Israeli, and 111 Palestinian journalists have been killed (CPJ) trying to report the reality from the ground, many of their Western colleagues have dismissed their plight with blatant racism.
We are publishing today a map-chart that helps locate the unfolding violence in time and place, tracing back the year of fire exchange across South Lebanon’s border. It shows the pattern of almost a year-long relatively steady exchange of fire following October 7 (October 8–September 27), when Hezbollah linked cease-fire on the country’s southern borders to a cessation of fire on Palestine’s civilians. For 11 months, tacit rules of engagement seemed to contain the daily crossfire to a relatively limited region where residents were largely displaced on both sides of the border, despite occasional escalations by Israeli incursions that included two strikes on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut (January 2 and July 30, 2024). The map-chart also shows the abrupt escalation of violence across Lebanon’s territory as Israel expanded its war agenda. In just one week, our data records over 800 Israeli air strikes, killing more people than the entirety of the previous year, and those have been continuing since.
As an Urban Lab invested in working towards just futures, we are deploying our analytic and visualization tools to denounce the horrors perpetuated against people across our villages and cities, country, and region. The brutality of the past days has been countered by hundreds of solidarity initiatives that have sprung to support displaced populations who have been taking refuge in many public schools across the Lebanese territory (see our recent data platform documenting these shelters here). In the coming days, we will further the cause for justice by giving visibility to some of these solidarity initiatives, with a firm belief that collective empathy and mutual support can help shape a better world.