On June 9, after an Israeli air strike killed at least eight people in a residential block, the Israeli military ordered the Lebanese city of Tyre to be emptied. Tyre has stood for roughly 4,000 years, long enough to have survived Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire. Now Israel sought to clear it all out—the Old City and the churches and the camps where generations of some Palestinian families have lived since they were exiled from their homeland in 1948.

A few days later, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, urged that for every rocket fired from Lebanon toward Israel, 10 buildings in Beirut’s Dahiyeh district, where hundreds of thousands of people live, should be leveled. He had previously vowed that Dahiyeh would soon look like Khan Younis in Gaza, and that the villages of the south would be destroyed like Rafah and Beit Hanoun.

Nobody who has witnessed Israel’s annihilation of Gaza should be surprised that it is bringing the same genocidal mission to bear on Lebanon. But just because something is expected does not make it less important—and now that there is talk of peace in the air between Israel and Lebanon, it is vital to examine what Israel has done and what it still intends to do to its neighbor—with, it would seem, the tacit agreement of the Lebanese government.

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