The 2026 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon

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Beyond Europe Inter/Transnational Militarism State Violence

The following is a guest post from a Lebanese comrade outside of Plan C who sent us a series of general reflections on the conflict which has erupted in the Levant since Israel resumed bombing Iran on February 28th. These reflections overview the history of the conflict in the region, as well as the political restrictions set in place by Hezbollah’s monopoly of resistance against Israel within Lebanon.

Introduction

The United States and Israel began an airstrike campaign against Iran on February 28, 2026. Those air raids have culminated in the deaths of many Iranian leaders, including the former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In response to these increasing tensions, but for more complex reasons detailed below, the Lebanese sectarian-political-militia group, Hezbollah, joined the conflict on March 2, 2026 by firing rockets into Israel. Since then, Israel has invaded Southern Lebanon, known as Jabal Amel in Lebanon and has engaged in an air campaign across the Shia dominated South, Beqaa, and Dahiya suburb of Beirut. In a clear shift from prior wars, Israel has not limited their attacks only to the Shia majority areas and has been far more indiscriminate, hitting usually spared Christian, Druze, and Sunni regions as well.

Haneen Sayed, the Lebanese minister of social affairs reports that, since this invasion started, more than 800,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon, the vast majority from the South (UNHCR, 2026). This exodus has occurred in response to the Israeli mass evacuation orders of March 3rd and 4th. Those orders, unilaterally declared by the Israeli state, demanded that all civilians residing south of the Litani River (a strategic landmark which bisects Southern Lebanon) and those residing in Dahiya must evacuate immediately or face the full might of indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes (Amnesty, 2026). On the March 12th the evacuation zone was expanded northward up to the Zahrani River. It now includes almost the entirety of the Shia majority regions of Southern Lebanon (Cuddy, 2026). Additionally, almost 400 people have been killed across the country by the Israelis (Asharq Al Awsat, 2026).

Much like the coverage of the genocide in Gaza, European and American news sites seem content to begin this story on February 28, 2026. In reality, this conflict has been oscillating between simmering and raging since Hezbollah intervened in the war in Gaza back in 2023. Beyond that, it reaches back to the end of the Lebanese Civil War, when Hezbollah monopolized resistance to Israel and the fight for the liberation of Palestine was decoupled from the goal of destroying Lebanon’s sectarian system.

This article is an attempt to give an overview of the history of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. It will start with a history of the Shiites of Lebanon and the formation of Hezbollah. From there it will discuss Hezbollah’s ‘resistance’ to Israeli aggression during the 1982-2000 Occupation, the 2006 War, and the ongoing conflict. And, finally, it will point to the ways in which Hezbollah has buried radical change in Lebanon, transforming class conflicts into sectarian conflicts, and paving the way for Israel’s domination in the current war.

Hezbollah and Israel: A Brief History

As with almost all histories of Lebanon, the history of Hezbollah is wrapped up in the history of sectarianism. There has not been a census of Lebanon’s population since 1932. But, according to estimates, it is 67.6% Muslim (31.9% Sunni and 31% Shia) and 32.4% Christian (split between Maronites, Greek Orthodox, and other smaller sects) along with a 4.52% of the population which follows the Druze faith (U.S. Department of State, 2019). At the time of Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the split between Muslim and Christian was closer to 50-50. The new state was founded by the French to act as a Christian refuge in a sea of Muslim majority countries. To that end, it established the formal system of sectarian rule in Lebanon via the 1943 National Pact, which granted Christians a 6-5 majority in Parliament along with a Maronite monopoly on the Presidency. Sunnis were given the Prime Ministership and Shias were given the Speaker of the House (Trabousli, 2012).

This system for the first 4 decades acted as a system of Christian domination. Muslims and Druze quickly began to organize against the Sectarian system, with groups like the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon led by the Jumblatt family building a popular anti-sectarian front. Class politics, which had been developing in the early days of independence, were substituted with class collaboration and sectarian micro-nationalism. As Mahdi Amel describes, each sect had effectively built its own structures of surplus value extraction, with sectoral elites justifying the oppression of their workers as necessary in order to promote the interests of the sect as a whole (Amel, 2021). The particular exclusion of the Shiite population of Lebanon from political and economic power meant that they acted as a fountain of support for many of these anti-sectarian groups including, and most importantly, the Lebanese Communist Party (Abisaab & Abisaab, 2017). An aspect of this sectarian division of power was the sectarian division of capital formation in Lebanon.

As Lebanon developed economically, an important sector of the new working class was pulled from the Shiite hinterlands of Southern Lebanon. This population migrated out of the impoverished villages of the South and into the Dahiya suburb of Beirut – known as the ‘poverty belt.’ In a process which mirrored the Italian post-war experience, these new Shia workers tended to be more militant and open to radical ideologies. By the 1970s a strong plurality of the Lebanese Communist Party, as well as many smaller Nasserist groups were Shiite, including some of their most celebrated luminaries including Mahdi Amel and Hussein Mruoe (Abisaab & Abisaab, 2017). As such, by the start of the Civil War in 1975 the Shiites had become one of, if not the key demographic of the anti-Sectarian popular front known as the Lebanese National Movement.

The domination of the Lebanese Shia by the left began to unravel in 1974 with the foundation of the Movement of the Dispossessed (or Amal). Amal was founded by the charismatic Iranian-Lebanese cleric Imam Musa al-Sadr. Sadr came to Lebanon in the 1950s and quickly became a key leader in the Shiite community. Sadr sought to empower the Shiites of Lebanon and did so by organizing them into an independent force in the country. He preached a peaceful transition beyond sectarianism wherein all the sects of Lebanon could gain equal participation in Lebanese political and economic life. Much of the financial support for his efforts came from donations from Lebanese Shiite populations abroad, particularly in West Africa where they found economic success as middlemen for French Colonialism (Ajami, 2012). In many ways Sadr’s movement resembled the left Christian Democrats of Europe. Utilizing religious rhetoric Sadr called for a peaceful revolution/modernization of the Lebanese state. His objections to sectarianism often carried class rhetoric but never formed into critiques of capitalism, only the exclusion of the Shia from political and economic power.

By the 1970s Sadr had built a coalition of religious leaders, both Shiite and non-Shiite (including an alliance with Georges Haddad, the famous communist-aligned ‘red bishop’ of Tyre), Shiite nouveau riche, and sections of the Shiite working class. Entering the political scene one year before the Civil War meant that an early pivot towards more aggressively sectarian policies became inevitable. Although aligned with the Lebanese National Movement, Sadr began to promote the independent armament of Lebanese Shiites, and by the end of 1975 Amal had developed an armed wing (Ajami, 2012).

Three events in the late 1970s and early 1980s would cause a fundamental shift in the history of the Lebanese Shiites. The first was the disappearance of Musa Sadr in 1978 while on a diplomatic trip to meet with Gaddafi in Libya (it is now nearly universally accepted that Gaddafi had Sadr killed) (Ajami, 2012). This left the Shiites of Lebanon without a single leader who could unify them: Amal was taken over by the businessman Nabih Berri, who slowly transformed it into the party of Shiite notables and small businessmen. The second event was the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iran was a majority Shiite country, and the Iranian Revolution was, in large part, a Shiite revolution. The victory of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s forces and the establishment of a Shiite Islamic Republic would change the horizons of the political-Shia forces in Lebanon. And, the final event, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was ostensibly started to push the PLO out of Lebanonm but quickly turned into an intervention on behalf of right-wing Christian militias. Many young clerics and militants no longer saw Sadr’s vision of a secular-inclusive Lebanese state as sufficient change. Instead, they wanted to bring an Islamic Revolution to Lebanon (although modified from the Iranian example as the Shiites alone were only a plurality of the population) and to bring armed struggle against Israel (Norton, 2018). This group would become the foundation for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah was founded around 1982, although the exact date of their formation is debated. The group was formed around a committed cluster of militants and clerics who, following a Leninist model, developed a base of operations in the Shia majority region of the Beqa Valley in Eastern Lebanon. Hezbollah took the Leninist model of a centralized party with internal diversity of thought but external unity of action, stripped it of any radical political content, and turned into a tool of military-clerical domination (Meier, 2013).

The nascent Hezbollah was funded, equipped, and trained by Iranian officers sent by the Islamic Republic with the goal of spreading their revolution (Norton, 2018). Unlike Amal, Hezbollah was a revolutionary and armed group first and a socio-political formation second (Daher, 2016). From the outset its primary function was above all else understood to be resistance to Israel (Botta, 2016). Its legitimacy was further bolstered as the ‘left’ Lebanese National Movement fell apart due to infighting, due in large part to differing views on Syrian intervention in the war. Amal proved itself unable to protect the South from Israeli aggression and to put the liberation of Palestine on the immediate agenda (Daher, 2016). As such, Hezbollah gained mass support from the Shia youth of Lebanon who wanted to continue the fight against Israel. A cult of martyrdom, bolstered by the suicide tactic employed by Hezbollah, would also play into Shia sensibilities of self-sacrifice in the name of social justice. By the time Southern Lebanon was liberated from Israel’s occupation, Hezbollah was seen as the only serious group still in the fight. Although there were also a small number of Communists and Social Nationalists (a strange pan-Syrian fascist group) engaged in the conflict, they were utterly dwarfed by the size and strength of Hezbollah.

Throughout the Civil War, Hezbollah would draw Shiites from class formations into their sectarian organization. An active campaign was waged to promote collaboration between Shia proletarians with the developing Shiite bourgeois class, although this would only come to completion in the post-war rebuilding (Daher, 2016). Through the 1980s, the Shiites still made up a large portion of the Lebanese left, including the small but important critical left. Groups such as the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon (OACL – using its French acronym), a semi-Maoist group inspired by the situationists, autonomists, and Latin American Guevarists, was led and supported by the college educated Shia working class of Beirut (Bardawil, 2020). To undermine these groups, Hezbollah waged a campaign of terror on the left, including assassinations of key left leaders of Shia backgrounds including Hussayn Mruwwa and Hassan Hamdan (Mahdi Amel, 2021; Jadaliyya, 2012) [Note that it is disputed who killed Mruwwa and Hamdan, but it is generally believed that Hezbollah was the perpetrator].

Such was Hezbollah’s domination of resistance to Israel that when the Lebanese Civil War came to an end, they were the only militia allowed to maintain their arms (Taif Accord, 1989). In the post-war world, Hezbollah agreed to share political power over the Shiites with the rump of Amal that maintained support from wealthy expats, but refused to share military power with any other group. As Joseph Daher points out in his history of Hezbollah, it was during this post-war rebuilding that Hezbollah would see its transformation from a pseudo popular front group committed to anti-Zionism into a rentier party which became political-economic bosses of the Shia of Lebanon (Daher, 2016).

Part of this change was Hezbollah’s rebuilding of the Shia regions of Lebanon after the Civil War and Occupation. Allying itself with local elites and business people, it invested millions (often procured via Iranian donations, gun running, and smuggling of contraband) into infrastructure across the South. In doing so it became tied to those business interests, and its class composition shifted from young disenfranchised men towards the petty bourgeois bosses who came to dominate the Southern Lebanese economy (Daher, 2016). Furthermore, Hezbollah succeeded in carving out a piece of the Lebanese pie for the Shiites. It was no longer the case that Shia were overwhelmingly working class. Instead, large sections of the Shia were now able to attend college or technical school, often with financial aid from Hezbollah. This new sector of wealthy, upwardly-mobile Shiites would become the new backbone of Hezbollah.

Another fascinating aspect of Hezbollah’s conquest of political power in Shiite Lebanon was the 1996 formation of its General Trade Union Department (Beeri, 2025). The Trade Union Department acts a central hub from which Hezbollah can organize active interventions into the Lebanese trade union movement. In 2003 Hezbollah supported the Lebanese state’s crackdown on a general strike against inflation (that was supported primarily by Shia workers), which led to the deaths of five workers (Daher, 2016b). Hezbollah also flexed its power within the trade union movement to discipline workers in 2004. During a strike called by the General Confederation of Workers (“GCWL”) in Lebanon protesting rising fuel prices and cuts to social services, a violent clash with the Lebanese army occurred in a Shia neighborhood of Beirut. Five unarmed protestors were killed. Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s former General Secretary, claimed that Hezbollah had been working closely with the GCWL, but that with the violent outbreak, which they blamed on American interference, the strike had gone too far (Bou Khater, 2022). In 2008 they were able to take charge of a strike at the Rafic Hariri National Airport used it to force concessions from a hostile Lebanese government (Reuters, 2008). Another attempted general strike in 2008 also saw Hezbollah transform a worker movement into a sectarian struggle. Workers on strike for a higher general minimum wage had, early on, received support for their struggles from Hezbollah. However, that ephemeral support evaporated when Hezbollah began to engage in armed clashes with political rivals in order to defend their communications network. As always Hezbollah demanded that workers surrender their class interest in order to protect the resistance. (Daher, 2016b).

By the mid 2000s Hezbollah had also established itself as a regional power. Its domination of Southern Lebanon and the Beqqa, its alliance with the Assad regime, Iran and, increasingly, Russia, allowed it to exert outsized influence for a sectarian party in a miniscule state. In 2011 Hezbollah would make the fateful decision to exert their power by intervening in the Syrian Civil War on the side of the Assad regime. Hezbollah had, by that time, become deeply reliant on the Assad regime for support: Syria acted as a byway for Iranian material and economic support to reach Hezbollah. So close was their relationship that Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah described Assad as “the spine of the resistance” (history would eventually show how weak that spine was). Thus, between 2011 and 2019, Hezbollah invested millions of dollars, tons of arms, and thousands of soldiers into the Syrian quagmire helping to secure Assad’s fleeting victory (Daher, 2019). In the process, their image in the region would also undergo a fundamental change. No longer was Hezbollah just the resistance, it now had a hand in regional conflicts. It had allies and it had enemies. It was no longer simply the anti-Zionist resistance it claimed to be.

Perhaps the most spectacular of Hezbollah’s interventions against the working class of Lebanon occurred during the October 2019 uprisings. In October of 2019 workers across Lebanon, of every sect, came out in spontaneous protest against the Lebanese state due to lingering corruption of all kinds, but most importantly due to the effects of a financial meltdown which eventually left 50% of Lebanon below the poverty line (IJURR, 2020). In response to these crises, workers united across sectarian lines and began to seize public spaces. (IJURR, 2020). A telling slogan of these protests ran “if Syria and Sudan have one dictator, we have 100.” In response, Hezbollah again stepped up to defend the sectarian state. Its leader Hasan Nasrallah called for people to go home, again relying on conspiracy theories about American and Zionist infiltration and the need to defend their resistance. As Elia El Khazen describes, Hezbollah had again channelled class frictions towards sectarianism, turning the Shia against the protests using Israel as a Sword of Damoclese. (El Khazen, 2020).

These changes would also change the way in which Hezbollah waged war. Between the 1980s and 2006 Hezbollah, for all of its faults, could be described as a popular movement. It waged a guerilla war against the Israelis, with a fusion of veteran guerrillas and semi-spontaneous militias utilizing hit and run tactics, suicide bombings, assassinations, and sabotage to win the war. They sacrificed people and land, using any means necessary to fight, and refusing to engage on Israel’s terms. They did this greedily, refusing to accept that any other groups could act as part of the resistance, and brutally enforcing their monopoly on resistance. They also transformed the nature of the resistance to Israel. No longer was it the case that fighting Israel was one part of a general struggle against inequity in Lebanon, but instead it was the only struggle that mattered. Any Shia workers seeking to fight for their class interests in a manner that went against Hezbollah’s interests was treated as a threat to their anti-Zionist project and thus was brutally suppressed.

With their new economic investments in the South, their previous strategies eventually ceased being practical for Hezbollah. They would shift their focus to matching Israel in conventional terms. Their forces increasingly resembled an army and they spoke of bringing the war to Israel – Nasrallah would regularly say that the next war would be fought in Haifa and Tel Aviv (Daher, 2016). However, this new strategy was doomed from the start as Hezbollah could never hope to match Israel, with its American and European support, on their own terms. It must become evident to the working class of Lebanon that Hezbollah’s resistance is a castle made of sand, and that any liberation of Palestine will only be possible through class struggle which seeks to overcome capitalism in both Lebanon and occupied Palestine. Hezbollah’s monopoly on resistance has been used as a cudgel to prevent the development of independent class power. This cannot be tolerated.

The 2026 invasion of Lebanon

Although the war started with Hezbollah’s feeble missile attack on March 2, Israel is clearly setting the tempo of this conflict. Between November 26, 2024 and March 2, 2026, there was, technically, a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel. By November 2024 Hezbollah had been decapitated. Its leadership, including its ideological center Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, as well as many of its veterans, had been killed in the conflict of the preceding year. What remained was a disorganized, angry, and inexperienced group with a dwindling list of supplies and allies.

A March 6 article published by CNN described the invasion as Israel “[seizing] the chance to finish the job against Hezbollah.” (Llebermann and Shalev, 2026). Both the United States and Israel know of Hezbollah’s current weakness. Without Iranian, Russian or Syrian support, Hezbollah is limited to its local resources. Nearly three years of war have worn those resources thin. Additionally, the war has further alienated Hezbollah from any potential local allies. Christians, Sunnis, and Druze parties all regularly blame Hezbollah and the Palestinians for forcing them into a war they do not see as their own. Hezbollah’s transformation of the conflict into one where they are the only party with any say has solidified political opposition to their crusade. Hezbollah has been losing their monopoly in this conflict. The Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Sunni organization commonly in conflict with Hezbollah called the Islamic Group, joined the fray back in 2023 (Homsi, 2023). As of 2026 they have once again declared their intention to fend off the Israelis: it has yet to be seen how effective they will be.

Additionally, the Lebanese State has intervened in this conflict in an unprecedented manner. Since the Taif Accords, the Lebanese state has been forced to tacitly accept that Hezbollah acts as a legitimate armed resistance against Israeli aggression. During the Occupation and the 2006 War, the State primarily left Hezbollah to its own devices. This time, however, they are openly calling for the disarming of Hezbollah. Yet, this tacit acceptance of Israeli demands has not resulted in any shift in Israeli policy (Granville, 2026). Despite requests for talks from the Lebanese President, Israel has continued its invasion and has refused further discussions (Gebeily, 2026). This war between three camps can only end in disaster for the workers of Lebanon. Israeli occupation would mean ethnic cleansing, and victory for Hezbollah or the Lebanese state would mean a return to a status quo which crushes workers.

Perhaps the most perverse aspect of this war has been its disproportionality. On March 8, 2026 two Israeli soldiers were killed in Southern Lebanon. These two soldiers were the first military casualties Israel has had since the war started (Fabian, 2026). The war is clearly not going well for Hezbollah. They transformed a popular conflict into a military conflict that they cannot win. They are out gunned, out manned, and out of time.

Their failures have left Lebanon in ruins. The Israelis currently occupy many villages along the border, they have destroyed countless homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools, and they are still moving. With seemingly unlimited American support, it is looking like Israel will be able to dictate the terms of this war, ending it only once they are satisfied with their own victory. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians are currently displaced, unable to return home without risking death in an air raid. Speaking to my family currently fleeing their homes in Dahiya, I came to learn that predatory landlords and hotels are currently charging exorbitant rates to those displaced. The Israelis have also hit many hotels in Beirut, killing those fleeing their onslaught and making it more difficult to find lodging (Al Jazeera, 2026).

The last two years have highlighted the fact that Hezbollah cannot liberate Lebanon or Palestine. The party has become thoroughly sectarianized, now nothing more than another religious militia extracting rent from the sect they purport to represent. Only an independent class organization built across all of the sects of Lebanon can transform the resistance into a class war capable of overturning both the Lebanese sectarian system which divides the Lebanese working class as well as the colonial machinations of the Israeli state.

The only way to stop Israel’s genocidal onslaught is for the working classes of the world to refuse to participate in this bloodbath. Socialists everywhere have an obligation to resist the march to war.

Having spoken with family currently displaced in Lebanon there is an overwhelming fear that Israel is planning on staying this time. The arrival of bulldozers alongside tanks on the southern border seems to confirm this fear. (Aljazeera, 2026). Over the last two and a half years we have seen Israel transform operations initially presented as limited strategic strikes into vectors for expansion and colonization. Gaza has been demolished, its people have been killed and pushed out, and Israel has again expanded the boundaries of their state. Now Southern Lebanon is on the agenda. For over 40 years the people of Southern Lebanon have lived under the shadow of occupation, many are now praying they may be able to stay in that shadow but in their homes.

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