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I woke up early last Sunday morning to news that Israel has been attacking Iran again, in retaliation for Iran attacking Israel, in retaliation for Israel expanding its violent incursion into Lebanon. At the time of writing, the fighting has stopped. For now.
On the 5th of June 2026, the day after a US-mediated ceasefire agreement, Israeli strikes killed at least twenty-one people in Lebanon, including two Syrian children on a motorcycle, a municipal council member, and a paramedic whose ambulance was hit while delivering bread to a besieged family. The following day Israeli forces killed a brigadier general, a captain and a soldier of the Lebanese army — not Hezbollah — in a strike on a military vehicle. According to The Times of Israel, “The IDF said the vehicle was ‘moving suspiciously’ in an active combat zone where movement ‘requires prior coordination’ with Israeli forces.” Israel’s arrogant and domineering expectation is that Lebanon should ask Israel’s permission to move its own soldiers on its own roads. This incident is being ‘investigated’ by the Israeli military.
The damage Israel is inflicting in Lebanon is staggering. Since the invasion began on 2nd of March 2026 more than 1.2 million people — including 390,000 children — have been forced to flee their homes, making it one of the world’s fastest-growing displacement crises. This is roughly one in five of Lebanon’s entire population of 5.9 million. UNICEF reported that Lebanon was seeing nearly 19,000 children displaced every day during the peak weeks of the assault. This new wave of displacement and pain comes on top of the 2024 displacement wave. Around 64,000 people in Lebanon were already displaced from earlier Israeli assaults.
Over a million people displaced in a country of 5.9 million isn’t ‘collateral damage’. It is the stated goal — Israel’s Defence Minister explicitly said Israel plans to destroy Lebanese border towns and continue occupying the south.
Last Friday, 5th of June, Israeli soldiers murdered a seven-months old baby after opening fire on his family’s vehicle. The Bethlehem family were visiting the father’s family in Tel Rumeida, Hebron. They were attacked by Israeli soldiers who claimed they were ‘worried the vehicle was speeding towards them’. Back in March a Palestinian couple and their two children ages 5 and 17 were murdered in kafr Tammun in the Jordan valley. There too the soldiers claimed they were worried that the vehicle was speeding towards them. It’s doubtful that two family vehicles with children in them were looking for trouble, when Palestinians know their lives are worth nothing to Israel, and they could be killed in cold blood. The murdering soldiers are saying what they were told to say. The Israeli state media are reporting that the military is ‘sorry’, and that the Friday incident is ‘being investigated’. The list of crimes committed by the Israeli military is so long, it would take a century to investigate all of them. Excuse me if I’m not holding my breath when a perpetrator is proposing to investigate their own crimes. These sham investigations are nothing more than a stalling tactic, just like Israel’s pretend ‘negotiations’.
All over the colonised West Bank attacks against Palestinians are accelerating. Theft, destruction of Palestinian property, intimidation, disruption to daily life, harassment, and random cold-blooded murder — are all on the rise.
Five days ago, Smotrich announced that a planning committee had approved over 2,162 new Jewish homes across three West Bank settlement areas. “They include 1,006 units in a new settlement near Jerusalem, 922 near the Palestinian city of Nablus and 234 near Hebron”. The Israeli cabinet approved 34 new settlements in a single decision in April, bringing the total approved by the current Netanyahu coalition to 103 — the largest batch approved in decades, breaking the record set in May 2025 when 22 new settlements were approved.
Smotrich: “We are continuing to build the Land of Israel in practice” [The new homes will] “strengthen our hold on the land, reinforce Israel’s security, and establish clear facts on the ground that prevent the creation of an Arab terror state in the heart of the country…” — U.S.News (my bold emphasis).
Israel is violently expanding in all directions. To some, this behaviour might appear disproportionate, irrational, even self-defeating. It makes more enemies. It destroys the last remnants of credibility Israel might still have as a negotiating partner. And it deepens international isolation. How can a state that claims to be fighting for its survival keep doing things that undermine its own security? The answer is that many analysts and commentators are measuring Israel’s actions against the wrong goal. I suspect some are doing it intentionally, but others might be genuinely ignorant. If you want to understand a person or a group you need to focus on what they do, not what they say. Israel’s words are meaningless, but Israel’s actions are clear. If you look past the deliberate confusion, biased analyses, and all other ‘noise’, it is quite clear what Israel’s actions mean.
Israel is not primarily fighting for security. It is completing a settler-colonial project. Once you understand that, everything that might appear incoherent or confusing becomes entirely rational.
Israel claims its goal in Lebanon is to secure a buffer zone to protect its northern settlements from attack. There may be some truth in this, but it is not the real or full goal. Israel’s assault on Lebanon is clearing a space into which to expel over three million West Bank Palestinians — an ethnic cleansing operation Israel is preparing for, and waiting for the right moment to execute. That moment will likely come when the world’s attention is consumed by global economic crises, other wars, civil unrest elsewhere and chaos in general. Israel needs global chaos to serve as a smokescreen behind which it can complete the removal of the Palestinians from all of historic Palestine.
Israel sees subduing Hezbollah as necessary — but not for the reasons it states. Eliminating Hezbollah’s threat is a prerequisite for the expulsion itself. Israel cannot safely push millions of Palestinians across its northern border while Hezbollah retains the capacity to respond. Lebanon must be neutralised not to protect Israeli settlers in the north, but to receive the Palestinians Israel intends to remove from the West Bank. And once those Palestinians are there, Israel will need to control them — a displaced, dispossessed, and angry population on its doorstep would be an existential threat by any measure. That control will be brutal, because it always is. What Israel is planning is not merely ethnic cleansing within its current borders — it is the extension of the settler-colonial project beyond them, into the sovereign territory of a neighbouring country.
Killing Lebanese army officers is sending a message that even sovereign Lebanese military authority is subordinate to Israeli military will in the region. This is a warning to Lebanon not to interfere with Israel’s plans.
Approving new West Bank settlements while simultaneously initiating military assault on multiple fronts may seem like recklessness. But in reality it is a race to create facts on the ground before the window closes.
In the meantime the killing in Gaza continues — not only with conventional weapons but through deliberate abandonment to starvation, disease, and engineered squalor. Israel hopes that by the time it moves to empty Gaza, there will be far fewer people left to deal with.
Israel hates Iran so much because it is the only sovereign country that openly supports the Palestinians and that names Israel’s settler-colonialism. Israel cannot safely finish eliminating the presence of Palestinians from all of historic Palestine while Iran is still there as an independent state with a mind of its own, rather than another US client state run by corrupt client leaders happy to live a life of luxury on US bribes.
Israel’s violence and expansion are not a departure from the project. They are the project and the Palestinians are on borrowed time.
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