Forced displacement in Lebanon, the “Gaza model” of genocidal land theft
Analysis: The Zionist regime is deploying the Gaza model in Lebanon, using the same genocidal strategies, thinly disguised as lawful humanitarian warfare.
Leaflets. Thousands of leaflets were dropped in Beirut, Lebanon, from an Israeli jet in mid-March, drifting among apartment buildings like confetti. Residents poked out of their balconies, stopped in the street, to read the leaflets, which announced a “new reality” in Lebanon, ordered Lebanese to “disarm Hezbollah,” and to collaborate with Israel’s military.
Israel’s genocidal goal, according to an Israeli military pundit, “is to render these villages uninhabitable for civilian populations or terrorist activity.” It’s the “Gaza model.”
“What we need to do is to capture the area up to the Litani line, evacuate the entire Lebanese population northward, and hold that area. That will threaten them,” said Amichai Attali on Israel’s Channel 14.
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have attacked numerous villages, aerial bombed cities, and flattened entire apartment buildings in one strike. Yet, Israeli media have gawked at the IOF’s underestimation of Hezbollah’s resistance and rocket fire in combat and into Tel Aviv, Israel’s central city. Considered “decapitated and defeated,” the resistance has dominated ground operations, with dozens of Israeli tank “massacres” in just a few weeks.
Still, at least one million Lebanese are displaced by the Israeli genocidal invasion in southern Lebanon, where the IOF expanded its “evacuation orders” for over a hundred villages from the Litani River to north of the Zahrani River, about 40km (25 miles) north of the Israeli border—displacing at least 15% of Lebanon.
On March 23, Israel bombed the Qasmiya Bridge that crosses the Litani River, a key strategic spot separating Southern Lebanon from the rest of the country. The invading Israeli army seeks to create a “security zone” or “buffer zone” up to the Litani River, or what Databases for Palestine founder ZO has called a “designated kill zone” that Israelis use to shoot civilians in Gaza.
“Israel’s policy in Lebanon is clear: where there is terror and missiles - there are no homes and no residents - and the IDF will control the security zone up to the Litani,” tweeted Israeli defense minister Israel Katz on March 24, six days after announcing hundreds of thousands of fleeing residents “will not return to their homes south of the Litani, until the safety of the residents of [Israel’s] north is guarenteed.”
In the last 12 days, Israel has destroyed seven bridges that cross the Litani River and connect Southern Lebanon to the rest of the country, including the Qasmiya Bridge, which was aerial bombed on March 22.
As journalist Hala Jaber observed on Substack, “The Qasmiya Bridge is a key civilian artery linking southern Lebanon to the rest of the country,” she wrote. “Cut it, & you isolate entire communities, restricting movement of civilians, ambulances, aid, & daily life.”
Destroying the Qasmiya Bridge isolates food supply lines from Southern Lebanon, one of the country's main agricultural regions, and isolates communities from one another.
“This is how a buffer zone becomes a border,” wrote Jaber.
Residents from southern Lebanon are pouring onto the beaches, fleeing aerial bombings from Israeli drones and fighter jets.
If the “buffer zone” is established, America is set to help occupy Lebanon, according to a US proposal unveiled last September, securing the land for Israeli settlers to erect their white-ruled settlements.
This plan of American security for Israeli settlements is not discussed in the mainstream media, yet these details were presented to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. America will help secure the Israeli kill zone, because it’s set to become the “Trump economic zone.”
An archive of “evacuation orders” for Gaza and Lebanon is available at Gaza Maps, created by Databases for Palestine.
Deploying the Gaza model in Lebanon
The IDF seeks to create a “buffer zone” between the border and the Litani River or, as Databases for Palestine calls it, a “Designated Kill Zone.” Anyone caught in the kill zone, if spotted, is shot by the IOF.
Israeli forced displacement orders follow the familiar pattern that the IOF created for Palestinian Gazans during the heat of Israel’s post-Oct 7 genocide, and continue to use today as kill zones. Every military action Israel makes is dressed in “humanitarian camouflage,” disguising their extermination campaign with a veneer of compliance with International Humanitarian Law, the laws that govern lawful conduct in war.
“I believe that what Israel did in Gaza was the model and is the model for what we’re going to see in terms of Iran and in terms of Lebanon and elsewhere,” said Diana Buttu, lawyer and analyst at Al-Shabaka, during a panel. “We’re already seeing it.”
An October 2024 report from the Institute for Palestine Studies found Israel to be shepherding in a new “era of mass atrocities” by states unwilling to submit to international law. As a colonial power, Israel has determined that the international treaties enshrined to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure can be rewritten or reinterpreted to legitimize mass killing and wholesale destruction of Gaza.
No person is safe in a protected infrastructure. Hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, houses, universities, courts, municipal offices, parliament buildings, and entire neighborhoods are military targets, because terrorists “embed themselves among civilians” and use them as “human shields.”
In November 2023, early in Israel’s genocide, Israel portrayed the Al-Shifa Hospital as a “Hamas command center,” thus losing its protected status and justifying endless attacks on patients and medical workers, turning the hospital into a “death zone.”
“Proportionality,” a rule prohibiting attacks expected to produce “excessive” civilian harm, will never be an issue when Israel’s indiscriminate killing is portrayed as “proportionate” to Zionism’s military goals.
Yet the indefensible transformation of the ‘law of armed conflict’ to Israel’s “law of armed genocide” is possible solely because Western countries upholding these laws—Britain, France, Germany, and especially America—did nothing to stop the Zionist regime.
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Still, the most evident parallel between Israel’s 2023 invasion of Gaza and its renewed invasion of Lebanon is the “evacuation orders,” disguising a colonialist plan to “depopulate” and “transfer” the undesirable Native population of Palestinians and Lebanese out of their homeland in order to replace the Native population with white Jewish settlers.
A January 2025 report by Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, “How to Hide a Genocide: The Role of Evacuation Orders and Safe Zones in Israel’s Genocidal Campaign in Gaza,” came to a similar conclusion as the Institute for Palestine Studies report.
Al-Haq found Israel’s use of evacuation orders is a “lethal tactic of disguising its mass forcible transfer and targeting of Palestinians in Gaza with humanitarian language, which misleadingly depicts these acts as preventative measures designed to protect civilians. In reality, the illegal evacuation orders and ensuing forced displacement of over 1.9 million Palestinians to areas that make up less than 20 per cent of Gaza’s territory only serve to facilitate and fuel its genocide.”
Since Israel restarted its invasion of Lebanon on Feb. 2, the Zionist regime has published at least 50 “evacuation orders,” effectively forced displacement orders, for over 100 villages and towns in southern Lebanon.
First, the IOF announces “evacuation orders” for specific neighborhoods, streets, or areas, and at a given time, residents should be gone from the site.
Second, IOF military operations follow, usually aerial bombings by drones or piloted aircraft, or ground operations by soldiers on foot.
And third, once areas are bombed, the IOF often demolishes the remaining buildings with bulldozers and more explosives.
These are the overly simplified steps to Israel’s genocide-by-flyer operation.
Israel’s “evacuation orders” give the Zionist regime a thinly veiled “humanitarian camouflage,” the appearance of reasonable notice before deadly military operations begin.
Instead, families have hours, even minutes, to gather their loved ones and necessary possessions before aerial bombs burst through the ceiling or walls, burying everyone under mountains of concrete.
Those left caught in the “evacuation zones,” or even many who flee to “safe zones,” are presumed to be terrorists. No infrastructure is protected under Israel’s interpretation of IHL.
If or when the “Designated Kill Zone” or “buffer zone” is established, America is set to help occupy Lebanon, securing the land for Israeli settlers to erect their white-ruled settlements.
Planned from the beginning: A Trump “economic zone”
Hezbollah didn’t exist in 1981. The armed resistance group was established in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and had fired rockets at Israel in solidarity with Palestinians.
Israel has invaded Lebanon six times in the last 50 years: 1978, 1982, 1990, 2006, 2024, and 2026.
During a visit from the US delegation to Lebanon in September 2025, the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, presented a proposal to the President of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun, for a new “zone” for southern Lebanon.
Details of the proposed Trump “economic zone,” according to Annahar, would be “under American security control and would operate without UNIFIL,” a UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
The plan:
Land will be seized from 27 towns. There are Shia villages and all Sunni towns in the western sector (Dhaira, Yarin, Al-Bustan, Marwahin, and Al-Zaloutieh), as well as Christian towns in the central sector (Qawzah, Rmeish, Debel, and Ain Ebel), whose residents will be displaced from their homes in exchange for attractive financial compensation.
Already, this plan sounds eerily similar to US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner’s, “Master Plan” for colonizing the so-called Gaza Riviera, which Kushner would unveil a few months later at Davos, Switzerland, in January 2025.
This area will be under American security management. Between 1,500 and 2,000 soldiers will oversee its daily operations and communicate with Lebanese and Israeli security agencies. Israel will have the right to erect dozens of observation posts along the border to reassure settlers in the north. Israeli army units will be given the freedom to enter, when necessary.
In addition to being the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack is also a billionaire real estate investor, a member of the “Epstein class”, and is all for helping Israel redraw the map of West Asia in its own image: Greater Israel. No more pesky borders penciled in over a hundred years ago.
As Palestine Will be Free first reported, Barrack tweeted that America and Israel reject the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that secretly divided West Asia between the French and British colonial powers. The message was clear: Israel should have it all.
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On Wednesday, Israel’s Channel 14 revealed new plans to redraw the regime’s border approximately 8km farther north. “The new border will be right next to the Tyre area,” according to the report, and include 18 military outposts among former Lebanese villages, all in service of securing their “buffer zone.”
“Does Israel have the capacity or the desire to really geographically take over Lebanon? Absolutely,” said Tom Barrack during an interview with a UAE-based influencer. “Probably in an afternoon.”
They were wrong.
In a now-deleted story reported in The Telegraph, a British Zionist rag, a Lebanese villager told the reporter some truths Western media didn’t want spread.
“We are at war with the Epstein people. The people eating, frying and raping kids. They are monsters, beasts. They are not humans. But the worst part is they are the ones that rule the world,” someone named Ahmad told The Telegraph.
The Lebanese, like the Palestinians, will never give up their land.
“How can we as Christians in this area not be with Hezbollah[?]” he said. “They protect our churches. They helped us fight ISIS. During Covid they gave us free care in their hospitals. When there was no electricity they gave us generators. They even put up a Christmas tree at Christmas. How can we not be with them now?” [**]