Beyond The Gaza Mirror

Why the common shorthand of the "Gaza model" flattens the long and specific trajectory of Israeli aggression against south Lebanon

What's unfolding in south Lebanon is often described as being “like Gaza,” which is a comparison that gestures toward shared suffering but one which ultimately flattens a much longer and more specific historical trajectory. The Israeli attacks and acts of aggression in the south cannot be understood solely through the lens of the present war on Lebanon, nor even as an extension of recent regional escalations or ongoing genocide in Gaza. All that we are witnessing today belongs to a continuum that predates the modern Lebanese state itself, rooted in the transformation of the region historically known as Jabal Amel into a frontier of recurring Israeli invasion and targeted depopulation.

Jabal Amel was never an incidental geography, but rather a region of distinct and enduring strategic importance. For centuries it functioned as a distinct cultural and intellectual center within Bilad al-Sham (the pre-colonial, unified Levant), producing scholars and networks of learning that connected it to Najaf, Isfahan, and beyond. Its social fabric was marked by tight agrarian communities and a deeply rooted attachment to land (that still exists to this day), which made it both resilient and, in the modern period, a target. With the imposition of the French Mandate, these peripheral regions were administratively reorganized but never meaningfully integrated into a cohesive national framework, leaving the south exposed to external pressures and state neglect.
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The occupation of Palestine, alongside parts of Jabal Amel, and the establishment of the Israeli entity in 1948, inaugurated a lasting condition of aggression against south Lebanon and entrenched instability along the country’s southern frontier. From the earliest attacks and massacres predating the establishment of the Zionist entity to the incursions in the 1950s and the large-scale invasions of 1978 and 1982, south Lebanon became a laboratory for doctrines of imperial control; villages were subjected to ethnic cleansing, the land and local infrastructure was systematically degraded, and entire populations were driven into recurring cycles of displacement that profoundly reshaped the country’s internal balance. The Israeli occupation that followed 1982 entrenched these patterns even further.

So, to understand places like the southern village Qana, for example, is to confront how this history accumulates in a single location. Qana is not only a site of spiritual memory and cultural heritage, associated in Christian tradition with the first miracle of Jesus, but also a site where US-Israeli aggression has repeatedly inscribed itself with devastating clarity. The 1996 massacre saw over 100 people killed by Israeli forces while sheltering in a UN compound. A decade later, in 2006, another similar Israeli massacre, with many of the victims being children.
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For decades, the well-documented, historical pattern of Israeli aggression in the south relied on a strategic ambiguity, where attacks on civilian infrastructure were framed by Israeli officials as collateral errors despite their constant recurrence. Recently, however, this cheap pretense has been discarded.

On March 14, Israel publicly announced an official campaign targeting Lebanese ambulance services and first responders, effectively acknowledging a policy that had already been carried out through multiple massacres in the preceding days and in the decades before.

This announcement, and the statements that followed it, must be read against a long and documented historical pattern in which Israeli 'operations' in Lebanon have repeatedly and intentionally struck ambulances, medical convoys, civil defense teams, and first responders, a pattern that stretches across decades of Israeli attacks and reflects a broader, systemic Israeli approach; during the 1978 Operation Litani and especially the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Lebanese hospitals, Red Cross convoys, and emergency responders were repeatedly targeted by Israeli forces, establishing an early and consequential pattern.

In April 1996, during Operation Grapes of Wrath, Israeli attacks culminated in the Qana massacre, where those seeking refuge in a UN compound were killed while medical teams struggled to reach the wounded under continued Israeli fire. That same year there was the Mansouri massacre in south Lebanon. Israeli forces fired on a clearly marked ambulance in the village, killing six people, including four children. The vehicle was being driven by Abbas Jihah, a local farmer and volunteer ambulance driver. In a now notorious photo he is seen clutching the body of his daughter, killed in the airstrike, in his arms.

From a 1996 interview with Jihah, who was a volunteer ambulance driver, we find the same Israeli crime, and the same Israeli excuse:

“Abbas Jihah recalls hearing a powerful, loud whistling noise, and in an instant his life was shattered forever.

In that split second, the ambulance he was driving, packed with at least 12 people, was picked up with sickening force by an Israeli rocket fired from a helicopter hovering overhead. The vehicle was hurled 20 yards off the road, into the front room of a house.

Hysterical, but alive, Jihah turned to see his wife, Mona, and their three daughters, Zaina, 10, Hannan, 3, and Miriam, 2 months old, all mortally wounded. He instinctively grabbed the infant and the 10-year-old, half of whose face was burned and blown away, and ran down the road screaming for help.

Israel’s explanation came within hours Saturday: The attack on Jihah’s ambulance, government officials said, was not an accident. It was targeted because its driver was a “known Hezbollah activist” and the vehicle was known to ferry Hezbollah members.

On Saturday, Jihah said, he was asked by a fellow volunteer to help Tyre’s ambulance service deliver food supplies to nearby villages.

After finishing one run, he went back to Tyre to get more food and take an injured man to a hospital.

Then, on the radio, he said, he heard a warning issued by Israel in Arabic that all residents of Mansouri and two other villages should leave within four hours. He drove the ambulance straight home to his village nine miles south of Tyre and quickly gathered his family.

They formed an ungainly convoy. His brother Hussein, who has 20 children, put his family into a red pickup truck. Then came Jihah in the ambulance, followed by a third brother on a motorbike and a fourth brother driving a tractor.

They had seen the Israeli helicopters but did not realize they were being followed, Jihah said. Then, 50 yards after the vehicle passed the U.N. checkpoint manned by Fijian soldiers, the rocket came.

“All of a sudden, everything just shattered,” Jihah recalled. Besides his four family members, a woman and a little girl riding in the ambulance were killed.

The only time Jihah expressed anger during a 45-minute interview was when he was asked his opinion of Israel. Calling the Israelis “terrorists and murderers,” he said he wants Israel to “leave our land alone so people can live in peace...”

The 2006 war further deepened the record of Israeli aggression against first responders, with direct Israeli strikes on clearly marked Red Cross ambulances, including the July 23, 2006 attack on a convoy in Qana that wounded paramedics and destroyed emergency vehicles, alongside repeated incidents in which rescue workers reported secondary strikes after arriving at impact sites, a pattern we now refer to as “double-tap” attacks which are intended to kill any survivors and ensure more casualties; in the years since, and particularly during the recent 2023–2026 aggression, at least at least 176 Lebanese health workers have been killed to date, countless ambulances destroyed, and medical facilities damaged across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, reinforcing a continuity that points to an open Israeli policy of targeting anyone providing aid.

What emerges from this record is a consistent and brutal reality of Israel targeting first responders as a form of coercive pressure on Lebanese society at large, namely the Resistance community. When speaking with crew members belonging to Lebanon’s Civil Defense, who have risked their very lives in noble efforts to rescue and save their people, it becomes even more evident that Israel's destruction of medical and emergency infrastructure in Lebanon is meant to reshape the conditions under which we live and seek safety; it is an attempt to instill fear into the healthcare systems we access that sustain life, and to ensure that our communities cannot recover.
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To say that the ongoing Israeli aggression against south Lebanon is “like Gaza” risks reducing it to a mere echo of the genocide in Gaza, when in fact both are expressions of a broader project that operates across different terrains with long and locally specific histories. Much of the world may have discovered the Palestinian cause in Gaza, but what we are witnessing in Gaza did not begin in Gaza. By framing these crises as isolated or even simply as successive events, observers risk ignoring the cumulative and systemic nature of this historical arch, which has long deployed compartmentalized aggression as a mechanism to consolidate power and dismantle the possibility of any cohesive resistance across the Levant.

What is visible today in south Lebanon is the latest iteration of a much older process. The persistence of communities in Jabal Amel, despite decades of invasion and marginalization, reveals something that is often obscured in external analyses: that the campaign of occupation being waged against us is not simply about territory in the abstract, but about the endurance of a social and historical presence that has been continuously targeted and yet refuses to disappear.