By Mohamad Safa
Israel is making southern Lebanon unliveable – exactly as outlined in the document it submitted to the international community years before regarding the 6 to 8 kilometers border zone – a document the media is unaware of.
Twenty years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution SCR1701, Israel has violated it more than 50,000 times since its adoption in 2006. Israel has violated all signed agreements, and all international norms with absolutely no consequences.
Israel currently occupies and controls 20% of Lebanon, systematically demolished more than 81 villages – ancient villages where Jesus Christ once walked, villages that have stood the test of time for centuries and centuries, with prehistoric and Roman-era roots – destroyed homes, roads, bridges, and all infrastructure, as well as farmland, forests, valleys, hills, and entire ecosystems.
According to Article Il of the UN Genocide Convention, genocide involves specific acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Israel is engaged in the deliberate destruction of the means of life in southern Lebanon, which itself is evidence of genocide. Wiping out entire villages is not a military necessity. It is the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure. These are war crimes under international law: wanton devastation not justified by military necessity.
The war in Lebanon has reached a point where it can no longer be described as anything other than genocide and ecocide. When Israel flattens entire villages, the rest of the world has one clear obligation – cut off that military’s access to weapons.
Don’t be fooled by current leaders statements calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. If they really wanted to end it, they would have stopped military aid to Israel.
World leaders must move beyond expressing deep concern and strong condemnation of Israel’s genocide to taking steps to stop it, and that means immediately ending all military aid to Israel.
Israel is committing another genocide in Lebanon with complete impunity, so regularly that the world has lost interest – just like it has lost interest in Gaza.
Lebanon is the second most-documented genocide in history after Palestine, yet the most denied.
Mohamad Safa, is a former UN representative for the Patriotic Vision Association (PVA).
From the Facebook post of Mohamad Safa, here.
[Feature picture is a montage of photographs from the Israeli incursion into Lebanon twenty years ago. From Wikimedia Commons, here]
