On the 8th (local time), when the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week conditional cease-fire premised on safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz and preventing escalation, Israeli airstrikes continued that day in the Lebanon border area. Iran opened the negotiating table by leveraging the powerful economic card of control over the Strait of Hormuz, the key conduit for the world's oil shipments. Countries where oil supplies are urgently needed, like Pakistan, volunteered to mediate.
But Lebanon, which has no means of pressure that would immediately affect the global market, still has not escaped Israel's sweep operations. It shows how the application of cease-fires between countries on the international political stage clearly diverges depending on whether they have economic leverage.
According to a compilation of major foreign media reports including the AP and Al Jazeera on the 8th, the Israeli military carried out bombings targeting key strategic points in southern Lebanon and densely populated areas on the outskirts of the capital, Beirut, even immediately after the Iran cease-fire took effect. MarineTraffic, a maritime logistics monitoring firm, said merchant traffic has resumed in the Strait of Hormuz as fears of ship seizures have eased, but drones and fighter jets have not stopped flying over Lebanon.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the cease-fire, said as the airstrikes continued, "Lebanon is naturally included in this agreement." In contrast, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately denied that, drawing a line by saying, "We will continue ground operations and airstrikes against Hezbollah indefinitely." Israel officially accepted the two-week temporary cease-fire plan against Iran that day. However, it issued a new mandatory evacuation order in the area around the southern hub city of Tyrshi, signaling its intent to secure additional buffer zones. The Israeli military issues evacuation orders to residents of the area on humanitarian grounds before airstrikes. In wartime, the firepower that would have been split between Iran and Lebanon is now being projected entirely onto Lebanon.
Lebanon has no effective diplomatic tools to move the international community. Iran has the ability to seize the Strait of Hormuz, a major transport route for oil and natural gas. It holds the physical destructive power to paralyze the global energy market and strike the entire world economic system. In this war, too, the international community, including the United States and Europe, moved quickly to negotiate to prevent a logistics crisis and a surge in oil prices. In contrast, Lebanon has no weapon to disrupt global maritime logistics or key raw material supply chains. The international community, including the World Bank (WB), views the situation in which Lebanese civilians who do not cooperate with armed groups suffer massive property damage and loss of life from Israeli airstrikes as a serious humanitarian crisis. But compared with the Iran front, it is not actively working to deter military action.
Israeli security authorities defined the airstrikes on Lebanon as not a full-scale war between sovereign states. Israel views the strikes as a counterterrorism operation to eliminate Hezbollah, an armed group that directly threatens the security of its northern territory. Defense Minister Israel Katz said on the 24th of last month regarding the plan for southern Lebanon, "There can be no houses or residents left in the terrorist areas of southern Lebanon." Reuters explained that this series of remarks forms a security and counterterrorism operation framework for creating buffer zones near the border and removing Hezbollah.
Within Israel's military, there is distrust that Lebanon's central government has neither the military capability nor the political control to restrain Hezbollah, which is based on its territory. Even if the Lebanese government promises a peace accord in writing to the international community, from Israel's perspective it is hard to trust that this diplomatic guarantee will ensure the safety and return of residents in its northern regions. It also judges that it lacks sufficient grounds to unilaterally halt military operations in the border area.
With airstrikes continuing regardless of the Iran cease-fire, Lebanon has faced a shutdown of state functions. The official death toll compiled by the Lebanese government since the outbreak of war with Iran has exceeded 1,700. By Lebanese health authorities' count, the cumulative death toll before the cease-fire on the 8th was 1,530, but at least 182 more died within a day immediately after the cease-fire. The estimated death toll within Iran compiled by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is around 1,900. Iran's population is 90 million, and Lebanon's is about 6 million. Even though Lebanon is not the main battlefield, it is suffering far more severe losses relative to its population.
Separately, more than 1.2 million people, amounting to 20% of the total population, have fled to escape the airstrikes and the protracted war. In particular, as Shiite groups fleeing the heavily bombed south have poured into Sunni areas in the north, friction among local residents and sectarian conflict within Islam have surfaced. Following economic and human losses, even national cohesion is rapidly unraveling. Economy Minister Amer Bisat said in an interview with CNBC on the 8th that "Lebanon's gross domestic product (GDP) has shrunk by 5% to 7% due to the unilateral war of the past five weeks," adding, "The faint recovery that had barely appeared after years of economic crisis collapsed in less than a month."
The World Bank estimated the cumulative damage from the Lebanon conflict at $8.5 billion (about 12.6 trillion won) as of the end of 2024. It then projected that at least $11.0 billion (about 16.3 trillion won) more would be needed for national reconstruction. If the current airstrike status continues, the normalization of border conflict in northern Israel as well as a large-scale outflow of refugees by sea could shake the entire security landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. If control over the Strait of Hormuz is a variable that pushes up oil prices in the short term, the collapse of Lebanon's state system is a chronic risk that will continuously impose massive diplomatic and security expenses on neighboring countries and the international community.
Mohammad Haz Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said in an interview with The New York Times (NYT) that "Israel has only one policy tool, a military solution, and no political solution is in sight," assessing that Israel's hard-line approach could lead to a long-term crisis.