00:10An Israeli airstrike has been reported this morning in a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut.
00:16It follows a wave of Israeli strikes on the suburbs of the Lebanese capital on Wednesday,
00:21one of which targeted a hotel not in a traditional Hezbollah bastion.
00:25Three people were killed in two separate strikes.
00:28The Israeli military also entered several villages in the south of the country after issuing evacuation orders to residents.
00:35Lebanon has reported 72 deaths since Monday, and the bombings have forced tens of thousands to leave their homes.
00:43For more on this, I can welcome Filippo Dionigi, lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol.
00:51Good morning, Filippo, and thank you very much for joining us.
00:54And these strikes on Lebanon by Israel were not particularly unexpected, given that Hezbollah did launch rocket attacks into Israel.
01:04But is there anything unusual on the scale of the Israeli strikes, particularly given that one of those strikes yesterday
01:10was outside a Hezbollah stronghold?
01:14No, there is nothing that is particularly unusual about this, sadly so.
01:19Israel has taken the opportunity to retaliate Hezbollah's attack that has taken place on the night of the 1st and
01:282nd of March,
01:29and has continued then to attack again Israel, although its attacks are effectively intercepted by the Israeli defense.
01:39The fact that Israel has expanded its operation is consistent with what has been a pattern that has been noticed
01:45already in the past months.
01:47Israel has been escalating in its attacks against Lebanon and against Hezbollah in particular.
01:52And occasionally these attacks also target areas that are not necessarily the ones that are generally considered Hezbollah's areas under
02:02Hezbollah's control.
02:03Israel consider that anyway, the geography of Lebanon and the demographic distribution is not as clear-cut as you can
02:10expect.
02:11Obviously, there are mixed areas, of course.
02:16And in the case of this latest attack on a hotel facility in Beirut,
02:21it may be that it's based on some intelligence that Israel has,
02:26and may have thought that there were some relevant targets in that facility in particular.
02:31Now, what military capabilities does Hezbollah have left,
02:36given it has been pretty much battered over the past couple of years by Israel?
02:41That's correct.
02:43Israel has launched massive military operations against Hezbollah,
02:48has degraded its military capacity,
02:50has decimated its political and military leadership,
02:54including killing its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and his successor.
03:00And now what is left of Hezbollah is up for assessment.
03:05Up until when the latest ceasefire was agreed in November 2024,
03:12the estimate was that Hezbollah's capacity was reduced of up to 70,
03:18even 80 percent of its original capacity.
03:21These are assessments, however, that are based mostly on IDF,
03:25the Israeli Defense Forces assessments,
03:27and therefore might be not entirely accurate.
03:30Then what we know is that there have been reports,
03:34according to which Hezbollah has been capable of reconstructing
03:38and reconstituted part of its military capacity,
03:40especially focusing on drones' capabilities,
03:45due to the fact that they may have learned about the potential,
03:50the military potential of this weapon from,
03:52and its dual-use capacity to be converted to military devices,
03:58from the case of Ukraine, for example.
04:01But again, these are all estimates,
04:03and they're rather obscures and difficult to corroborate.
04:06What we know so far from the attacks that we saw
04:08is that Hezbollah has been mostly launching short-range,
04:13unguided missiles, rockets, in fact, and swarms of drones.
04:19These are all types of attacks that Israel had no problems in intercepting,
04:24and in fact were not particularly relevant,
04:28eventually, for Israeli security as such.
04:30Now, Hezbollah in the past has been quite heavily reliant upon the Iranian regime,
04:37as was indeed Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria,
04:42which collapsed really when there wasn't really the same amount of support coming.
04:47With regard to Israel, can Israel completely destroy Hezbollah?
04:54I think Israel has the military capacity to do so.
04:58There's no question about it.
05:00Israel, let us not forget,
05:01is a vastly more capable military power compared to Hezbollah,
05:07and certainly the Lebanese army as well,
05:09which is a different question, of course.
05:13But the capacity to do so will obviously entail massive humanitarian repercussions for Lebanon.
05:21And already, as you were saying a minute ago,
05:24the enormous mass displacements that the Lebanese are experiencing,
05:28especially from the south towards the north,
05:30is impacting significantly the social and political balances of the country.
05:36And therefore, that capacity to operate militarily will have extremely high costs
05:42for the Lebanese people, unfortunately.
05:44Now, there are calls both internationally and within Lebanon as well for Hezbollah to be disarmed.
05:52Is there any possibility of the Lebanese government doing so?
05:56The Lebanese government, since the ceasefire of November 2024,
06:03there was an agreement at that point,
06:05that the Lebanese government and the national community would have collaborated
06:08for the disarmament of Hezbollah.
06:11And the process was going in that direction.
06:14There were problems, of course.
06:15Hezbollah was very reluctant in doing so.
06:18But after all, you know, there were a step forward.
06:22The Lebanese army is under-equipped
06:25and certainly needs further support for that operation to take place.
06:30However, these latest eruptions of violence between Israel and Hezbollah has clearly stopped that process.
06:38And what happened, interestingly, is that the Lebanese government has finally announced clearly
06:46that it has banned the weapons of Hezbollah and its military activity,
06:52declaring it, in fact, illegal as such,
06:55and therefore taking a further formal step forward towards the declaration of Hezbollah's military activities as illegal
07:03and therefore going into the direction of its disarmament.
07:06Whether there will be an actual capacity to implement that ban is a difficult question.
07:12For the time being, the operations are far more connected with the war between Israel and Hezbollah
07:21and the Lebanese army as a minor role in this process.
07:26And what we see now, however, is in fact the possibility that Israel will launch a ground invasion
07:33of South Lebanon to establish what they would call a buffering zone in South Lebanon
07:39and then possibly proceed with the elimination of any military capacity,
07:43at least in that part of Lebanon.
07:46Although it has to be said that the general accounts, the general reports that we've read so far
07:52reported that Hezbollah's military facilities have been moved north of the Litani River,
07:57so in the upper part of the country, which was one of the requirements that was set by the ceasefire
08:04in 2024.
08:06Now, Hezbollah is not particularly viewed particularly favorably by Lebanon's other religious and ethnic communities.
08:14And also Israel says that it insists that its war is against Hezbollah and not Lebanon as a whole.
08:20But how is Israel's campaign against Hezbollah viewed within Lebanon itself?
08:27Well, it's a complex picture.
08:30I think what the Lebanese government would have wanted to achieve,
08:37and I think that would have been the ideal scenario, of course,
08:39was the disarmament of Hezbollah through a consensual political process
08:44that would have not created the humanitarian impact that the Israeli attacks on Lebanon are creating now.
08:52The possibility for that process to take place was there.
08:57It had plenty of obstacles as Hezbollah was certainly reluctant in engaging with that process.
09:02But gradually, and with the adequate amount of pressure and appropriate negotiations between the parties involved,
09:11there could have been a possibility for that ceasefire agreement to become a reality
09:14and therefore reconstitute the credibility and trust of Lebanese political institution.
09:21However, the intervention of Israel in this process through violence,
09:27in fact, discredit the legitimacy of the Lebanese institution as such,
09:33and risks of collapsing their credibility,
09:37and may eventually even achieve the contrary of what they're trying to attempt to achieve,
09:42that is to basically reinstate the narrative of resistance and self-defense
09:46that has legitimized Hezbollah, at least in the eyes of their supporters so far,
09:51and therefore it might be counterproductive in that sense.
09:54So it would have been ideal and much better to implement the process politically and through consensus
10:01rather than having an escalation of the nature that we're witnessing today.
10:06Thank you very much for that, Filippo Dionigi,
10:08Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol.
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