Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 13 April 2026
Is Lebanon going to be another Gaza?
While many breathe a sigh of relief that a cease fire between the USA/Israel and Iran has been reached, Lebanon has been bombed mercilessly. On April 7, 2026, the ceasefire was announced. Within a few hours, Israel engaged in the heaviest bombing of Beirut seen in decades: in just ten minutes more than three hundred Lebanese were dead and hundreds more wounded.
When it comes to Lebanon, the Israeli leadership is using language that repeats many of the themes that were used to justify genocide and destruction in Gaza. In both Gaza and Lebanon, Islamic resistance, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, has indeed attacked Israeli territory and population. In both places the horrifying lack of proportionality in the Israeli response has led to massacres and catastrophic devastation. In both places, the Israeli army has occupied territories, claiming need of a security zone, and as a consequence displacing hundreds of thousands.
As Israel continues to use violence to impose its will on the region, Israelis are certainly not more secure. The resistance to Israel’s attempts at domination, even if weakened, is still very much a part of the fabric of society in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Israeli leadership seems addicted to war, holding on to its own power by using fear, revenge and bloodlust to block any possibility of reasonable thinking, diplomatic initiative and dialogue. For how long will those who support Israel politically, militarily, economically and socially allow a rogue regime to ravage the region and endanger the world?
We need to acknowledge that there will be no security for Israelis, peace in Palestine/Israel, or in the Middle East as a whole, until the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people are recognized. The festering wound of Palestinian displacement, occupation, discrimination, and genocide is a major reason for the instability that the Middle East has experienced over the past century.
Watch an excellent interview with a journalist based in East Beirut, sharing on the events of April 8, 2026, when Israel dropped about one hundred bombs on Beirut.
And the comment of David Hearst of the Middle East Eye.