Jonah Valdez
After nearly a year of unrelenting attacks in Gaza, Israel further escalated and expanded its war by invading Lebanon late Monday. Iran responded the following evening by launching ballistic missiles into Tel Aviv, stoking fears that the region is on the precipice of an even broader war.
The Israeli military has tried repeatedly to minimize the perceived scope of its attacks, describing its ongoing invasion of Lebanon as “limited, localized, and targeted ground raids” against Hezbollah. Such semantics are also in play in the U.S., where President Joe Biden publicly called for a ceasefire, while reporting suggests the White House privately condoned Israel’s expansion of its war into Lebanon.
“Increasingly we’ve seen Israel use words like ‘targeted’ and ‘limited,’ words that try or seek to convey that this is somehow acceptable,” said Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the D.C.-based think tank Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. “And yet we know from the last year — in Israel’s war in Gaza and this latest front in Lebanon — that these are euphemisms for, at the end of the day, what may very well amount to be war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
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