Israel’s War in Lebanon Has Not Stopped

Since the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire, on Tuesday night, Israel has continued pummelling Lebanon with air strikes, killing more than three hundred people on Wednesday and wounding over a thousand more. After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, in February, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia paramilitary group in Lebanon, fired missiles at Israel; this was followed by a heavy Israeli response across the country, and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel has forced out over a million people from their homes, and killed more than a thousand, in a country of some five million, vowing to hold many of these areas as buffer zones. (The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, has compared the strategy to the one his country used in Gaza.) And the New York Times reported that Israel has recently made allowances for religious groups other than Shia Muslims to remain in the “evacuation zone.” Meanwhile, Israel and Lebanon are set to hold talks next week, but Iran and the United States have not yet reached an agreement on whether the ceasefire covers Israeli operations in Lebanon.I recently spoke by phone with Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center, who