Israel Defense Minister Deploys ‘Gaza Model’ in Lebanon, Ordering Destruction of Villages
One expert called the policy “an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing.”
A man walks amongst the wreckage following an Israeli airstrike on March 23, 2026, in Baalbek, Lebanon.
(Photo by Adri Salido/Getty Images)
Stephen Prager
Mar 23, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
Israel is planning to use Gaza as a “model” for its expanding assault on Lebanon, its defense minister said on Sunday as he pledged to begin the demolition of homes in border villages.
In a statement Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israel Defense Forces to “immediately destroy all the bridges over the Litani River that are used for terrorist activity, in order to prevent the passage of Hezbollah terrorists and weapons southward.”
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He also said he’d ordered the military to “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes in the border villages in order to thwart threats to the Israeli settlements—in accordance with the Beit Hanoun and Rafah model in Gaza.”
Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, described the invocation of this “Gaza model” as “an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing” in Lebanon.
The two cities Katz referred to were largely wiped off the map during the Gaza genocide.
Beit Hanoun, a city on the northeastern edge of the Gaza Strip, which once had a population of more than 50,000 people, had nearly all of its structures totally “flattened” by Israel’s bombing and was totally depopulated, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in mid-2025. The far-right in Israel has pushed for Jewish Israeli settlers to move in and build settlements on the territory.
Rafah has been similarly devastated, with nearly 70% of the structures “wiped out” according to an October 2025 investigation by the Center for Information Resilience.
At the time that Israeli forces moved into Rafah in mid-2024, it was the last refuge for more than 1 million Palestinians who’d been displaced from their homes elsewhere in the strip. UN experts described the attack on Rafah as a culmination of a monthslong campaign to “forcibly transfer and destroy Gaza’s population,” with more than 800,000 people being forced to flee.
Human Rights Watch said on Monday that Katz’s announcement demonstrated “an intent to forcibly displace residents, destroy civilian homes, and conduct strikes that could target civilians” in Lebanon as well.
Already, more than 1 million civilians in Lebanon, from the area south of the Litani River and in Beirut’s southern suburbs, have become displaced following orders from the Israeli military to evacuate their homes.
Katz has said hundreds of thousands of Shiite civilians will be forbidden from returning from their south of the Litani “until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed,” and he has said Israel “will not hesitate to target anyone who is present near Hezbollah members, facilities, or means of combat.”
Human Rights Watch has said these indefinite displacements raise the concern that Israel is perpetrating the war crime of forced displacement and doing so based on religion.
“The Israeli military does not get to decide when civilians lose protections afforded by international law, nor should it be allowed to prevent displaced residents from returning to their homes based on some undefined ‘safety’ standard,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. Deliberately targeting civilians, civilian objects, and others protected under international law would be a war crime, and countries supplying Israel with weapons need to realize they are risking complicity in war crimes too.“
Since the latest outbreak of hostilities at the beginning of March following the launch of the US-Israeli war against Iran, at least 1,024 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli attacks, including 79 women and 118 children, according to a report from Lebanese authorities this weekend.
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have “destroyed hundreds of homes and civilian infrastructure, including healthcare facilities.”
“For over two years, Israel’s allies and European states that purport to support and uphold human rights have buried their heads in the sand as atrocities continue in Lebanon, as in Gaza,” Kaiss said. “Atrocities flourish when there is impunity, and other countries should no longer stand by as they continue.”
One in five Lebanese displacement in three weeks by Israel’s invasion
Lebanon is facing a humanitarian crisis after one in five Lebanese have been displaced following Israel’s invasion of the south of the country in the fastest displacement in recent history.
Israel is preparing to seize a third of Lebanon and annex it to the Golan Heights, which it annexed from Syria.
The head of the Knesset Committee on Internal Affairs and the Environment, Yitzhak Kroyzer, said about Lebanon: "There is no other choice but to expel and clear the entire territory up to the Litani River, to cleanse it of Lebanese civilians... Sovereignty and settlement."
Gaza, Syria, Somalia and South Sudan have all seen larger displacements, ranging from 20% of the population in South Sudan to 35% in Gaza, but Israel has displaced around a million Lebanese, or 20% of the population in just three weeks since the war in Iran broke out three weeks ago, according to figures compiled from UN and IDMC data and cited by Al Jazeera.
“Israel has pushed Lebanon into the ranks of the world’s worst displacement crises almost overnight,” according to reporting shared with Middle East Eye. “Syria and Somalia took years to reach this level. Israel did this in three weeks.”
Tel Aviv launched a ground operation after Hezbollah joined in the fray in the first few days following the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 2 and says it wants to take permanent control of the south of the country up to the Litani River.
The surge follows intensified military activity that has expanded beyond southern border into more densely populated areas, triggering widespread civilian movement and straining already fragile infrastructure. Aid agencies have warned that a humanitarian is looming as Lebanon’s capacity to absorb further displacement is limited.
Regional spillover risks are also rising, as neighbouring countries monitor the potential for further population flows and instability. Analysts note that the size of the displacement in Lebanon is unusual even by recent Middle Eastern conflict standards, where mass internal movements typically build over extended periods.
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