Israel’s War on Lebanon: Where Do Human Rights and Aid Mechanisms Stand Today?

Displacement in Beirut's Ramlet el Bayda. 24 October 2024. Pictures taken by Author

Lebanon is experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis as Israel expands its military operations. In this context, both humanitarian aid and human rights mechanisms are proving ineffective and lack credibility in the region.

On the 2^nd of March 2026, Israel escalated its war on Lebanon. Within two weeks of the war’s expansion, Israel killed over 1,029 people, including 118 children and 40 medical workers, and injured over 2,800 people. This Israeli aggression has displaced over one million people in merely a few weeks, as per official registration, such that one in every ten children is now displaced following an Israeli ground incursion in South Lebanon. Yet, global media frequently dehumanises the war by downplaying the intense implications of a rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis for the Lebanese people, framing these attacks as merely a “war against Hezbollah”. 

Last week’s aggression brings renewed attention to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon since October 2023, and exposes the role of international aid and powers in stopping this, if not enabling it. 

The muted response of international aid and protection mechanisms to ongoing humanitarian and human rights violations in Lebanon demonstrates that accountability on such issues is selective and often does not apply to Israel, as also seen in Gaza. 

Dismissed Humanitarian and Human Rights Violations 

A humanitarian lens necessitates understanding the scale of the current war in relation to Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty over the past two and a half years. 

On 2^nd March 2026, Hezbollah launched strikes on Israel. Israel responded with a series of major strikes across the capital city, Beirut, and the Bekaa region in Southern Lebanon. The Israeli displacement tactics were launched on two fronts. They first targeted the south of the Litani area, an area that makes up about 8% of Lebanon’s territory. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of people’s homes being threatened with erasure. This was followed by another order, where Israel issued a broad displacement directive to all of Beirut’s suburbs, forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, most of whom were doing so for the second time in less than a year. 

As per International Humanitarian Law (IHL), evacuation orders must serve to protect civilians, not to forcibly displace them. Amnesty International warned that Israel's overly broad mass evacuation orders in Lebanon raise serious concerns that they may constitute forced displacement rather than measures to protect civilians. However, keeping Israel’s evacuation orders aside, its attacks have killed at least 40 paramedics so far, and hundreds of people in just a few weeks, indicating Israel’s blatant disregard for IHL. Expressing great shock at the prohibitions of this law, the International Federation of Human Rights also recalled Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s statement that Beirut’s southern suburbs "will soon look like Khan Younis," indicating intentions similar to the devastation inflicted on the Gaza Strip.

This massive displacement crisis builds on Israel’s October 2023 systematic escalation against Lebanon, particularly as thousands have remained displaced since then. 

For Iman, a displaced woman from the Southern Suburbs of Beirut, this week’s displacement order shattered the progress she had been making toward recovery after the previous escalation. The course of events leading up to the escalation in October 2023 gave her family time and thus, mental preparation, as opposed to the suddenness of the ongoing displacement. Unlike the previous war, Iman and her family have yet to find an apartment to take refuge in.  

According to her, the second war arrived before they had “even caught their breath”. Iman had lost her first house in the previous escalated aggression last year, and the months that followed were spent trying to financially recover from what was destroyed. "I haven't forgotten the fact that I had to lose my stuff the first time yet," she said. When this displacement order came, they were neither financially nor mentally ready. She and her family could not even gather their most crucial documents before fleeing, as they were not expecting a displacement of such scale to happen again.

The community support systems that endured during the initial escalation have been significantly disrupted. The friend who had taken Iman's family in during the first displacement had himself lost his house in the south and was no longer able to help. Although more than a thousand public schools have been transformed into shelters by the Lebanese government, Iman denied receiving any governmental support or calls. “People are highly disappointed,” she said. 

When asked about her feelings, Iman describes rage. "I cannot describe my anger," she explains before adding, "We [are all] tired… we have been building our homes and furniture… we are working, and we are trying to support our parents, to merely build a normal life. Then, reality reminds you that you and your parents need to sleep on a mattress and watch your life collapse. As if you have no right to any stability in life. Or even, a normal one."

Iman’s testimony captures the systemic displacement that Israel denies, especially in a country that has been experiencing its worst economic collapse since 2019. 

Compounded Pattern of Violations 

Beyond displacement, and in another breach of IHL, the Israeli military unlawfully used artillery-fired white phosphorus, a highly incendiary and toxic chemical, on the 3^rd of March on residential areas in South Lebanon. White phosphorus is known to cause death or permanent injuries resulting in “lifelong suffering” as per Lebanon’s Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher. HRW also warned that this act is prohibited under IHL, as it fails to meet the legal requirement to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm. 

Now more than ever, it is imperative to observe Israel’s pattern of international violations since October 2023.  

Since the ceasefire agreement, which loosely held between November 2024 and March 2026, Israel has violated the agreement 10,000 times, targeting Lebanese soil and killing over 335 people – including 11 children – and injuring 973. Despite the ceasefire requiring Israeli withdrawal and the transfer of security responsibility to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and UNIFIL, Israeli forces have continued to occupy positions inside Lebanese territory, carrying out strikes and reconnaissance operations. 

Amid Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm and the Lebanese government’s lack of response to these violations, Israel has warned that it may escalate if disarmament is not achieved. 

During the ceasefire period, both the Lebanese government and Hezbollah have not responded to any Israeli violation of Lebanese sovereignty. Hezbollah launched strikes towards Israel on the 2nd March in retaliation for the assassination of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Israel treated these circumstances as yet another opportunity to target and displace the Lebanese. 

Prior to the ceasefire, Israel killed over 4,040 people, including 316 children and 790 women, and displaced thousands who remained unable to return. This pattern of accumulated violations of UN Resolution 1701, alongside the undermining of UNIFIL's peacekeeping mandate and repeated breaches of IHL, calls into question the very frameworks designed to prevent such crimes. While Israel frames its most recent war as a mere response to Hezbollah's strikes, the consistency of these violations reveals a systematic disregard for international agreements that did not start this week.

Humanitarian aid: inadequacy or systemic weakening?

Since 2019, Lebanon has endured an economic collapse, the Beirut port explosion, a fourteen-month war, and political paralysis. As each crisis compounds over the last, and amid the Lebanese government’s inability to provide support for its citizens, the international aid and development system that was designed to cushion the Lebanese has been slowly dismantled. 

Lebanon’s 2024 response plan sought $2.72 billion in funding but received only 36% of it by the end of September 2024. Similarly, the humanitarian response plan received only a third of what was required before the March 2026 attacks began. This compounds the humanitarian need of vulnerable communities, including Palestinian and Syrian refugees, leaving over 4.1 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.

As the humanitarian aid shrinks, accountability for the Israeli aggression and repercussions also remains unachieved. The United States’ political decisions have been deliberate, especially as its funding withdrawal has been the sharpest since January 2025, when USAID’s development programs were suspended as a result of Trump’s executive order. This decision has severely affected education, healthcare, agriculture, and water infrastructure in the country, leaving civil society at minimal capacity in response to the current humanitarian crises. 

The dismantling of humanitarian aid disproportionately affects many Global South countries, raising a fundamental question about international humanitarian aid’s role, its fragile political positioning, and its ability to sustain countries when they need it the most. 

On the ground, these numbers translate into organisational collapse. Abdel Hamid Awad, executive director of Tahaddi, a community-based NGO in Hay El Gharby providing psychosocial, livelihood, and community support, described a pattern of compounding loss to The London Globalist.

In response to the previous war, Tahaddi shifted its mandate to serve whoever remained, providing meals, blankets, pillows, and medical support. In the current war, however, the organisation can only offer a fraction of what it once did. Funding that once came through institutional projects now relies on individual donors, and even those channels have dried up. "2025 was hard," Awad said. Although Tahaddi does not receive direct funding from USAID, many of its other donors have been affected by the broader funding crisis. The organisation's staff, many of whom are displaced again, are exhausted. Awad adds that while Tahaddi received direct allocations from supporting donors during the previous war, even then, the international attention was already shifting away from Lebanon.

By transforming schools into shelters, the Lebanese government’s response to the current war has been more significant than during the previous conflict, replacing an earlier reliance on international aid. In a country heavily dependent on external assistance, the government’s role in previous crises has been described as “mismanagement” as per human rights reports.

What frustrates Awad even more is the impact on all residents in the country. With the UNHCR receiving only 26% of the funding it requires, Syrian refugees who once relied on UN support are increasingly turning to local organisations like Tahaddi, which are themselves struggling to meet their needs. Meanwhile, NGOs are competing for fewer funding opportunities, forcing many to reduce their work or shut down entirely.

This funding crisis is not limited to US policy. Across Europe, right-wing governments have accelerated cuts to humanitarian aid on ideological grounds. In the Netherlands, the outgoing right-wing coalition announced plans to slash funding to civil society organisations by roughly two-thirds, from approximately €1.4 billion over five years down to as little as €390 million.

Germany also unveiled plans to cut nearly €4.8 billion from development and humanitarian spending, with humanitarian aid set to be more than halved. Overall, government funding for humanitarian aid could contract between 34 to 45% by the end of 2025 compared to 2023 levels.

Civil society organisations have been responding to consecutive humanitarian crises since 2019, but they are now operating in a landscape where the international funding they depend on has been dramatically reduced. Meanwhile, UNIFIL, which has monitored southern Lebanon for nearly five decades, is set to end its mandate by December 2026, with a full withdrawal planned the following year. European governments have warned that a rapid drawdown risks creating a security vacuum, yet the decision, driven largely by US and Israeli pressure, has already been made. As the Lebanese army, weakened by years of economic collapse and political instability, fails to respond to Israel's ongoing aggression in southern Lebanon, the potential end of UNIFIL's mandate signals a new chapter of international abandonment for a country whose sovereignty is currently under direct threat.

The structural pattern where breaches of humanitarian law are being dismissed, international funding continues to shrink, and Israeli violations persist, exposes an elimination of the very institutions designed to provide aid and uphold peacekeeping. Lebanon’s unfolding crises reflect a broader failure of international human rights and humanitarian frameworks that are in place, particularly in the wake of their devastating breakdown during Israel’s war on Gaza. In such cases, framing Israeli violations as isolated attacks on a single entity undermines the scale and danger of what is unfolding. It also drifts us further away from a pressing question that remains unasked: who will protect southern Lebanon from being seized by Israel as the country faces its largest displacement from southern towns?

Written by Chrystine Mhanna

Edited by Rana Zeidan, Aditya Gupta, Mahira Haque