Lebanon was already lurching from crisis to crisis before Hezbollah’s latest move provoked Israel into a larger war. The country was in financial distress in 2022, and it suffered the Beirut Port explosion in 2020.
It’s worth understanding how Hezbollah has brought Lebanon back to the brink. It’s also worth looking at this history to understand what went wrong.
It now looks like Hezbollah has brought upon Lebanon another war within 20 years. It last did this in 2006, when it attacked Israel and kidnapped the bodies of two soldiers. Hezbollah at the time was at a crossroads. It had forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. It then had five years of relative peace.
Hezbollah chose to murder former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, and this led to protests and the ejection of the Syrian army from Lebanon. Syria had occupied Lebanon since 1976, when it intervened in the Lebanese civil war. READ MORE
