Neve Gordon
On Friday, March 13, nearly two weeks into the Lebanese front of “Operation Roaring Lion,” Israeli forces bombed Burj Qalaouiyah, a village in the country’s south. The strike destroyed a health care center, killing twelve doctors, paramedics, nurses, and patients; The New York Times reported that “only one severely injured worker survived.” Among the victims, according to the journalist Lylla Younes’s reporting for Drop Site, was a paramedic who had spoken last fall at a memorial service for several colleagues killed by an Israeli airstrike during the previous war in Lebanon. “Even if we are killed one by one,” he reportedly said then, “we will not abandon our duty.”
The US and Israel’s illegal war on Iran, launched in the late stages of negotiations to renew a nuclear deal, spread quickly to Lebanon. Hezbollah joined the fray on the second day, after a US–Israeli strike killed Ali Khamenei in Tehran. Israel has conducted near-daily airstrikes in Lebanon in the fifteen months since the two countries signed a truce, killing more than three hundred people, but since March 2 its fighter jets have been relentlessly bombing south Lebanon, Beirut, and other cities; it recently launched a ground incursion in the south. Where in Iran the US and Israel are operating side by side, in Lebanon Israel has taken the lead, with the US providing arms and other support.
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