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The heavy cost of the 34-day war triggered by Hezbollah against Israel on July 12, 2006, is still vivid in the memory of the Lebanese people who fear that the Iran-backed party could drag them into the quagmire of the raging war in Gaza, pitting Hamas against Israel since October 7.
Tensions on the southern front have been exacerbating continuously with Hezbollah and Israeli forces trading artillery, rocket and missile fire across the Blue Line, forcing the displacement of more than 19,000 people from southern villages close to the border.
With the Gaza war showing no sign of abating, the risk of war between Hezbollah and Israel remains higher than at any point since their last big conflict in 2006.
Israel warned Hezbollah that it would wreak “havoc and devastation” upon Lebanon if the group was to open the front in support of its Palestinian ally, Hamas.
Can a broken and bankrupt Lebanon with no head of state, no functioning government and crumbling institutions afford a new war with Israel?
The Huge Price of the 2006 War
The so-called “divine victory” claimed by Hezbollah in 2006 came at a huge price for Lebanon.
-Some 1,200 people died and 4,400 were wounded, mostly civilians. The dead included about 270 Hezbollah fighters and 50 Lebanese soldiers and police.
-About 974,000 Lebanese, almost a third of the country’s 4.5 million people, were displaced.
-Israeli bombing damaged or destroyed bridges, roads, airport runways, ports, factories, power and water networks, and military installations, as well as Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs and towns and villages in the south and the eastern Bekaa Valley.
-The Lebanese government estimated the direct war damage at $2.8 billion.
-At least 929 Israeli cluster bomb strikes contaminated an area of 37 million square meters, according to the United Nations. The cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance have killed 30 people and wounded 209 after the war.
Paying the Bill of a New War
With the Lebanese state coffers empty, and the oil-rich Gulf Arab countries, which funded reconstruction in 2006, losing interest in supporting a Hezbollah-dominated state, a question arises, who would pay the reconstruction bill, if Lebanon is dragged into conflict?
Druze leader and former chief of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), Walid Joumblatt, warned earlier this week that “nothing would be left of Lebanon” if it slips into war, calling on Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah to exercise “restraint” to avoid a full-scale conflict with the Hebrew state.
Will Nasrallah heed calls by local politicians, as well as international pressures, to keep Lebanon at bay from regional tensions?
After the war in 2006, which Hezbollah triggered by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing others in a cross-border raid, Nasrallah said that he had not anticipated Israel’s harsh retaliation and would not have carried out the operation if he had known that it would lead to such a devastating conflict.
This time, in the event of a war, Israel vowed to inflict massive destruction on Hezbollah and all of Lebanon, wiping out any hope for economic and financial recovery. Unlike the conflict in 2006, Hezbollah should anticipate a devastating Israeli response.
