Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly had a stark warning Tuesday for Canadian citizens in Lebanon.
“If the armed conflict intensifies, it could impact your ability to leave the country and our ability to provide you with consular services,” she said. “Canada is not currently offering assisted departures or evacuations for Canadians in Lebanon, and these are not guaranteed.
“My message to Canadians has been clear since the beginning of the crisis in the Middle East: it is not the time to travel to Lebanon. And for Canadians currently in Lebanon, it is time to leave, while commercial flights remain available.”
Canadian officials are acutely aware of the fact that a large-scale Israeli air attack on Lebanon could force Canada to evacuate thousands of citizens under fire, as it did during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.
Canada spent $94 million and leased seven ships to evacuate Canadians from Lebanon to Cyprus and Turkey in 2006.
Three naval ships participated in the operation. Even the prime minister’s jet was roped into service.
The evacuation led to complaints in Canada about “citizens of convenience” after reports emerged that many evacuees returned to live in Lebanon as soon as it was safe to do so.
Canada ultimately evacuated about 15,000 people. Today, a similar number of Canadian citizens have registered with the embassy in Lebanon. Joly has said that is likely just a “fraction” of the true number of Canadians in the Middle Eastern country.
Canada doesn’t have many resources in the area right now. The frigate HMCS Charlottetown entered the Mediterranean Tuesday morning, steaming through the Strait of Gibraltar on its way to join NATO’s Maritime Group 2.
The utility of Cyprus as a base of operations has also been cast into some doubt after Hezbollah warned the island’s government that it could be a target if it assists Israel in an attack on Lebanon.
Cyprus is within range of the Zelzal-2 ballistic missiles Hezbollah acquired from Iran, and the M-600 missiles it got from Syria.
Stumbling toward a wider war
“What worries me most is the possibility of a war as a result of miscalculation rather than planning or by design,” former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas told CBC News. “Someone misinterprets the other side’s intention.”
For months, Israel and Hezbollah have been trading artillery and missile fire across the border, and Israel has also engaged in air and drone strikes as far north as Beirut.
Homes, fields and forests have burned in the farming communities that dot the hilly landscape. Close to 500 people have died, mostly in Lebanon.
“Israel has been saying for a few weeks now that the situation up in the north is untenable and unsustainable and that something needs to be done,” Pinkas said. Sixty thousand Israelis have been displaced for months and are demanding solutions. An even larger number of Lebanese civilians are also displaced.
As cross-border attacks between Israel and Lebanon increase, the threat of an all-out regional war with Hamas ally Hezbollah becomes a greater possibility.
“The problem is that Israel refuses or chooses not to see it the way the Americans do,” Pinkas added. “And that is that Gaza and Lebanon are communicating vessels, meaning that de-escalation in Lebanon can only happen as a result of a ceasefire in Gaza.
“So when Israel is reluctant to entertain any kind of hostage or ceasefire deal in Gaza, you cannot de-escalate the north, which then leads to this notion of the inevitability of war.”
But there are still signals coming from Lebanon suggesting that Hezbollah hopes to avoid escalation.
Rare regrets from Nasrallah
Hassan Nasrallah was surprisingly frank in an interview following the 2006 war with Israel. The Hezbollah chief said bluntly that the war wasn’t worth it.
The 2006 war began when a Hezbollah raiding party crossed the border to capture soldiers the group could trade for its own people in Israeli prisons.
The raiders captured two Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers and killed three more. Five more Israeli soldiers died inside Lebanon while in pursuit.
In subsequent days, Israeli planes flattened the mostly Shi’ite Dahiya neighbourhood of South Beirut, home to many Hezbollah supporters.
The interview Nasrallah gave in August 2006, shortly after the 34-day war ended, reveals how miscalculations about the other side’s intentions and reactions can lead to war. It also suggests that Nasrallah felt compelled to explain his actions, in light of the death and destruction the war brought to his own community.
“I would like to say this clearly, and I want people to listen to me, because there is still a controversy over this. We did not think that there was even a one per cent chance that the operation to capture [Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war of such a scale,” he told Lebanon’s Al-Jadeed Television.
“If you ask me whether — in case I thought on July 11 that there was even a one per cent chance that the capturing operation would lead to the kind of war that unfolded — would I still carry out the capturing operation, my answer is, absolutely not.”
Close observers of the group say that same caution can be seen in Hezbollah’s calibrated support for Hamas over the past months: it’s keen to be seen to be doing something, but not enough to start a war.
Israeli strategists were also unhappy with the inconclusive way the 2006 war ended. Although Israel had total superiority in the skies, it received unwelcome surprises on other fronts.
Hezbollah’s ability to launch missiles into Israel did not seem to diminish as the war went on. The group fired over 200 missiles into Israel on the last day of the war to show that its capabilities were intact.
Hezbollah also hit and disabled the Israeli navy’s flagship off the Lebanese coast, probably with a Chinese C-802 anti-ship missile that Israel didn’t know it possessed.
Finally, when Israel launched its ground invasion across Lebanon’s hilly southern border, its tanks were met with a storm of Kornet anti-tank guided missiles, and the incursion fizzled before the IDF could penetrate any distance into the country.
The Dahiya doctrine
And yet, Israel knew that its infrastructure bombing campaign had hurt Hezbollah and caused many Lebanese — particularly non-Shia Lebanese — to question the group’s approach.
The bombing destroyed 640 kilometres of roads, 80 bridges, Beirut’s Rafic al-Hariri International Airport, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities, 25 fuel stations, 900 commercial structures such as factories and farms, up to 350 schools, two hospitals and 15,000 homes. A further 130,000 homes are believed to have been damaged.
After the war ended, Israel’s war planners gave the IDF a new strategic concept they called the Dahiya doctrine.
The doctrine holds that if Israel’s enemies know that any attack would be met with a hugely disproportionate response targeting the other side’s civilian infrastructure and homes, they would be more likely to show the restraint Nasrallah expressed after the 2006 war.
That doctrine of mass destruction is now being applied in Gaza.
The administrators of the Rafic al-Hariri International Airport clearly have not forgotten being targeted in the 2006 war.
Outraged by a report in the British Daily Telegraph that said Hezbollah was stockpiling weapons there, Lebanon’s ministers of transportation and information invited European and Arab ambassadors to tour the airport facilities yesterday.
The airport likely would be a target for Israel in any case, as it was in 2006.
Lebanon is in a poor state to face an Israeli air campaign. Beirut still has not recovered from the port explosion of 2020 and Lebanon’s economy is in shambles. A banking collapse, hyperinflation, a failing power grid and a liquidity crisis have forced the government to end fuel and food subsidies, and many Lebanese are struggling.
A vulnerable grid
Israel is in better shape economically, although the Gaza war has caused a downturn due to evacuations and the burden of calling up large numbers of reservists for extended service.
Shaul Goldstein, CEO of Israel’s national electrical grid management company, had to apologize last week for what he called “irresponsible” comments in which he suggested that few people in Israel understood how vulnerable the country is to Hezbollah’s missiles.
“Hezbollah could easily cripple Israel’s power grid,” he told a conference at the Institute for National Security Studies conference in Sderot.
“After five hours [without electricity] I have no phone to call. After 12 hours, you will arrive at the gas station, but there is no gasoline, and not a single gas station operates. At each station there is a queue of at least 30 kilometres, if not more.
“Check all our infrastructure, fibre optics and ports … We are in a bad situation. We are not ready for a real war. We live in an imaginary world, in my view … If the war is postponed for a year, five, or ten, our situation is better.”
Although Goldstein walked those remarks back in response to politicians’ outrage, the assessment of the Ministry of Defense’s own National Emergency Management Authority was not much more optimistic.
Drones and missiles create an air of menace
Hezbollah propaganda has sought to play on those vulnerabilities, posting video that it claimed was taken by a drone that penetrated some of Israel’s most sensitive sites, such as its naval base at Haifa, and returned to Lebanon with the images.
“Hezbollah has close to 100,000 rockets and missiles,” said Pinkas, “of which we believe 20 to 25,000 are precise missiles, meaning they could hit not just any random neighborhood, which is bad itself in and of itself, but infrastructure, power grids, oil refineries, Air Force bases and even the international airport right outside of Tel Aviv.”
Pinkas stressed that Hezbollah’s missiles bear little resemblance to the unguided and homemade Qassam rockets used by Hamas, which are propelled by fertilizer and sugar and have a range of less than 20 kilometres.
Prior to October 7, 2023, Hamas was thought to possess some smuggled Grad 122mm rockets and perhaps dozens of homemade R-160 rockets, which can theoretically travel over 150 kilometres but have no guidance systems.
Hezbollah’s arsenal includes arms from Iran, Syria and China, and could include ballistic missiles as large as a Scud-B.
“The idea that technology or military, defensive military systems like the Iron Dome could conceivably shoot down with a 80 to 90 per cent success rate incoming missiles from Lebanon, the same way that was done with Hamas from Gaza, that’s fantasy,” said Pinkas.
“We’re talking thousands, if not tens of thousands, of missiles and rockets, some of which are precise and some of which are long-range. And Israel just doesn’t have that capability.”
Re-occupation risks a quagmire
The U.S. has also warned Israel that Hezbollah could be bolstered in the event of war by an influx of Shi’ite militiamen from outside of Lebanon.
The emergence of Iraq as a Shi’ite power means that Lebanon now borders a vast area of Shi’ite-dominated territory stretching nearly 2,000 kilometres east through Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The U.S. believes fighters could filter into Lebanon in the event of a ground war with Israel, bringing more Iranian and Syrian weapons with them.
Some in the Israeli government have talked about re-occupying southern Lebanon to recreate the buffer zone that lasted from the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 until the Israeli withdrawal in May 2000.
But Pinkas said Israelis have bitter memories of that first occupation, which led to the creation of Hezbollah as a force dedicated to driving the Israelis out.
“If Israel does in fact go back and reoccupy the so-called security zone — if that’s the idea — then Israel must be prepared for another South Lebanon, which is another Afghanistan, which is another Vietnam, and which, on top of that, does not solve the missile issue.”