The 26 November ceasefire agreement dealt a significant blow to Zionist attempts to subjugate Lebanon through its war on multiple fronts, with the Lebanese resistance still armed, prepared and giving heart to Palestinians struggling against the genocidal occupation. It came barely a week after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Even as the Zionist state inflicts daily massacres in Gaza and breaks the terms of the Lebanon ceasefire, it remains incapable of victory. The assassination of Yahya Sinwar, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and other leading Palestinian and Lebanese fighters has had little effect on the capacities of the armed resistance. The oppressed remain steadfast under siege.
Lebanon ceasefire – a defeat for Zionist invasion
In December 2023, Netanyahu had threatened to ‘turn Beirut and South Lebanon…into Gaza and Khan Yunis’. Zionist airstrikes left over 3,800 people dead and over 13,500 injured, with all-out war on Lebanon starting in late summer 2024. Over 1.2 million were displaced. By 25 October, Zionist bombings had murdered over 163 health and rescue workers, and damaged 158 ambulances and 55 hospitals. Attempting to decapitate the resistance, Zionist forces followed the 27 September assassination of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah with a string of killings of other high-ranking figures, including head of media relations Mohammad Afifi in Beirut on 18 November.
Yet the capabilities of the Lebanese resistance were not significantly affected by the Israeli invasion despite CNN claims that ‘Hezbollah appears on the backfoot, rattled, and forced to contend with a new reality’ (19 September), and The Guardian (3 October) opining that Israel had enjoyed a ‘fortnight of military triumph’. The same day, the ‘elite’ Zionist Golani Brigade were blown up by Lebanese resistance explosives, with Israeli Telegram channels reporting many casualties. Continually repelled by guerrilla forces in the south, Zionist ground forces were unable to progress beyond Khiam, a mere 6km from the Israeli border.
On 15 October, Netanyahu visited the Golani brigade training camp to speak to those among dozens wounded in a Hezbollah drone attack on the camp a day earlier. When, on 13 November, six more Golani soldiers were killed in the ground invasion, bringing the total to 47 in the space of six weeks, Netanyahu posted a ‘broken heart’ emoji on social media alongside the brigade logo. By 10 November, Israeli forces had lost upwards of 48 Merkava tanks. Threats to turn Lebanon into Gaza had failed.
According to Hezbollah central council member Hasan Al-Baghdadi, ceasefire negotiations had exposed US imperialist pressure on Israel to end its Lebanon operations, recognising that the war was unwinnable. This lobbying was, of course ‘not for the sake of Lebanon, as all the killing and destruction here were by American missiles’. The 26 November agreement was a clear defeat. The conditions previously placed on any negotiated pause by the Israeli government were all ditched. A week earlier, Zionist foreign minister Gideon Saar had said that any deal must include Israeli ‘freedom to act’ militarily in Lebanon. Echoing this, Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz demanded that Lebanon be treated like the West Bank’s ‘Area A’ – under nominal Palestinian control but subject to constant, murderous invasion. None of this came to pass. According to a poll conducted by Israeli Channel 13, 61% of Israelis thought that Israel had lost the war. Lebanese Amal movement leader Nabih Berri, who negotiated the ceasefire, called for those who had fled to ‘bring back life to all the neighbourhoods that the Israeli occupation and aggression tried to destroy. The victory of your land relies on you coming back.’
Those displaced from their homes immediately defied Zionist orders not to return. Thousands took to highways, towns and villages, waving the flags of the resistance in celebrating victory. In Gaza, Palestinians went on the streets in celebration, even as the occupation intensified its bombings of Jabaliya and other areas. Yemen’s Ansar Allah spokesperson Mohammad Abdul Salam hailed the steadfastness of the Lebanese people, pointing out that ‘the Israeli enemy would not have conceded to a ceasefire had it not encountered an unbroken and solid resistance.’ A 28 November Hezbollah statement affirmed that its fighters’ hands ‘remain on the trigger’, with eyes ‘fixed on the movements and withdrawals of enemy forces beyond the borders.’ Whether or not the agreement holds, the outpouring of popular energy in and beyond Lebanon and Palestine showed who had won.
Sumud amidst Zionist terror in Gaza
With official figures showing over 44,000 killed in the Israeli aggression, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza recorded 26 massacres in the week to 22 November alone. These included the killing of 50 residents in a five-storey building in Beit Lahia on 17 November, and the slaughter of families sheltering at Abu Assi School a day earlier. A siege of the Kamal Adwan hospital is ongoing, its generator destroyed with the bombing of the childcare facility overnight on 21 November. Medical staff are shot by Zionist drones while the injured bodies of residents of the northern area of Beit Lahiya fill the hospital beds.
On 5 October Avichay Buaron, a politician from Netanyahu’s Likud party, revealed that Zionist forces had launched an operation in northern Gaza to completely eliminate all Palestinians from the area. On 1 October, World Food Programme director for the Palestinian territories had said that ‘The north is basically cut off and we’re not able to operate there.’ By 13 October, satellite imagery showed the total siege of northern Gaza by Zionist forces. It was revealed in October that a plan hatched by ex-general Giora Eiland to turn northern Gaza into ‘occupied territory’ and expel its inhabitants was being considered by the Israeli leadership. Eiland called for the starvation of ‘all of Gaza’ in order to catalyse a ‘coup’ against Hamas.
Despite the shift back to northern Gaza, those in the south are still suffering the blitzkrieg. In one among dozens of recent massacres on 14 October, Zionist bombs burned sheltering Palestinians alive at a makeshift camp at al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, including those still strapped to IV tubes. Returning from Gaza, US-based doctor Ahmed Yousaf reported that, following a year of Israeli aggression, all Gaza’s cancer patients and kidney dialysis patients have been killed. The stated numbers of deaths, he suggested, were a gross understatement. A UN report on 10 September concluded that even if a ceasefire were reached, Gaza’s economy would take 350 years to return to even its severely blockaded 2022 levels.
As the Lebanese ceasefire was being negotiated, armed resistance groups in Gaza targeted occupying forces with anti-personnel shells in Jabaliya, Rafah, Saftawi and the so-called Netzarim corridor used by the occupation to divide north and south. Meanwhile, fighters hit back at invading forces in the West Bank regions of Jenin and Nablus, where settler mobs had violently attacked residents and burned crops. More than 13 months into the genocidal onslaught, the Gaza resistance continues to launch successful rocket attacks at Re’im military base and areas east of the Strip. Despite a crushing blockade and relentless massacres, weapons including rocket-propelled grenades able to destroy tanks and fortified military vehicles are still being developed and produced by Gaza’s guerrillas.
On the weekend of 23 November, the Zionist military ordered Palestinians to leave Shujaiya, having issued similar orders to Beit Lahia earlier in the month. Unable and unwilling to flee their lands, only a few hundred took the road south. Despite repeated massacres and threats, over 400,000 maintain Gaza’s legendary sumud (steadfastness) in bombed-out camps and neighbourhoods. Zionist security cabinet member Avi Dichter said that ‘Gaza will never be a threat to the state of Israel, no matter how long it is going to take … I think that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time… I think most people understand that that will be years.’
Regional war and imperialist rivalries
22 November saw a million people march in solidarity with Gaza in al-Sabeen square in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. The mobilisation hailed the launching of the Palestine-2 hypersonic ballistic missile, which successfully hit the Nevatim Israeli military base in the occupied Naqab the day before. Simultaneously, Yemeni forces downed a US MQ-9 drone. Ansarallah rockets have hit Tel Aviv and other cities, and it continues to attack Israeli-linked ships in the Red Sea as well as US naval forces in reprisals against US bombing raids. Elsewhere, Zionist forces have continued to pound Syria, massacring over 92 people in Palmyra on 20 November. In the year to October 2024, the Zionist state had bombed Syria 220 times in an effort to break the links between the Lebanese resistance and groups organising in Syria.
The return of Trump to the US presidency will only accentuate conflicts between EU and US imperialists, highlighted sharply with Iran, where EU politicians favour negotiations on its nuclear programme, while this is opposed in the US. Though EU states are complicit in the proxy war against Iran and others in the resistance camp, disagreements mount. Italy said it would withdraw a destroyer from the imperialist fleet in the Red Sea, and Germany urged Arab states to mediate in the conflict. EU investment in long-time US imperialist ally Egypt now outstrips that of the US, and EU trade with Qatar has risen as US-Qatari economic relations have declined.
On 20 November, the UN Security Council voted 14 to 1 for an ‘immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza’, the dissenting vote being that of the US. The same day the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The US predictably rejected the warrants, but EU leader Josep Borrell warned that ICC warrants were binding and that ICC signatories could not ‘pick and choose’ over which judgments to recognise. Despite this, France joined the US in saying it would not execute the warrants, while the British Labour government sought to evade the issue, declaring that ‘we are not going to get into hypotheticals’ regarding any arrest. Labour’s real commitments were that:
‘Israel has a right to defend itself in accordance with international law. There is no moral equivalence between Israel, a democracy, and Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, which are terrorist organisations. We remain focused on pushing for an immediate ceasefire to bring an end to the devastating violence in Gaza.’
It is clear from these words that the fabled ceasefire backed by British imperialism has never meant anything more than pacifying the forces of resistance in the Middle East. Defence Secretary John Healey claimed that the 7 October resistance operation was to blame for ‘more than a year of conflict and an intolerable level of civilian Palestinian casualties’. Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the House of Commons on 13 November that labelling the Zionist war as genocide ‘undermines [the] seriousness’ of the term.
Resistance to Zionism has flared within the belly of the beast with the 7 November confrontation with fascist Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans in Amsterdam. Zionist thugs had flooded the city with racist chants, violent attacks on Arabs and Muslims, and ripping down any symbols of solidarity with Palestine. The response of a conscious cross-section of society came swiftly, physically beating back the racists, wounding scores of them and throwing one colonialist Israeli into the canals. Whilst Gazans celebrated this fightback, the Zionist state evacuated thousands back to Tel Aviv on private planes and banned its soldiers from travelling to the Netherlands. Over 60 anti-Zionist youths were arrested and on 10 November, thousands braved a ban on protests and mobilised against the framing of the confrontation as ‘anti-Semitic’. Dutch police beat protesters and arrested dozens, and campaigns are now being built to drop the charges.
Zionist leaders will not, of course, be arrested in Britain, Spain, Ireland or any other European country but conflicts are emerging between imperialist states and within ruling classes. Building a movement in solidarity with Palestinian resistance means deepening these political crises and fighting back on a clear anti-imperialist basis.
Victory to the Palestinian people!
Louis Brehony
