Dahiya Doctrine

"Here, we must recall the “Dahiya Doctrine” that Israel employed for the first time in the 2006 war and its godfather, minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s recently resigned government and then-head of the Northern Command, Gadi Eisenkot. In 2008, Eisenkot called for the destruction of any Lebanese village from which Israel is fired upon. “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases,” he said, explicitly denying all the inhabitants their civilian status.

This doctrine has been adopted by Israel as a military strategy and used in its wars on Gaza since 2008, reaching its peak in the current genocidal war. All indicators today confirm that Tel Aviv has adopted it in Southern Lebanon too. This all shows Israel’s institutionalization of war crime, which constitutes, in the words of the previous United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, “state terrorism”.

Israeli political and military officials have explicitly expressed this doctrine in the current war. For example, in November 2023, the minister of “defense” Yoav Gallant stated that “the ones who will pay the price will be first and foremost Lebanese citizens”. In the early weeks of the war, Prime Minister Netanyahu threatened to turn Beirut and Southern Lebanon into Gaza and Khan Younis. Minister of Education Yoav Kisch called for “driv[ing] 400,000 residents of south Lebanon away, beyond the Litani river” and said in another statement: “The way things are progressing at the moment, Lebanon will be annihilated”.
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