The strike on Beirut, the latest breach of the Lebanon ceasefire might finally be the last straw, but is anyone actually capable of retaliating anymore? Right, so here’s the thing about this so-called ceasefire on the Lebanese front: it’s only ever been a ceasefire if you squint hard enough to pretend the body count doesn’t matter. Israel has been hitting refugee camps, blowing up towns, scattering cluster munitions across valleys and calling it restraint, and Lebanon has been told to take it on the chin because apparently that’s what good neighbours do now. Then Israel strolls into Beirut with an airstrike that kills a senior Hezbollah figure and still expects the world to treat this like an unfortunate misunderstanding. You don’t need a map to see what’s happening here. One side has been honouring the deal, the other has been testing how far they can push before anyone notices the ceasefire is a corpse. And if this wasn’t the last straw for Hezbollah, you’d have to ask what would be. Right, so a ceasefire only exists when both sides stop shooting, and Israel hasn’t stopped for more than five minutes at any point in the last year as far as Lebanon is concerned. Lebanon kept its side of Resolution 1701, Hezbollah held its fire, and Israel carried on as if the agreement was a technicality, the most recent events consisting of hitting refugee camps, dropping cluster munitions into rural valleys, k*lling officials in the south and now assassinating a senior figure in Beirut. So the idea that this thing has “fallen apart” is too generous by half. You can’t fall apart if you were never intact. What we’re looking at is a ceasefire being performed on one side and ignored on the other to greater and greater extent at that and Israel has been ignoring it from day one. That’s the situation on the Lebanese front right now. Israel has been escalating for a year straight, and Hezbollah has been holding its fire for a year straight. Because when Israel carried out an assassination in Beirut, in a city that was supposed to be safe under the terms both sides claimed to accept, what you saw wasn’t a sudden escalation, you saw the moment where the sham finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. The thing about this front is that the pressure didn’t begin with the assassination, it’s been building step by step, and Lebanon has been absorbing the damage because the state can’t fight back and Hezbollah has been choosing not to escalate.