On Tuesday, October 27, Israelis vote, and the government that sent its army back into southern Lebanon could fall with the ballots. In Beirut, as Justin Salhani reported for Al Jazeera, almost nobody expects that to change their lives.
“I don’t think anything major – or at all – will change for Lebanon even if there’s a change in [Israeli] leadership,” said Fouad Debs, a lawyer who lives in the capital. Any internal shift, he said, “might lead to small, insignificant changes just to show the outside world that Israeli society and politics are not messed up or evil.”
People who live next to a stronger state learn to judge it by what comes across the border: jets in the airspace, columns of troops, an occupation that settles in and stays. They pay little attention to the name on the prime minister’s door. For the Lebanese, decades of overflights, ground invasions and occupation have hardened into a distrust that survives every change of cabinet.
The prize
Karim Safieddine, a Beirut-based nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, said the evidence was in the campaign itself. “No one is promising withdrawal, and no one is addressing south Lebanon as a crisis or a mistake,” he said. In his view, the “general Israeli establishment looks at Lebanon as its prize”.
Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting, sometimes harder and sometimes less, since October 2023, after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel and the war on Gaza that followed it. Israel has escalated twice: in September 2024, and again in March of this year, when the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. Since October 2023 the war in Lebanon has killed almost 9,000 people, among them journalists, first responders and children. The Shia movement has counted its own losses over those three years.
In June, after direct talks that Hezbollah rejected, the Lebanese government and Israel signed a US-brokered framework agreement whose aims included a phased Israeli withdrawal. CNN reported that the deal was signed on June 26, with Israel to begin by leaving two areas. Al Jazeera’s report on the announcement came the same day. Four months on, Israel still holds large parts of the south. In dozens of villages there it has demolished homes and infrastructure methodically, and more than one million people have been driven from their homes.
The Lebanese do not agree among themselves about how to deal with this. A June 2026 survey by Lebanese American University professor Jad Melki and his team found 54 percent in favour of diplomacy with Israel and 35 percent preferring armed resistance. Whatever the method, opinion of Israel was overwhelmingly hostile: 87 percent of respondents regarded it “as their enemy”.
The general and the capital
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces corruption trials, accusations that he failed to prevent the October 2023 attack, and claims that he put the assault on Gaza ahead of bringing home Israeli captives. The International Criminal Court wants him on charges of war crimes in Gaza. Since Benny Gantz left the race, his main challenger appears to be Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar party, whom many Israelis see as a break with the incumbent.
Lebanon remembers him differently. Eisenkot is a former general and army chief of staff. In the 2006 war on Lebanon he commanded Israel’s northern front, and he designed the Dahiyeh Doctrine, a military strategy of deliberately disproportionate damage and destruction that Israel is now applying in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Beirut has not been attacked since April. Eisenkot’s complaint is that Netanyahu stopped the strikes because he gave in to American pressure. He says the army should be free to hit Hezbollah targets anywhere in Lebanon. The disagreement goes back to the spring: in early June, Axios reported that a US ceasefire push had stalled as Israel sought a green light for massive strikes on Hezbollah targets in Beirut.
So the challenger’s charge against the man the court wants for war crimes is that he bombed too little.
‘Normalised dehumanisation’
Lebanese analysts noted that Eisenkot and the other contenders have attacked Netanyahu mostly on domestic questions, and from the right, as soft on security. “Those that have come forward as candidates in Israeli elections criticise Netanyahu and his handling of the war,” said Elia Ayoub, a Lebanese researcher and podcaster. “They’re not criticising him based on any kind of humanitarianism or anything [related to] human rights.” The opposition parties agree on removing Netanyahu and on very little else.
Ayoub argued that the problem goes deeper than one government. As an example he cited the backlash, from officials and from the public, against NAZA, a documentary by Israeli journalists in which soldiers describe the calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
There’s a profoundly dehumanising discourse that is completely normalised in Israeli society, and the backlash against any pushback is drastic. I don’t necessarily believe that it’s going to change Israeli policy towards Lebanon.
Neither war nor peace
Since the June agreement Lebanon has been suspended. The heavy fighting has mostly ended. The demolitions have not, and almost nothing stands in their way. As the occupation takes deeper root, many Lebanese fear it will outlast a generation.
“Definitely, it’s a prolonged situation of neither war nor peace,” Safieddine said. “We’re going to be living in this grey area for a very long time.”
The grey area could still darken. On October 20, the Israeli outlet JFeed reported that Washington had passed Lebanon an Israeli warning: if Hezbollah joined a renewed war with Iran, Israel would strike Beirut and push beyond the Litani River.
For that reason Ayoub was looking past Tuesday to another vote, the US midterms on November 3. “The US elections are just as important, if not more important,” he said, “because they tend to determine how much the Israelis feel emboldened toward Palestinians first and foremost, but of course, towards Lebanon as well, and Syria to a large extent.”