Lessons of the 2006 Lebanon War
Thirty-four days of war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 ended with neither side achieving its aims. The Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab was among those who drew a simple conclusion: force alone would not solve the region's conflicts.
The war began on 12 July 2006, when Hezbollah fighters crossed into Israel, killed several soldiers and captured two. Israel responded with a massive air and ground campaign across Lebanon, and Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel. By the time a ceasefire took effect on 14 August under UN Security Council Resolution 1701, more than a thousand Lebanese, most of them civilians, and more than 150 Israelis, most of them soldiers, had been killed.
What each side learned
- Israel had failed to recover its soldiers or destroy Hezbollah's rocket arsenal. An official inquiry, the Winograd Commission, sharply criticised the government's and army's conduct of the war.
- Hezbollah claimed a "divine victory" for surviving, but its leader Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged that he would not have ordered the raid had he known the scale of the response.
- Lebanon suffered devastating damage to infrastructure and deep political divisions over Hezbollah's weapons.
The argument for negotiation
Commentators such as the Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab argued that the war showed the futility of trying to settle political conflicts by force. Moderate leaders on all sides, they wrote, needed to return to negotiations over the underlying issues: prisoners, borders, the Shebaa Farms and, ultimately, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hindsight
The 2006 war established a deterrence balance on the Israel-Lebanon border that lasted until 2023. It was followed by the far more destructive confrontation of 2024, which severely weakened Hezbollah. The central lesson of 2006, that military victories do not deliver political settlements, still applies.