Israel is planning to use Gaza as a “model” for its expanding assault on Lebanon, its defense minister said on Sunday as he pledged to begin the demolition of homes in border villages.

In a statement Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israel Defense Forces to “immediately destroy all the bridges over the Litani River that are used for terrorist activity, in order to prevent the passage of Hezbollah terrorists and weapons southward.”

He also said he’d ordered the military to “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes in the border villages in order to thwart threats to the Israeli settlements—in accordance with the Beit Hanoun and Rafah model in Gaza.”

Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, described the invocation of this “Gaza model” as “an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing” in Lebanon.

The two cities Katz referred to were largely wiped off the map during the Gaza genocide.

Beit Hanoun, a city on the northeastern edge of the Gaza Strip, which once had a population of more than 50,000 people, had nearly all of its structures totally “flattened” by Israel’s bombing and was totally depopulated, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in mid-2025. The far-right in Israel has pushed for Jewish Israeli settlers to move in and build settlements on the territory.

Rafah has been similarly devastated, with nearly 70% of the structures “wiped out” according to an October 2025 investigation by the Center for Information Resilience.

At the time that Israeli forces moved into Rafah in mid-2024, it was the last refuge for more than 1 million Palestinians who’d been displaced from their homes elsewhere in the strip. UN experts described the attack on Rafah as a culmination of a monthslong campaign to “forcibly transfer and destroy Gaza’s population," with more than 800,000 people being forced to flee.

Human Rights Watch said on Monday that Katz’s announcement demonstrated “an intent to forcibly displace residents, destroy civilian homes, and conduct strikes that could target civilians” in Lebanon as well.

Already, more than 1 million civilians in Lebanon, from the area south of the Litani River and in Beirut’s southern suburbs, have become displaced following orders from the Israeli military to evacuate their homes.

Katz has said hundreds of thousands of Shiite civilians will be forbidden from returning from their south of the Litani “until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed,” and he has said Israel “will not hesitate to target anyone who is present near Hezbollah members, facilities, or means of combat.”

Human Rights Watch has said these indefinite displacements raise the concern that Israel is perpetrating the war crime of forced displacement and doing so based on religion.

“The Israeli military does not get to decide when civilians lose protections afforded by international law, nor should it be allowed to prevent displaced residents from returning to their homes based on some undefined ‘safety’ standard,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. Deliberately targeting civilians, civilian objects, and others protected under international law would be a war crime, and countries supplying Israel with weapons need to realize they are risking complicity in war crimes too.”

Since the latest outbreak of hostilities at the beginning of March following the launch of the US-Israeli war against Iran, at least 1,024 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli attacks, including 79 women and 118 children, according to a report from Lebanese authorities this weekend.

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have “destroyed hundreds of homes and civilian infrastructure, including healthcare facilities.”

“For over two years, Israel’s allies and European states that purport to support and uphold human rights have buried their heads in the sand as atrocities continue in Lebanon, as in Gaza,” Kaiss said. “Atrocities flourish when there is impunity, and other countries should no longer stand by as they continue.”

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