Israel Strikes Beirut's Southern Suburbs, First Attack on the Capital Since Ceasefire Was Renewed

Israeli warplanes struck the southern suburbs of Beirut on Sunday, the first attack on the Lebanese capital since a U.S.-brokered ceasefire with Hezbollah was renewed last week, in a strike that laid bare how tenuous the truce has become.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the operation, which hit the Dahieh district, a densely populated area south of Beirut that has long been a Hezbollah stronghold. The Israeli military said the strike was carried out in retaliation for an earlier Hezbollah attack in which the militant group used fighter drones against Israeli forces. The exchange marked the most serious escalation since the latest pause in fighting took effect.

The ceasefire, which the United States helped negotiate, first went into effect on April 17 and was renewed on Thursday. But it has proven extraordinarily fragile, with both sides accusing the other of repeated violations. "These ceasefires between Israel and Hezbollah essentially have been quite tenuous, and they've been broken almost on a daily basis over the last few weeks," said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, capturing the precariousness of an arrangement that has never fully halted the violence.

The renewed truce has been complicated by Hezbollah's own posture. On June 4, the Iran-backed group rejected a deal that had been reached between Lebanese and Israeli authorities in Washington, demanding instead a full ceasefire paired with a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon. Israel has kept troops at several positions inside Lebanese territory, calling them necessary to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its arsenal near the border, a presence Beirut and the group describe as an occupation.

The strike on Dahieh raised fears in Lebanon of a return to the heavy bombardment that battered the capital during earlier rounds of the conflict, displacing tens of thousands of residents and reducing whole blocks to rubble. Lebanese officials have repeatedly appealed to international mediators to enforce the truce, warning that continued Israeli operations risk reigniting a wider war that the country, in the grip of a prolonged economic collapse, can ill afford.

For Washington, the latest violence is a setback to an effort to stabilize the Israel-Lebanon frontier and ease one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the region. U.S. officials have pressed both sides to hold their fire and pursue a longer-term arrangement, but Sunday's strike and the drone attack that preceded it demonstrated how quickly the cycle of retaliation can resume, leaving the ceasefire intact on paper but routinely violated on the ground.