Israel has, as we write these lines, taken the entirety of the Lebanese Southern District. It is razing all the Shiite villages and towns to the ground south of the Litani and Zahrani rivers, such that, given enough time, nature would have re-asserted itself and all the boundaries, markers and hallmarks between villages and houses would have disappeared. Unless of course, Israel organizes a land rush for all the Yahweh-crazy Zionist settlers and invites them to build their kibbutzim and settlements.
The city of Tyre in particular was both a friend and an enemy of the invading Hebrews and their kings David and Solomon circa 800 BC. King Hiram of Tyre did help the Hebrew kings who, as nomadic desert-dwelling people, admitted to him to living in miserable goat-skin tents and being ignorant of masonry. Hiram sent cedar wood, engineers and masons to Jerusalem and built them palaces and the first Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem (modeled on the Melkart Temple of the Tyrian powerhouse). But when Phoenician Princess Jezebel, daughter of King Ithobaal of Tyre married King Ahab of Israel, she brought with her the worship of the Phoenician deities (Baal, Adonis, Asherah) and displaced the worship of Yahweh. The Hebrew religious conservatives of the time rebelled against her and killed her. From that point forward, ultra-powerful Tyre became a much maligned neighbor for the Hebrews and the Torah is replete with curses and hateful comments against it. It is even suggested that this breakup of the Hebrew-Phoenician alliance and the threat of the Assyrian empire invasion of the region is what prompted the Phoenicians of Tyre to take create their mighty colony in Carthage in today's Tunisia.
Back to May 2026. Israel appears to have no intention of withdrawing any time soon, if at all, which means that the Lebanese Shiites who have fled north and are now sheltering among the other communities (Maronites, Sunnis, Druze...) would need to find a more "permanent" place to settle. The other communities have been welcoming them on humanitarian grounds, even though there is a deep political resentment at Hezbollah's waging wars despite the objections of these other communities.
Back in the 1980s-1990s, Israel occupied a strip along the border with the help of local residents who had been cut off from the central government by the Palestinians first, then by Hezbollah. In that situation, Shiite villages remained intact and became incubators of a guerilla warfare by Hezbollah which forced the Israelis to withdraw in 2000, turning the whole charade into a victory for the Iranian terrorist militia.
This time, the Israelis seem to have learned from that bitter experience. This time, it is completely erasing villages and towns from the map, eliminating any hope for the Shiite villager supporters of Hezbollah to ever return, let alone wage a guerilla war against the new Israeli occupation. Israel too is managing a minimalist occupation, leaving troops temporarily on the ground only for operational purposes and relying mostly on air assaults.
The question on the minds of the Lebanese is: What is Hezbollah going to do now that it has been deprived of its most valuable asset, the Shiite villages bordering Israel?
The welcome mat of the other communities will sooner or later have to be removed. Schools, churches, official buildings... will have to be taken back. Tent camps for the refugees are typically installed on open terrain often belonging to the State or to religious orders. Residents of some neighborhood are already contesting setting up these camps in the middle of residential neighborhoods, fearing a repeat of the Palestinian exodus of 1948 and 1967 during which refugees set up these camps initially temporarily, thinking they'd be returning to their villages and towns that the Zionists ethnically cleansed. The 1975 War in Lebanon was essentially fought to prevent Yasser Arafat's PLO from taking over of the state, and the refugee camps around Beirut that were turned into fortified and heavily armed holdouts were dislodged at great cost: Sabra, Shatila, Tel Zaatar, Jisr El-Pasha, Dbayyieh and others. No one wants a repeat of those events, and the otherwise jaded Lebanese have been adamant at preventing the creation of such camps.
Where will the Shiites go? They still have a dominating presence in the eastern Bekaa Valley and in the Hermel further north. They could conceivably end up settling there among other pro-Hezbollah Shiites. There are rumors, mostly from radical right-wing pro-Trump Maronites in the US (who vehicle Zionist-like ideas), that go much farther and whose tenor seems to fit well with the Zionist plan of redrawing the maps of the region: The Lebanese Shiites may be somehow "induced" to leave Lebanon altogether, perhaps settle in Shiite-friendly areas of Syria, Iraq and even further afield in Iran. If these ideas have any currency, it is in the hope by these Maronites that a Lebanon emptied or truncated of its Shiites would by default revert to the Maronite-dominated Lebanon that existed between WWI and 1975. An amputated Greater Lebanon that would have shrunken back to the majority Maronite, semi-independent, Mount Lebanon Governorate , a.k.a. "Smaller Lebanon", that existed between 1860 and 1914.
For now, the bigger question is what will Hezbollah do "politically"? It is the only sectarian militia that is openly operational in the country. Neither the Sunni Muslims, nor the Maronite Catholics, nor the Druze exhibit signs of militarization: As far as one can tell, no one has a militia. But everyone fears Hezbollah. So, a civil war between the communities is possible but unlikely.
What is more likely is that Hezbollah might seize power by toppling the Lebanese government of Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam, split the army by calling on the Shiite soldiers of the regular army to quit and join its ranks, something the Sunni Muslims, then allied with the PLO against their own government, did in 1976 when a Sunni Lieutenant by the name of Ahmed Khatib led a sedition, created the Arab Army of Lebanon allied with the PLO, and proceeded to attack the regular army barracks across the country.
The Lebanese army is poorly equipped, even though the Americans kept bragging for the last two decades about gifting it useless scrap and junk leftovers from ancient wars' vintage. So any resistance or opposition by the State and its army to a Hezbollah takeover is unlikely to turn things around. Hezbollah's existence rests upon its anointing itself as a "resistance" movement. By seizing power, it would re-constitute for itself a new resistance front against Israel's new and improved occupation, this time across the new "border" along the Litani and Zahrani rivers, assuming the Israelis stop their advance there.
But without its own Shiite community and villages, Hezbollah can only create this new front if it has sole power over the country. Sunni, Maronite or Druze villages would not willingly welcome a Hezbollah resistance from within their districts.
One thing is certain: Israel will not abandon the Lebanese south this time; it may even annex it as it has done with the Syrian Golan. There will have to be a rearrangement of the pawns inside the Lebanese chessboard. For now, the Lebanese wait and see.
