Picture taken in the Lebanese capital Beirut on October 6, 2024 shows the city during intense Israeli airstrikes. (Photo by AP)

Beirut, October 10 (RHC)-- The Israeli regime is turning Lebanon into another target of its genocidal and ethnic cleansing aims after pursuing the sinister goals in the Gaza Strip for more than a year now, says a scholar.

Amal Saad, a Lebanese lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, who specializes in the affairs of the regional Axis of Resistance, made the remarks in a series of posts on X, former Twitter, on Wednesday.  The goals “are now beginning to manifest in Lebanon,” with the regime taking advantage of “Lebanon's deep social and political divisions” to fuel internal conflict that it could use to further the objectives, she wrote.

The regime was exploiting the rifts by provoking Lebanon’s Christians against the country’s Shia community, encouraging Christian parties to take up arms against the Hezbollah resistance movement, Saad said.  The underway campaign, which manifested in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent remarks, in which he demanded that the country “free” itself from Hezbollah, would spare the regime the endeavor to try to realize “the unrealistic goal of defeating Hezbollah internally,” she noted.

The regime was also trying to provoke primarily Christian communities, which host hundreds of thousands of displaced Shias, into rejecting members of the faith, Saad said.  As means of powering up the dehumanization campaign against Shias, the regime was promoting the rhetoric that accuses them of “embedding fighters among displaced civilians and hiding weapons in homes,” the scholar stated.

The overall effort seeks to “effectively push the Shia into isolated, homogeneous territories that could be turned into kill zones, similar to what was done to Gazans—trapping them in areas marked for systematic extermination,” she noted.

Pursuing the strategy, the regime has killed close to 42,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since last October, when it began bringing the coastal sliver under a genocidal war.

Soon after launching the war, the regime intensified its attacks against Shia-populated areas across Lebanon, claiming the lives of thousands of others.

The Israeli military presses ahead with its aerial attacks across southern Lebanon more than two weeks into the regime’s aggression against the Arab country.  In the face of the campaign, however, the Lebanese Shias, who “already see Hezbollah as a protector against the existential threat posed by Israel, will now will rally even more strongly behind it,” Saad concluded.