Israel Thought the Ceasefire Held – Then They Went North

Israel has taken its Lebanon campaign north using F-35s, an escalation that hasn’t just breached the ceasefire again, but done so on steroids. Right, so Israel has been breaching the so-called Lebanon ceasefire from the moment it was signed, with regular strikes, incursions, and violations that everyone politely pretended were “incidents.” That fiction has now been stretched past breaking point, because Israel hasn’t just kept breaching it, it has expanded those breaches northward and done it openly with F-35s no less. The restraint people were relying on was never that Israel would stop, it was that the breaches would stay limited, stay south. That limit has now gone as well. The ceasefire isn’t failing, it’s always been irrelevant in practice and is now being treated even more so, and in full view of the supposed guarantors who were meant to make it mean something. Once that happens, a lot of confident commentary about enforcement and monitoring stops sounding reassuring and starts sounding evasive. Because what’s being tested here isn’t Israel’s firepower, it’s how much longer the rules people keep invoking we’re going to pretend mean anything. Right, so Israel has gone back to using F-35s over Lebanon and it has hit targets well outside the narrow mental box that people were being trained to keep this in, the “south only” box, the “border enforcement” box, the “it’s all still technically contained” box, and you can dress it up in whatever official vocabulary you like but it is still the same practical act, an air force with political cover striking another country at will. The Israeli government can give you a menu of justifications for that, and it will usually pick the one that makes it sound like a reluctant response rather than a chosen policy, but the part that matters for the public record is the act itself, the aircraft, the locations, the timing, and the lack of any visible restraint imposed from outside. When a strike campaign expands and there is no outward consequence, that expansion becomes part of the operating environment and everybody else has to think inside it.