#15 | Lebanon Conflict

The civilian populations of Northern Israel and central and Southern Lebanon lived under siege for nearly 2 months during the late summer of 2006, as the Israeli military and Hezbollah paramilitary forces erupted in conflict in continuation of more than 20 years of fighting along the embattled border since the creation of the borderland buffer zone in 1982.Following the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and the ensuing declarations of war, Hezbollah rockets were traded with a massive bombing and shelling campaign by the Israel Defense Forces, trapping the Lebanese government politically between a massively popular insurgent force and international pressure to cease fire. The conclusion found both sides declaring victory and the infrastructure of Lebanon in shambles, with tens of thousands of houses, business, roads, and services destroyed, and more than a thousand dead, mostly in Lebanon, and as many as 1 million people displaced from their lives.