On July 30th, in a matter of hours, Israel assassinated senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, in attacks that regional experts have called an unprecedented escalation. “It’s crossing a red line,” Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University of Beirut, told Jewish Currents. “And now there are bound to be responses from Lebanon and from Iran.” Despite these projections, however, many in Israel celebrated the news of the killings, with government ministers tweeting their joy and everyday citizens handing out sweets to passersby.

Since October 7th, the drive to war has been widespread within Israeli society—especially in the country’s north, where mayors and heads of local municipalities facing Hezbollah attacks have been demanding that Israel enter Lebanon, destroy its southern region, and occupy parts of the country as a means of ensuring security. Ministers and Members of Knesset have joined these exhortations, with MK Avigdor Lieberman arguing that “everything between the Litani [River] and Israel must be under the control of the IDF.” Such remarks make it clear that both war and occupation are firmly on the agenda as Israel expands its military operations toward Lebanon. Now, a new Israeli group is looking to push this extreme vision even further. Uri Tzafon, named for a biblical verse literally meaning “awaken, O North,” was founded in late March with the goal of demanding not only war and reoccupation but also Israeli civilian settlements in southern Lebanon. The group, which has amassed a following of several thousand, argues that settling Lebanon is both a pragmatic necessity—a way to “grant true and stable security to northern Israel,” according to its official WhatsApp channel—as well as part of a messianic quest to “reclaim” territory that falls within the biblical boundaries of Land of Israel. “The Israeli-Lebanese border is a ridiculous colonial border,” Eliyahu Ben Asher, a founding member of Uri Tzafon, told me, building on previous statements arguing that “what is called ‘southern Lebanon’ . . . is really and truly simply the northern Galilee.”….more