Could Israel be confronted with a wave of economic migrants from the north initiated by Lebanon’s economic collapse and takeover by Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah?
By United with Israel Staff
As the U.S. faces an unprecedented surge of economic migrants at its southern border, the IDF recently found two Lebanese nationals with no apparent terror motives attempting to enter Israel.
The military referred to the near-dawn intrusion as a “non-security incident.”
After soldiers in nearby observation posts identified the infiltrators, Israeli soldiers swooped in to make the arrests at Kibbutz Yiftach, near the border.
“[The IDF] will continue to act in order to prevent any attempt to cross the border and violate Israeli sovereignty,” declared the Israeli army.
According to reports in the Israeli media, the intruders appear to be economic migrants who crossed the border seeking work.
This is not the first time Israel has discovered similar migrants from the north, fleeing Lebanon, which is being slowly crushed by the Iranian proxy Hezbollah.
The ruthless terror group, which also runs a global narcotics and money laundering operation, seeks Israel’s destruction and diverts precious resources in Lebanon to arm itself for a future conflict.
With Lebanon’s economy collapsing and large swathes of the population rejecting Hezbollah’s Islamic fundamentalist worldview, the country is teetering on the brink of destruction. To a large extent, Lebanon has not recovered from a massive explosion in Beirut in August 2020, which killed 218 people, injured over 7,000, and destroyed a large chunk of the port.
Credible evidence suggests that the explosion was caused by a massive stash of weapons-grade ammonium nitrate recklessly stored by Hezbollah near a densely populated civilian area in Lebanon’s capital.
Incidents such as this and the resulting economic conditions in Lebanon appear to be forcing residents to leave, and Israel could see additional migrants seeking work and a more stable existence.
Israel faced a similar issue with regard to migrants from Africa, primarily Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia. Since around 2005, tens of thousands of Africans from these countries entered Israel illegally, seeking work. While a certain portion of the migrants are asylum-seekers fleeing persecution, a significant percentage are not refugees and are instead economically-motivated migrants.
Due to security considerations and limited resources, Israel was forced to address the issue through a number of strategies, from granting some of the migrants permission to stay in Israel to building a fence along its border with Egypt in 2013 to thwart illegal migrants, terrorism, and drug trafficking.
The prospect of economic migrants from Lebanon poses additional challenges for Israel because the Hezbollah terror group leverages these incidents to assess the IDF’s capabilities at the border.
Currently, the U.S. is facing an unprecedented crisis at its border with Mexico, as migrants from Latin America attempt to enter the U.S. illegally, primarily based on economic and political considerations. The U.S. has yet to formulate a unified approach to the issue, with elected officials on opposite ends of the political spectrum treating the crisis like a political football.
If the incursions on Israel’s northern border continues, Israel will need to develop a strategy to address the migrant situation, or face a crisis similar to the nightmare the U.S. is confronting.