Over the ten days of the renewed conflict in the Middle East, Beirut’s southern district of Dahiyeh has been targeted by Israel, which is looking to deal a knockout blow to Hezbollah. It’s not the first time the area has been bombarded. Dahiyeh was bombed by Israel during its 2006 war with Hezbollah, again in 2014 and yet again in 2024 and 2025. Now the Israel Defense Forces is bombing the area again.
The attacks mark the return of a strategy first developed by the Israeli armed forces in Dahiyeh before becoming a military doctrine, bearing the name of the suburb. The Dahiyeh doctrine is a military strategy that calls for using overwhelming and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure in areas controlled by hostile armed groups in order to deter attacks on Israel. It has repeatedly put into practice in Gaza. Now the Dahiyeh doctrine is once again being enacted in the place where it was first conceived.
Dahiyeh is a Hezbollah stronghold. It became the main urban centre of Lebanon’s Shia population in the middle of the last century when poor Shia families from Baalbek and south Lebanon migrated to Beirut’s suburbs.
