Experts fear that infrastructure vital to every day life will be put out of action, affecting millions of civilians
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A full-scale war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and Israel could cause power cuts for days, weeks or even months in both countries, experts tell media, causing massive economic damage and putting everything from water supplies to communications at risk.
Leaders on both sides, including Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, have threatened to destroy energy infrastructure if war breaks out.
This could affect essential services such as hospitals, telecoms, water supply and sanitation networks, as well farming reliant on irrigation by water pumps.
For decades, countries have used air power in war to destroy civilian energy infrastructure, despite this being prohibited in international law if it has no direct military use.
Israel has a track record of bombing power infrastructure in both Gaza and Lebanon.
Recent conflicts in Ukraine and Yemen have shown that even with dense air defences, energy infrastructure is extremely hard to protect. Militias no longer need a powerful air force to inflict massive damage.
Both Hezbollah and the Houthi militia in Yemen have proven adept at low-cost drone attacks capable of damaging fuel depots and power plants – energy infrastructure that is fragile and in some cases located at the same site.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, both Moscow and Kyiv have realised that air power can be supplemented with cheap long-range drones to devastate power plants and refineries.
The 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah provides a glimpse of how serious the impact of such attacks could be.
“In 2006 Israel bombed the Jiyeh power plant storage tanks in southern Lebanon and that caused an environmental disaster,” says Noam Raydan, an energy expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“Now Lebanon is suffering from an energy crisis and the government can barely afford purchasing oil products to keep the Zahrani and Deir Ammar power plants running, and not all the time. If in the future Hezbollah targeted Israel’s energy or maritime infrastructure, in any way, Israel will likely retaliate by hitting Lebanon’s fragile infrastructure. The situation is extremely worrying.”
One area of fragility for both countries in wartime is hospitals.
Israel appears to be preparing for this scenario, with patients at hospitals in the north, closer to the Lebanon border, being moved to the centre of the country, the Israeli Channel 12 news station reported on Tuesday.
The situation is much more dire for hospitals in Lebanon, where a continuing economic crisis has left the government unable to pay for sufficient fuel imports needed for power plants as well as for diesel generators.
Many hospitals in Lebanon are now almost entirely dependent on generators because of extended power cuts by the state electricity company. In March, hospitals in the south reported shortages of fuel as well as medical supplies as a result of the economic crisis and the near daily exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel since October.
Israeli strikes on Lebanon in the 2006 war and the economic crisis that hit in 2019 show how wide-ranging the disruption created by fuel shortages can be.
In one area of Lebanon in 2006, 42 out of 70 villages had no water because there was no electricity, or fuel, for water pumps. Aid agencies had to deliver water to Beirut. By one count, Israel hit a total of 17 fuel storage sites in Lebanon.
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