On June 16, 2024, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) issued a rare public condemnation after Israeli military drones dropped explosive grenades near its peacekeeping positions in southern Lebanon. The incidents, which occurred in the Tyre and Marjayoun sectors, did not cause casualties but damaged infrastructure and violated the safety perimeter around UN personnel. UNIFIL described the acts as “unacceptable breaches of international humanitarian law” and demanded “immediate cessation of all hostile actions in the vicinity of UN positions.”
According to verified UN reports and corroborated by satellite imagery analyzed by Conflict Armament Research, at least three drone-delivered grenade attacks targeted areas within 300 meters of UNIFIL bases over a 48-hour period. While Israel has not officially commented, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have increasingly employed loitering munitions and surveillance drones along the Blue Line amid escalating cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah since October 2023. The UN Security Council, in its Resolution 1701, explicitly prohibits any armed activity within 10 kilometers of UNIFIL positions a boundary now routinely tested.
In the village of Dhayra, just north of the border fence, farmers now work fields pocked with shrapnel craters. “We hear the drones every hour,” says 68-year-old Hassan Youssef, wiping dust from his olive trees. “But we stay this land is all we have.” Nearby, a UNIFIL armored vehicle sits parked beside a crater from a recent strike, its blue-and-white markings faded by sun and smoke. Peacekeepers from Indonesia and Ghana rotate shifts in tense silence, scanning skies that offer no sanctuary. The fragility of their mandate is no longer theoretical it’s measured in millimeters of drone clearance and seconds of warning.
UNIFIL’s 10,000-strong force, drawn from 45 countries, operates under one of the UN’s most precarious mandates. Since October, over 120 violations of its positions have been recorded more than in the previous five years combined. In response, a youth initiative led by Lebanese university students has begun mapping near-miss incidents using open-source data, creating a public archive to pressure accountability. “If the world forgets we’re here,” says engineering student Layla Nasser, “then the next explosion might be the one that starts something bigger.”
Diplomats warn that continued disregard for UNIFIL’s neutrality risks transforming peacekeepers into de facto combatants a threshold that could unravel the last buffer between full-scale war. The UN Secretary-General has called for an emergency Security Council session, while France and the U.S. have urged restraint. Yet on the ground, restraint feels like a luxury. As dusk settles over Naqoura, the hum of drones returns, and peacekeepers double-check their radios. They know their blue helmets won’t stop a grenade but their presence might still stop a war.
Because in southern Lebanon, peace isn’t kept by treaties alone it’s guarded, hour by hour, by those who stand in the line of fire and refuse to move. And if the world lets that line be erased, it won’t just be a violation of protocol it will be the end of the only thing standing between two armies and the abyss.
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