By Guardian - Simon Tisdall -Tue 24 Sep 2024 11.29 BST

The truth is plainer than ever: the Israeli leader needs forever wars to keep himself in power. Innocent lives just don’t matter. Benjamin Netanyahu must be stopped. The horror unfolding in Lebanon is another crime, to add to all the others.

Are Britain, the US, the UN and everyone else who supposedly cares about civilian lives, human rights and international law really going to look away while Israel’s out-of-control prime minister does it again? That shocking prospect beggars belief.

“Again” in this context means Netanyahu turning southern Lebanon, maybe the whole country, into a sort of second Gaza. More than 41,000 Gazan Palestinians, mostly civilians, have died since the 7 October Hamas atrocities. Nearly 500 people were killed by Israeli forces in Lebanon on Monday, including many children. Tens of thousands fled their homes. How many more innocents is this man going to kill before he’s out of office?

Netanyahu says this latest massacre is necessary to “restore the security balance”. But it’s Netanyahu himself who is unbalanced. With his peremptory order to south Lebanon residents – citizens of a sovereign country – to evacuate immediately, he signalled that Israel’s unprecedented air attacks will intensify further. A military ground incursion may follow.

That didn’t work in 2006 and it won’t now. Netanyahu’s “strategy”, as always, is self-defeating. Despite 1,300 Israeli strikes on Monday, Hezbollah is firing more rockets than before into Israel, and extending their range. Displaced Israeli residents cannot safely return – ostensibly his primary aim. Violence begets violence. It does not bring security, just more hatred and vengeance.

As usual, Netanyahu is sending mixed messages. What to believe? He claims the operation has a limited overall purpose: to degrade Hezbollah and push it away from the border, north of the Litani river. He claims to care about Lebanese civilians, just as he claims to care about Israeli hostages held by Hamas since 7 October – many of whom have since perished miserably.

But in truth, having failed dismally in his delusional objective of destroying Hamas, Netanyahu is deliberately creating a second front by escalating the confrontation with Hezbollah – exactly what US diplomats have spent months trying to prevent. Last week’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks and assassinations of key commanders were the prelude. Bottom line: only “forever war” keeps him in office and in power.

Najib Mikati, Lebanon’s prime minister, is in no doubt: Netanyahu must be stopped. “Continuing Israeli aggression on Lebanon is a war of extermination in every sense of the word,” he said. He appealed to the UN security council, general assembly and “influential countries” to act to prevent widening carnage.

Red warning lights are flashing everywhere. The UN’s peacekeeping force in Lebanon says “devastating” regional escalation looms amid what it calls the most intense Israeli bombing campaign in recent memory. The Israeli attacks are “not only violations of international law but could amount to war crimes”, it said.

Iran, which despite its threats has exercised unexpected restraint after Israel assassinated a top Hamas leader in Tehran in July, accuses Netanyahu of purposefully seeking the wider war he claims not to want. “Every day Israel is committing more atrocities and killing more and more people,” said Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. He also said: “We are only deluding ourselves if we think someone will be victorious in a regional war.”

Hezbollah has been clear all along. It says it will stop firing missiles when a Gaza ceasefire deal is agreed, not before. Netanyahu has reportedly blocked such a deal on numerous occasions. Yet Israel’s ambassador to the UK insists on the BBC’s Today programme that it’s all about the terror threat in the north. Whose terror, Tzipi Hotovely? Theirs or yours? Official Israeli denialism and misdirection continue, taking a cue from the top.

“Netanyahu’s latest speeches and conversations with senior IDF officers indicate that he is uninterested in reaching a [ceasefire] deal, which his partners on the extreme right oppose,” wrote the Haaretz commentator Amos Harel. “His personal fate takes precedence over the fate of the hostages. He has decided to bet everything, or almost completely everything … on an ambitious move that will hurt Hezbollah and perhaps affect Hamas indirectly.”

Netanyahu must be stopped. But who will do it? Not the US president, Joe Biden, who will say again this week at the UN that he has a plan – but, in practice, has hopelessly mishandled the crisis. He worries a Middle East-wide conflagration could harm Kamala Harris’s and the Democrats’ chances in November’s elections. So why doesn’t he step in? Because he worries more about appearing to take sides against Israel.

Given Washington’s wishy-washy stance, don’t expect Keir Starmer’s government to actually do anything meaningful by itself – such as suspending all UK arms export licences to Israel and carpeting Hotovely. The foreign secretary, David Lammy, declares “guts” and “nerve” are needed in dealing with today’s world. That’s exactly what’s lacking in all the western capitals, as Lebanon may be about to discover to its cost.

How about the courts? Will international law stop more Netanyahu-led depredations? Don’t hold your breath. Unaccountably, judges at the international criminal court have still not issued the arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes in Gaza, requested by the chief prosecutor in May. This lengthy, unexplained delay grows suspicious.

So what about the UN itself? How better to reassert its shattered authority than by moving finally to enforce its numerous, disregarded Palestine resolutions, including the latest demanding that Israel evacuate the occupied territories where abuses by Jewish settlers are rampant? Netanyahu, incredibly, is still scheduled to address the general assembly later this week.

Instead of giving him a platform, the UN should ban Netanyahu from its premises. If he turns up, disregard diplomatic immunity. He should be arrested by the NYPD and FBI – and deported or, preferably, charged. Netanyahu is dangerous. By all available non-violent means, he must be stopped.

• Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator