Why does Lebanon apparently lack aerial defenses?

Question

In the recent bombings of Beirut neighborhoods by Israeli aircraft ( as of September 2024), one thing that seems odd is that apparently the Israeli aircraft don't face any sort of anti-aircraft guns or other aerial defenses. Why is that so? In the case of Gaza, it's understandable aircraft operate with impunity, as the area is not a sovereign nation. But Beirut is the capital of Lebanon, a sovereign nation, so we should expect it to have better air defenses.

Answer 1

The LAF may have some systems, but they choose not to engage Israeli aircraft. O.m.'s answer is correct wrt the South, but LAF holds fire even the IAF hits Beirut or further north.

Anyhow, if Wikipedia is correct LAF's anti-air is Hamas-level, i.e. just MANPADs and 23mm guns, albeit they might have more of them. Israel destroyed most of Lebanon's larger SAMs in 1982 and apparently the LAF never bought replacements. Or those might have all been Syrian, I'm not actually sure if LAF themselves ever operated any larger (than man-portable) SAMs. Anyway, it matters little for the purpose of this Q if they had any 40 years ago.

If you take Syria as an example, whenever their SAMs paint some Israeli aircraft (note: activate their radar and sweep for targets) doing a raid, they often get destroyed. So that's the choice that LAF would have even if they had some systems. At least Russia replaced some of Syria's SAM reportedly for free, but nobody is going to do that with Lebanon as there's nothing to be gained in exchange. (Russia gets their bases.)

Hezbollah seems to have a few medium SAMs of Iranian origin, better what LAF has/had. But even they'd get easily overwhelmed by the IAF.

Also, the Lebanese Air Force doesn't seem to have any jets. Their manned fleet tops at A-29 (EMB 314) turboprop-powered COIN attack aircraft. And they have like 5 of them. (Bought 6, one crashed.) Afghanistan had a more impressive air force.

The LAF is pretty broke too, even their salaries are essentially paid by Western and Gulf countries. Clearly their Western sponsors [at least] would not approve them getting into a shooting war with Israel. They also suffered thousands of desertions, simply due to poor pay. (It's not that Hezbollah is financially self-sufficient either, they reportedly get almost a billion dollars a year from Iran, which about par with what the West manages to spend on [the whole of] Lebanon.)

Answer 2

Your characterization of both Lebanon and Gaza is wrong. This is the core of the answer.

• As originally written, the question characterized Gaza as an 'open air prison.' However, there are no prisons where the inmates are able to organize infantry battalions. The government of Gaza has armed forces, even if it lacks heavy mechanized equipment.
  Their army has lost most air defense systems early in the fighting, and what they had was not very good. They had MANPADS and light cannons. Those are not very effective against high-flying aircraft. They are more effective against low-and-slow ones. Israel seems to have lost at least one helicopter, for instance.
• Ever since the 1975 civil war, Lebanon has effectively lost control of many parts of their country. The international community does not like to acknowledge this because then they would have to admit that Hezbollah is in de-facto control of the South. Hezbollah air defenses are better than those of Hamas, but still not very good. Again, they lack defenses against high-and-fast aircraft.

Answer 3

The overall budget of Lebanon in 2022 was about 41 trillion Lebanese Pound, which at that point — at an exchange rate of 0.00065 — was nominally around 27 billion dollar. One way to put that into perspective is that it is a quarter of New York City's 2025 budget. Note that the nominal exchange rate is fixed; the free exchange rate in 2023 was at a low of around 0.00001 (i.e, a hundred thousand LPD equaled a USD), which would value the budget at only 400 million USD or so with respect to international purchasing power. That is not enough to buy a single airplane system including maintenance infrastructure and personnel.

Even if we stick with the nominal exchange rate the budget is prohibitively constrained. Citing from the mentioned budget PDF:

Salaries, wages, and related items reach around 55.8% of the estimated budget expenditures, interest payment (9.2%) and other current expenditures (27.2%) such as stationaries, procurement of small goods, water, electricity etc.

If I read the numbers correctly, less than 10% of the budget are actually available for anything outside the government. (It should be noted that it is likely that government jobs are partly a form of labor market intervention which would appear elsewhere in the budget in Western nations.)

The budget lists about 5 trillion LDP as the defense budget, amounting to 3 billion USD nominally. Following the overall budget pattern sans interest payments we can optimistically assume that 20% or 600 million USD of that are actually available to do anything beyond paying salaries and buying stationary. Given that the purchasing power is much lower, I come to the conclusion that there is simply no money available to purchase and maintain significant weapons systems; deals with Saudi Arabia involving anti-aircraft defenses capable of intercepting Israeli aircraft are reportedly worth billions of dollars.