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Tag: Lebanon
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Biden, Arab leaders call off meeting in Jordan
Biden, Arab leaders call off meeting in Jordan – CBS News
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Clashes at Lebanon-Israel border raise fears of wider war | CNN
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Southern Lebanon
CNN
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On the face of it, the crossfire on Lebanon’s border with Israel appears marginal, dwarfed by the scale and intensity of the Hamas-Israel war further south.
The fighting has stayed within a roughly 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) radius of either side of the demarcation line and less than 13 people have died here since last Saturday.
Yet this barely populated swathe of mountainous terrain could be the launching pad of a regional war, drawing in a myriad of actors, including Iran and the United States.
Hezbollah – an Iran-backed armed group that is also a regional force in its own right – dominates south Lebanon. It also operates alongside Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria, where the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights separates Israel from Tehran-aligned fighters.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian on Monday raised the specter of expanded fighting after talking to counterparts in Tunisia, Malaysia and Pakistan.
“Underlined the need to immediately stop Zionist crimes & murders in Gaza & to dispatch humanitarian aid,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“I stressed that time is running out for political solutions; probable spread of war in other fronts is approaching unavoidable stage,” he added.
It is a scenario that has gained more currency across a restive Arab and Muslim world as images of dead Palestinian civilians, including more than 500 children, flash on television screens and social media posts, reflecting a civilian death toll rapidly rising at a rate not seen in decades.
Meanwhile, the US has deployed two of its largest aircraft carriers — including the nuclear-powered USS Gerald Ford — to the eastern Mediterranean. It is an ominous sign of what may come if the situation on the Lebanon-Israel border combusts into a full-scale war.
For most of last week, the skirmishes were a low-rumbling exchange of fire between Lebanon-based militants and Israeli forces.
Palestinian militants fired the first shots from Lebanon, hours after Hamas’ surprise attack of October 7, launching rockets that were intercepted over Israel. Israel responded by shooting into Lebanese territory, including at Hezbollah positions. Hezbollah then launched missiles into Israel’s northern-most territory. That cycle repeated for several days.
By Friday morning, three Israeli soldiers and three Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the exchanges across the border.
But then the tit-for-tat escalated. At around 5 p.m. on Friday, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah, who was also a south Lebanon native, was killed in an Israeli strike that wounded at least six other international journalists.
A CNN video analysis found that the journalists were wearing vest jackets clearly marked as press.
An Israeli Apache helicopter was flying over their location, according to a Lebanese security source as well as video seen by CNN, when they were fired upon by what Lebanese army and Israeli statements indicate was artillery.
Israel said it was investigating the incident. In an Israeli military statement that was released around the time of the attack, it said it was shelling Lebanese territory with artillery fire in response to an explosion at a border fence in Israel’s Hanita, near to where Abdallah was killed.
The situation at the border spiraled further the next day.
On Saturday, Hezbollah launched a series of strikes at Israeli targets in the disputed Shebaa farms, which was followed by a barrage of artillery fire from Israel. On Sunday, the Lebanese militants fired at several Israeli locations at the border, killing one civilian and one soldier. Earlier that day, Israel turned the 4-kilometer area near its border into a closed military zone.
In Hezbollah’s statements on Sunday, the group said its cross-border attacks were in response to Abdallah’s killing and the killing of two elderly civilians in Sunday’s Israeli attacks in the border region.
Unlike low-tech rockets that are fired by Palestinian fighters in Lebanon — and are mostly intercepted by Israel — Hezbollah uses Russian anti-tank guided missiles known as Kornets.
Every Hezbollah attack over the last week was followed by a video released by the group that demonstrated precision. They were direct hits that seemed to blindside Israeli troops seen in the videos.
These videos are key to the psychological warfare that underpins this flare-up. It shows clearly how much more sophisticated the group’s arsenal had become since its last conflict with Israel in 2006, when it relied largely on inaccurate Soviet-era Katyusha rockets.
Back then, the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war ended with no clear victor or vanquished. At the time, many parts of Lebanon were devastated, but Hezbollah foiled Israel’s ultimate plan to dismantle the group, dealing a blow to Israel’s aura of invincibility.
In the intervening years, Hezbollah has dramatically built up its arsenal, and its fighters are far more experienced in urban warfare. They’re battle-hardened from fighting in Syria against ISIS, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, and armed opposition groups that tried to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly evoked a hypothetical scenario where his fighters would conduct an incursion into northern Israel in case war erupted between Lebanon and Israel again. Israel and US officials have repeatedly expressed alarm about Hezbollah’s precision-guided missiles, which were used against Israel for the first time this month.
Nasrallah has also said that his group boasts more than 100,000 fighters and reservists. Historically, Israeli and US officials have been reluctant to dismiss claims by the paramilitary leader, who oversaw a surge in the size and power of the group in the 32 years of his leadership.
Yet Nasrallah, known for his fiery televised speeches, has been noticeably silent since October 7. Observers don’t know what to make of this. In addresses he delivered in recent months, Nasrallah lauded the growing alliance between his group and Hamas, though they were on opposite sides of Syria’s bloody civil war.
He has also indicated that the loose rules of engagement between Hezbollah and Israel may soon change, with the Lebanon-based group possibly intervening on behalf of the Palestinians.
This has led many observers to speculate that Hezbollah may expand its fight against Israel in case of the much-anticipated Israeli ground invasion into Gaza.
Yet what happens from now is anyone’s guess. World leaders will continue to watch this border with bated breath.
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Gaza conditions a ‘complete catastrophe,’ official warns as Israel prepares for imminent offensive | CNN
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Gaza and Jerusalem
CNN
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Conditions in Gaza have deteriorated into a “complete catastrophe,” according to one official, with serious shortages of clean water and food as tens of thousands of Palestinians attempt to flee crippling airstrikes and an imminent Israeli ground offensive.
Israel’s military said Saturday its forces are readying for the next stages of the war, including “combined and coordinated strikes from the air, sea and land” in response to the unprecedented October 7 terrorist attacks by the Islamist militant group Hamas, which controls the enclave.
At least 1,300 people were killed during Hamas’ rampage in what US President Joe Biden described as “the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
Further escalation of the long-running conflict now increasingly risks spilling over regionally, prompting the Pentagon to order a second carrier strike group and squadrons of fighter jets to the region as a deterrence to Iran and Iranian proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The clock is ticking for residents fleeing south through the battered streets of Gaza after the Israeli military told civilians to leave northern areas of the densely populated strip.
More than half of Gaza’s 2 million residents live in the northern section that Israel said should evacuate. Many families, some of whom were already internally displaced, are now crammed into an even smaller portion of the 140-square-mile territory.
Civilians packed into cars, taxis, pickup trucks and donkey-pulled carts. Roads were filled with snaking lines of vehicles strapped with suitcases and mattresses. Those without other options walked, carrying what they could.
“We will commence significant military operations only once we see that civilians have left the area,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus told CNN early Sunday. “I cannot stress more than enough to say now is the time for Gazans to leave.”
Even as civilians fled southward, Israeli warplanes continued to blast Gaza over the weekend. Videos showed explosions and bodies along a Gaza evacuation route Friday, as tens of thousands of people abandoned their homes on the advice of the IDF.
Extensive destruction could be seen on Salah Al-Deen street – a main route for evacuation – in videos authenticated by CNN. A number of bodies, including those of children, can be seen on on a flat-bed trailer that appears to have been used to carry people away from Gaza City.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 2,329 civilians have been killed and more than 9,000 injured since the conflict broke out a week ago, with 300 killed in the past 24 hours.
Casualties in Gaza over the past eight days have now surpassed the number of those killed during the 51-day Gaza-Israel conflict in 2014, according to the spokesperson for the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Richard Brennan, a World Health Organization official in Cairo, told CNN that 60 percent of those killed in Gaza the last week were women and children.
Several United Nations agencies have warned that mass evacuation under siege conditions will lead to disaster, and that the most vulnerable Gazans, including the sick, elderly, pregnant and disabled, will not be able to relocate at all. For days, Israel has cut off the Gaza population’s access to electricity, food and water.
“Despite Israeli announcements suggesting that there are safe areas for people trapped in the Gaza Strip, they are in fact exposed to bombardment throughout the entire territory, including in the south,” said Avril Benoit, executive director of Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
A growing number of nations, global rights groups and organizations are calling on Israel to respect international rules of war, urging the protection of civilians’ lives, and not to target hospitals, schools and clinics. Jordan’s foreign minister warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza are causing a humanitarian disaster and amount to mass punishment for more than 2 million Palestinians.
As food, clean drinking water and medical supplies in Gaza run out, there are urgent pleas for humanitarian aid to be allowed in. Footage showed aid convoys continuing to arrive into Egypt’s El-Arish stadium in preparation to enter Gaza through the Rafah land crossing. On the Gazan side, thousands of people are stuck at the crossing, with families telling CNN they have been unable to cross into Egypt.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told CNN Saturday that Egypt has tried to ship humanitarian aid to Gaza but has not received the proper authorization to do so.
Palestinians who fled south, and those who are still in the north, are rapidly running out of food and water. There is no more electricity, and those with fuel-powered generators will soon live in complete blackout. Internet access, through which residents communicate their plight to the world, is also shrinking.
MSF’s Benoit told CNN Saturday there is a serious water shortage in Gaza with many people beginning to suffer from severe dehydration.
“Everyone there feels like they are likely to be collateral damage,” Benoit said. “The health care system there has always been extra fragile and was considered (a) humanitarian chronic emergency for many, many years, and now it’s a complete catastrophe.”
Palestine Red Crescent Society spokesperson Nebal Farsakh told CNN the situation in Gaza is “devastating” and though they had been notified by Israel to evacuate Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City, they did not have the means to do so.
“We are not willing to evacuate because we do not have the means to evacuate our patients,” Farsakh said. “We have around 300 patients at the hospital. Some of them are in the intensive care unit. We have children in incubators. We can’t evacuate them.”
The World Health Organization said Saturday it “strongly condemns Israel’s repeated orders for the evacuation of 22 hospitals” in Gaza, calling it a “death sentence for the sick and injured.”
If patients are forced to move and are cut off from life-saving medical attention while being evacuated, they all face imminent deterioration of their condition or death, the WHO said in a statement.
Health facilities in northern Gaza continue to receive an influx of injured patients and are struggling to operate beyond capacity, with some patients “being treated in corridors and outdoors in surrounding streets due to a lack of hospital beds,” it added.
Israel, which has massed troops and military equipment at the border with Gaza, said its ramped up offensive will feature hundreds of thousands of reservists and encompass “a wide range of operational offensive plans.”
In addition to widespread airstrikes, Israel’s army is preparing troops for an “expanded arena of combat,” the IDF said in a statement on Saturday. The preparations have placed “an emphasis on significant ground operations.”
Hamas has shown a level of military capability far beyond what was previously thought, and a recent CNN investigation found it is probably well-prepared for the next phase of the war.
Texas woman has family stuck trying to evacuate Gaza
Complicating an Israeli offensive in Gaza are up to 150 hostages captured by Hamas – including soldiers, civilians, women, children and the elderly – and who are being held in the crowded enclave.
IDF spokesperson Conricus said it is a top priority to get hostages out of Gaza, despite the difficulty that a dense urban area adds to the fight.
Pointing to the “elaborate network of tunnels” that Hamas has, he said hostages “are most likely held underground in various locations.”
“Fighting will be slow. Advances will be slow, and we will be cautious,” he said.
As Israel battles Hamas, it also faces the threat of a wider conflict on new fronts.
Israel has said it is ready in case there are attacks from neighboring Lebanon or Syria.
Syria’s military reported late Saturday that an “air aggression” by Israel, originating from the Mediterranean Sea, damaged Aleppo International Airport and rendered it nonoperational.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Mission to the UN warned on Saturday that if Israel does not stop its attacks on Gaza, “the situation could spiral out of control and ricochet far-reaching consequences.”
The comments came as Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian met with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha, Qatar on Saturday, according to Iran’s official news agency IRNA. The agency said it was the first official meeting between Iranian officials and Haniyeh since surprise Hamas attack on Israel that Hamas called Al-Aqsa storm.
Hostilities with neighboring Lebanon are being closely monitored internationally, as an escalation could draw the powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah paramilitary group into the conflict.
For days, Lebanon-based Palestinian militants have launched rockets into Israel, leading to Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory, including Hezbollah positions. Hezbollah has fired back at Israeli border positions with precision-guided missiles.
On Saturday, Israel returned fire after Hezbollah launched an attack on the disputed territory of the Shebaa farms near the Israel-Lebanon border, with CNN teams on the ground reporting prolonged shelling.
Mourners also gathered Saturday for the funeral of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon after he was killed when Israel fired artillery into the area where he and other journalists were on Friday. The IDF said it was reviewing the circumstances surrounding the incident on the Lebanese border.
In response to the regional security situation, the Pentagon has ordered a second carrier strike group – the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower – to the eastern Mediterranean Sea, joining the strike group led by the USS Gerald R. Ford.
The US warships are not intended to join the fighting in Gaza or take part in Israel’s operations, but the presence of two of the Navy’s most powerful ships is designed to send a message of deterrence to Iran and Iranian proxies in the region.
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‘A message’: Why is Biden dispatching a US strike group during Gaza war?
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Washington, DC – As the war rages on in Gaza, the United States has moved one of the largest aircraft carriers in the world and an accompanying strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean, bringing its military might to the tense region.
US officials have framed the move as aimed at deterring Hezbollah and Iran from “taking advantage” of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
But with that stance, analysts say President Joe Biden is effectively threatening to enter the war on Israel’s side should a broader conflict break out. Still, many believe it is highly unlikely that the US military would directly take part in the hostilities.
“The administration judged it to be important to take a step that would make it as clear as possible to Hezbollah and Iran that there is the danger of US military intervention on behalf of Israel,” said Steven Simon, a senior research analyst at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
“I’m pretty sure that President Biden does not want to get involved in this war. But sometimes you have to do these things to buttress deterrence,” added Simon, who previously served in senior positions on the White House National Security Council and in the State Department.
Biden said this week that his administration had enhanced its “force posture in the region to strengthen our deterrence” as a warning to any country or organisation considering an attack on Israel.
Days earlier, when the US announced it would send the USS Gerald R Ford Carrier Strike Group to the region, a defence official put Washington’s position more bluntly.
“These posture increases were intended to serve as an unequivocal demonstration in deed and not only in words of US support for Israel’s defence and serve as a deterrent signal to Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah and any other proxy across the region who might be considering exploiting the current situation to escalate conflict,” the official said.
“Those adversaries should think twice.”
USS Ford a ‘political and strategic’ signal
The status quo in the region was upended on Saturday when the Palestinian group Hamas launched a highly coordinated attack against Israel from the besieged Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of people and taking dozens captive.
Israel has responded by placing Gaza under a total blockade, preventing fuel and water from entering the strip. It has also bombed the territory relentlessly, as the Israeli military appears to prepare for a ground invasion.
Paul Salem, president of the nonprofit Middle East Institute, said the scale and brutality of Hamas’s attacks facilitated a “much clearer American response” in support of Israel than in previous Gaza conflicts.
“Having the aircraft carrier there is major political and strategic signalling,” Salem told Al Jazeera.
But he added that a US military intervention would be “far-fetched”.
“Definitely they’re signalling to Hezbollah and Iran: ‘Do not get involved. If you do get involved, you might have to deal with us,’” Salem said.
“It’s not clear what that would mean. And keeping in mind that Biden is entering an election year, it’s not great for him to enter a war in the Middle East. So he has political constraints as well.”
“The arrival of these highly capable forces to the region is a strong signal of deterrence should any actor hostile to Israel consider trying to take advantage of this situation,” said General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander, U.S. Central Command.https://t.co/URHNRuPdvn pic.twitter.com/fQhjW8UAVt
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) October 10, 2023
On Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated US commitment to Israel’s security during a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself. But as long as America exists, you will never ever have to. We will always be there by your side,” Blinken told Netanyahu.
Israel, which has been accused by major rights groups like Amnesty International of imposing a system of apartheid on Palestinians, already receives $3.8bn in US aid annually.
The Quincy Institute’s Simon explained that while Israeli forces are capable of fighting on several fronts, the potential for US attacks against Hezbollah would help Israel in a possible war.
He noted that the USS Ford carries 90 combat aircraft that could keep up “serious operational tempo”, including intercepting communications.
“If the United States says to Israel, ‘We’ll pick up a little bit of a burden against Hezbollah, so you can continue to focus on Hamas,’ then I think the Israelis would be very happy,” Simon told Al Jazeera.
The Lebanese front
Experts say it likely will not come to that. Since the war broke out, there have been skirmishes between Hezbollah and Israel, but they have stayed contained in the Lebanese-Israeli border area.
Salem, the president of the Middle East Institute, said Hezbollah is trying to draw some of Israel’s military focus from Gaza to the Lebanese border without igniting a full-on conflict.
“They’re playing that game of making it hot enough to get Israel’s attention and to force them to pay attention to the northern front in order to weaken the forces in the south, but not so much that it immediately triggers a war in Lebanon, on Lebanon,” he said.
Still, Salem added that the calculus of Hezbollah and its Iranian backers may change depending on the trajectory of the war in Gaza.
“If there’s a huge Israeli retaliation, yes, it’s going to kill a lot of people. But if it doesn’t defeat Hamas and if it [the conflict] ends in a few weeks, then Hezbollah wouldn’t need to open a second front,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But if Israel does ‘really well’ and is careening through Gaza and is about to completely knock out Hamas, I think there will be a lot of pressure strategically from Iran and others. They don’t want to lose Hamas as an asset, so they might have to act.”
For his part, Imad Harb, director of research at the nonprofit Arab Center Washington DC, said Lebanon’s internal financial and political crises also cap the chances of a war with Israel.
The country’s economy has been in free fall since late 2019, with its currency losing more than 90 percent of its value. A political deadlock has also prevented the election of a new president since Michel Aoun’s term expired nearly one year ago.
“Lebanon cannot take another war. Hezbollah’s constituency cannot take a war, and neither are the Arab states ready to assist Lebanon if Lebanon gets in a war with Israel and in the process gets destroyed,” Harb told Al Jazeera.
Hezbollah’s response
Hezbollah has dismissed the arrival of the US military to waters not far from Lebanon’s shore.
“Sending aircraft carriers to the region to boost the morale of the enemy [Israel] and its frustrated soldiers shows the weakness of the Zionist military machine despite the massacres and crimes it is committing and therefore its need for constant outside support,” the Lebanese group said in a statement.
“Thus, we stress that this move will not scare the people of our nation and the resistance groups that are ready for confrontation until total victory.”
Harb said Hezbollah’s response is unsurprising, and it doesn’t mean the group is rushing to war. “This is all rhetoric. I mean, these guys — the Israelis, Hezbollah, the Iranians, the Americans — all of them are rhetoricians,” he said.
Harb added that the US is not eager to go to war either. While Biden wants to be seen as standing with Israel, Harb explained that Americans have grown weary of war, and a battle with Hezbollah and Iran could quickly spiral out of control.
“This is why a message like this is only a message,” Harb said of the US military move. “Maybe Biden is just simply trying to take a stand, but I really don’t see the United States getting really involved in a war of this nature.”
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Lebanese hold their breath as fears grow Hezbollah will pull them into war
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BEIRUT — Once again, the Lebanese are glued to their TV sets and are compulsively checking their cell phones, following every twist and turn of skirmishes on the border, trying to weigh up whether another war is imminent.
In desperation, they are asking themselves how a nation so often shattered by conflict — and pummeled by an economic crisis — is again at risk of tipping back into the abyss.
“People are exhausted — they can’t take much more,” said Ramad Boukallil, a Lebanese businessman, who runs a company training managers. “Lebanon is reeling — we have had four harsh years with the economic crisis, people are skipping meals and can hardly get by. We had the port explosion, the pandemic, a financial crash. Please God we’re not hit with another war,” he added, in a conversation at Beirut airport.
The chief fear for many Lebanese is that they could soon be the second front of Israel’s war against its Islamist militant enemies, after Hamas’ brutal onslaught against Israel a week ago that killed more than 1,300 people. While most eyes are focused on an expected retaliatory ground assault against Hamas in Gaza, Israeli forces have also declared a 4-kilometer-wide closed military zone on Lebanon’s southern border, where they have exchanged fire with Hezbollah, a Shiite political party and militant group based in Lebanon.
One person close to Hezbollah said the Golan Heights — Syrian land occupied by Israel to the southeast of Lebanon — was shaping up into an especially dangerous flashpoint, saying Hezbollah has moved elite units there in the past few days.
Finger on the trigger
For now, this border fighting appears contained, but Iran’s flurry of regional diplomacy is heightening the anxiety that Tehran could be about to commit its proxies in Hezbollah headlong into the war. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned on Saturday that if Israel doesn’t halt its military campaign in Gaza, then Hezbollah, a key player in the Tehran-orchestrated “axis of resistance,” is “prepared” and has its “finger is on the trigger.”
“There’s still an opportunity to work on an initiative [to end the war] but it might be too late tomorrow,” Amir-Abdollahian told reporters after meeting Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar where they “agreed to continue co-operation” to achieve the group’s goals, according to a Hamas statement.
Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Britain’s Spectator TV his country was ready for Hezbollah, which he labeled a twin of Hamas. “Hezbollah could try to escalate the situation, so my message is clear: if we were caught by surprise by Hamas on Saturday morning, we are not going to be caught by surprise from the north. We are ready, we are prepared. We don’t want a war in the north but if they force one upon us, as I was saying, we are ready and we will win decisively in the north too.”
To try to forestall any such thing happening, the United States has dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups to the region and President Joe Biden publicly warned outside actors — taken to mean Iran and Hezbollah — not to get involved. “Don’t,” he said.
“That was music to my ears,” said Ruth Boulos, a mother of two, as she sipped coffee at a restaurant in Raouché, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Beirut, dotted with modern skyscrapers. “Let’s hope Hezbollah listens,” she added.
At nearby tables, mostly well-heeled Lebanese Christian families could be heard debating whether the country will once again be mired in war and whether they should get out now, joining other affluent Lebanese who have been leaving because of the economic crisis that’s left an estimated 85 percent of the population below the poverty line.
That may start to become more challenging. Airlines are getting nervous. Germany’s Lufthansa has temporarily suspended all flights to the country.
Lebanon’s caretaker government has no power to influence the course of events, Prime Minister Najib Mikati has admitted. He told a domestic TV channel Friday that Hezbollah had given him no assurances about whether they will enter the Gaza war or not. “It’s on Israel to stop provoking Hezbollah,” Mikati said in the interview. “I did not receive any guarantees from anyone about [how things could develop] because circumstances are changing,” he said.
Thanks to Lebanon’s hopelessly fractured politics, the country has had no fully functioning government since October 2022. The cabinet only met Thursday amid rising concerns that the border skirmishes might lead to the war’s spillover. It strongly condemned what it called “the criminal acts committed by the Zionist enemy in Gaza.” Ministers later told media the country would be broken by war. Lebanon “could fall apart completely,” Amin Salam, the economy minister, told The National.
Scarred by war
The rocket and artillery skirmishes along the Lebanese border since Hamas launched its terror attack on Israel have been of limited scope but have killed several people, including Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah. They are not, however, entirely out of the ordinary. An officer with the United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, who asked not to be identified as he’s not authorized to speak with the media, said he thought the skirmishes were mounted to keep Israel guessing.
The Lebanese are no strangers to toppling over the precipice. There are still grim pockmarked reminders dotted around Beirut of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, a brutal sectarian conflict that pitched Shiite, Sunni, Druze and Christians against each other in a prolonged and tortuous quarrel that drew in outside powers, killed an estimated 120,000 people, and triggered an exodus of a million.
In 2006 the country was plunged into war once again when Hezbollah seized the opportunity to strike Israel a fortnight into another war in Gaza. Hezbollah, the Party of God, declared “divine victory” after a month of brutal combat, which concluded when the U.N. brokered a ceasefire. Hezbollah’s capabilities took everyone by surprise, with Israel’s tanks being overwhelmed by “swarm” attacks.
Some see that brief war as the first serious round of an Iran-Israel proxy war, something more than just a continuation of the conflict between Arabs and Israelis.
No one doubts, though, that another full-scale confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah would be of much greater magnitude.
Armed with an estimated 150,000 precision-guided missiles thanks to Iran, which has been maintaining a steady flow of game-changing sophisticated weaponry for years via Syria, Hezbollah has the capability of striking anywhere in Israel and has a force that could easily be compared to a disciplined, well-trained mid-sized European army — but with a difference; Hezbollah has thousands of war-hardened fighters, thanks to its intervention in the Syrian Civil War.
Speculation is rife that air strikes on Damascus and Aleppo airports in Syria on Thursday were a step by Israel to impede Hezbollah’s arms supply line from Iran. Others see it as a warning to Syria not to get involved — Syrian support for Hezbollah could be especially important in the Golan Heights.
Hezbollah itself has been rehearsing for what its commanders often dub “the last war with Israel.” Hezbollah’s intervention on the side of President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War was an “opportune training” opportunity, a senior Hezbollah commander told this correspondent in 2017. “What we are doing in Syria in some ways is a dress rehearsal for Israel,” he explained.
Fighting in the vanguard alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah fighters honed their skills in urban warfare. When Hezbollah first intervened in Syria, Israeli defense analysts viewed the foray as a blessing — better to have their Lebanese arch-enemy ensnared there.
But concern rapidly mounted in Israel that Hezbollah was gaining valuable battlefield experience in Syria, especially in managing large-scale, offensive operations, something the Shiite militia had little skill at previously. Other enhanced Hezbollah capabilities from Syria include using artillery cover more effectively, using drones skillfully in reconnaissance and surveillance operations, and improving logistical operations to support big integrated offensives.
A question of timing
But will Hezbollah decide to strike now?
“I don’t think Hezbollah will open a second front,” Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute, and a seasoned Lebanon hand, told POLITICO. But he had caveats to add. “That assessment depends on what the Israelis do in Gaza.”
“If Israel moves in a big way in Gaza and begins to get close to either defeating or evicting Hamas, let’s say like the eviction of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, then at that point Hezbollah and Iran would not want to lose Hamas as an asset in Gaza,” he said.
“That’s a strategic imperative that might spur them to open a second front to make sure that Hamas isn’t defeated. Another factor will be the human toll in Gaza — if it is huge that might force Hezbollah’s hand because of an angry Arab public reaction,” Salem adds.
Tobias Borck, a security research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said Hezbollah faces a dilemma.
When it fought Israel in 2006 it became very popular across the Arab world, but that flipped when it intervened in Syria with “people asking — even Shiites in its strongholds in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley — what fighting in Syria had to do with resisting Israel, its supposed raison d’être, although it exists really to protect Iran from Israel,” he said.
“Hezbollah has to regain legitimacy and that puts an awful lot of pressure. That’s the worrying factor for me. How can Hezbollah still maintain it is the key player in the ‘axis of resistance’ against Israel and not get involved?” he added.
On Friday, Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem told a rally in the southern Beirut suburbs that the group would not be swayed by calls for it to stay on the sidelines of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, saying the party was “fully ready” to contribute to the fighting.
“The behind-the-scenes calls with us by great powers, Arab countries, envoys of the United Nations, directly and indirectly telling us not to interfere will have no effect,” he told supporters waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags.
The question remains what that contribution might be.
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Jamie Dettmer
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Israel forms wartime unity government with Netanyahu, opposition leader Gantz
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Israel forms wartime unity government with Netanyahu, opposition leader Gantz – CBS News
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How did Israel miss what Hamas was planning?
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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
The massive assault on Israel by Iran-backed Hamas militants is as bad an intelligence fiasco for the country as 1973’s Yom Kippur War, when Egypt and Syria launched a joint offensive unforeseen by Israel’s vaunted intelligence services.
No doubt Hamas commanders chose to launch their astonishing breakout from Gaza — the 140-square-mile coastal enclave Israel closely monitors with multiple layers of surveillance — on the war’s 50th anniversary for theatrical effect.
But despite such intense digital and satellite monitoring, as well as the use of predictive and facial-recognition technologies, Hamas caught Israel’s security services as off-guard as Egypt and Syria did half a century ago.
Back then, Western intelligence services seem to have been wrong-footed just as they are now — perhaps because they’re so focused on Ukraine and Russia.
But the Yom Kippur War left a legacy of recrimination surrounding Israel’s intelligence services, with the country’s defense forces and government all eager to pass the buck. Israel’s leadership had ignored clear signs of a coming attack, erroneously believing then Egyptian leader Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat wouldn’t elect to strike because he didn’t have control of the skies.
On the eve of the offensive, the head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate Eli Zeira had even written a memo to then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, stating, “I think they aren’t about to attack; we have no proof. Technically, they are able to act. I assume that if they are about to attack, we will get better indications.”
In the years to come, we will no doubt get a better understanding of what went wrong this weekend, when Hamas militants broke through the border fence demarcating Gaza and southern Israel, allowing Iran-aligned militants to overrun Israeli military positions, abducting and slaughtering civilians as they went.
The images of Israel’s Iron Dome being overwhelmed by thousands of Hamas-fired rockets, as well as the scenes of Hamas assault teams swarming Kibbutzim and wracking passing cars with gunfire, will leave a traumatic legacy likely to shape Israeli politics for decades to come.
“This will shake Israel to its core,” said author Jonathan Schanzer. “The majority of the defenses that Israel has relied upon for the last 20 years appear to have been penetrated. So, this obviously raises significant questions about Israeli military intelligence and Mossad, ” he told POLITICO.
For now, the country’s opposition parties are all on side, calling for unity in the face of attack. “In days like these, there is no opposition and no coalition in Israel,” their leaders said in a joint statement. We “are united in the face of terrorism” and the need to strike with “a strong and determined fist,” they added, calling for retribution.
“The State of Israel is at a difficult moment. I am wishing much strength to the IDF, its commanders and fighters and the entirety of the security and rescue forces,” President Isaac Herzog wrote on social media, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “Together we will triumph over those who wish to harm us.”
But as Israel fights back, questions are already snowballing.
IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters that over 2,200 rockets were fired into Israel during the first few hours of the assault. Hamas infiltrated from land, sea and air, with clashes between the militant group and Israeli soldiers in over half-a-dozen areas.
So, how was none of the preparation for this assault picked up on? Hamas would have used its vast network of tunnels that link the enclave to Egypt, but how did it smuggle in the materials needed for such a huge attack without Israel catching wind of the traffic? And how did Israeli intelligence fail to notice Hamas was making and assembling thousands of home-grown Qassam rockets?
“The last time Israel was blindsided this badly was the ’73 war,” noted miliary analyst Patrick Fox. “The scope of this infiltration attack indicates a huge level of planning and preparation spanning months or years,” he added.
In some ways, it seems Israel was looking in the wrong direction. According to Jacob Dallal, an Israeli reserve officer and former IDF spokesperson, this kind of attack was expected to be mounted from Lebanon by Iran-backed Hezbollah.
“The military scenario envisioned Hezbollah attacking from the north, not Hamas from Gaza. No one thought Hamas had such capacity, especially with the intelligence coverage by Israel’s Shabak and IDF Intelligence,” he wrote in the Times of Israel newspaper.
However, some now fear an attack by Hezbollah might still come, and that Israel might be facing a wider war.
Historically, most of the wars Israel has had to fight have involved battles on several fronts at once. But if Hezbollah were to launch cross-border raids from southern Lebanon while Hamas presses from Gaza, according to Schanzer and others, this would mark a far more ambitious strategic endeavor by Iranian proxies, likely orchestrated by Tehran.
And if that were to happen, “the potential death and destruction may top anything we’ve seen in decades,” warned former U.S. national intelligence official Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
Along these lines, Hamas military commander Mohammad Deif has since called on the “Islamic resistance in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria” to coordinate and “start marching towards Palestine now.”
So far, Hezbollah hasn’t heeded the call, with the group’s leaders saying they’re monitoring the situation. Yet on Sunday, Hezbollah launched a strike, using artillery and guided missiles on Israeli positions in a disputed area along the border with Syria’s Golan Heights — and Israel’s military responded. Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine, a cousin of the secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said the artillery attack was a warning. “We tell the Israelis and the U.S. to stop this ‘stupidity’ or the whole region will be involved in the war,” he said.
However, as Israel battles Hamas and keeps a wary eye on Hezbollah, queries about how this came to pass and how Israeli intelligence got it wrong will continue to niggle away. And as in 1973, there’s likely to be a political and intelligence reckoning once the guns fall silent.
The Yom Kippur War shook Israeli’s faith in their leaders, sparking a protest movement accusing Meir’s Labor government of mismanagement. And it ultimately led to her departure from politics when her coalition lost seats and was unable to form a majority.
Will this now be the fate awaiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu too?
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Jamie Dettmer
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US will redirect millions of funds for Egypt to Taiwan and Lebanon | CNN Politics
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CNN
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The Biden administration has notified Congress that it will withhold $85 million in aid to Egypt that had been conditioned on Cairo’s progress in its treatment of political prisoners, instead diverting that money to Taiwan and Lebanon, sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN.
The administration said it would redirect $55 million worth of that funding to Taiwan and $30 million to Lebanon, the sources said.
However, the administration will allow Cairo to access $235 million of the total of $320 million in foreign military financing that is conditioned on human rights issues, a senior State Department official said Thursday.
The US provides more than $1 billion in foreign military financing to Egypt and the vast majority of it is not conditional.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken “determined that it is in the US national security interest to waive certain human rights related conditions” and allow the $235 million to go to Egypt.
“What I’m describing today reflects our current assessment that Egypt’s cooperation merits the national security waiver for fiscal year 2022,” the official said.
“Our position on the very serious human rights situation in Egypt absolutely has not changed and we’re going to continue to raise those issues in Egypt consistently and at the most senior levels,” they added.
The conditions around the $85 million – “that Egypt is making clear and consistent progress in relieving political prisoners, providing detainees with due process and preventing harassment of American citizens” – cannot be waived, the official explained.
“The Secretary is determined that Egypt has not fulfilled his conditions and therefore we are reprogramming that 85 million,” the official said.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the redirection of the funds.
Last month, a group of 11 House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to withhold all $320 million in conditional foreign military financing over concerns about Cairo’s human rights abuses.
“We acknowledge the historic, deeply rooted bilateral U.S. – Egypt relationship, based in shared social, economic, and political ties,” wrote the lawmakers, led by House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Rep. Gregory Meeks.
“Nonetheless, we are strongly concerned by reports from both the State Department as well as numerous credible human rights and civil society organizations about the persistent and continued systemic violations of human rights in Egypt,” the letter continued.
“As we continue to stand for the prioritization of basic human rights in our foreign policy and call on the Administration to adhere to the spirit and letter of the law in ensuring progress in the U.S.–Egypt relationship, we call on you to withhold the full $320 million of FY22 FMF until Egypt’s human rights record significantly improves,” it concluded.
Meanwhile, the administration has been working to bolster Taiwan’s defense capabilities in preparation for a potential conflict with China, and in July announced a new weapons package for the self-governing island valued at up to $345 million.
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US to withhold $85m military aid to Egypt over political prisoners, rights
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US Senator Chris Murphy calls for additional $235m to be withheld over Egypt’s ‘egregious human rights record’.
The United States plans to withhold $85m in military aid to Egypt owing to Cairo’s failure to uphold US conditions on freeing political prisoners and other human rights issues, a US senator said, with some of the withheld funds being redirected to Taiwan.
Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, also urged US President Joe Biden’s administration on Wednesday to withhold $235m more in military aid for what he described as Egypt’s “egregious human rights record”.
Two other sources familiar with the matter told the Reuters news agency that a decision on the future of the $235m was expected soon.
“The administration rightly decided to withhold that first tranche – $85m tied to the release of political prisoners – because there’s just no question there has not been enough progress,” Murphy said.
“I would urge the administration to finish the job and withhold the full $320m … until Egypt’s human rights and democracy record improves,” he said.
Of the $85m that is being withheld from Egypt, $55m will be redirected to Taiwan, and the remaining $30m to Lebanon, according to a US State Department letter to congressional committees laying out foreign military financing.
The Egyptian embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On the floor of the US Senate on Tuesday, Murphy said that Egypt had jailed more political prisoners than it had released since 2022.
“Egypt has released more than 1,600 political prisoners since early 2022. That’s good news,” Murphy said.
“During that same time, they have jailed 5,000 more. So for every political prisoner that Egypt releases, three more are jailed. That’s one step forward, and three steps back,” he said.
“That’s not the kind of ‘clear and consistent progress’ in releasing political prisoners that the law requires. The administration was right to withhold the $85m.”
Human rights groups have long accused Egypt of widespread human rights abuses under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government, including torture and enforced disappearances.
Egyptian authorities have taken some steps since late 2021 that they say aim to address rights, including launching a human rights strategy and ending a state of emergency, but critics have dismissed the measures as largely cosmetic.
Some high-profile detainees have been pardoned or released, but activists say new detentions have outnumbered releases and that thousands of political prisoners remain in jail, with restrictions on free speech as tight as ever.
For decades, the US has given Egypt about $1.3bn a year in military aid to buy US weapons systems and services. More recently, the US Congress has made some aid to Egypt subject to human rights conditions.
The announced withholding of military aid is significant, said Seth Binder of the Project on Middle East Democracy rights group.
“But if the administration withholds less than it has the last two years it would in essence be saying to al-Sisi that it believes the Egyptian government has improved its rights record, which is just not true,” Binder said.
Under US law, $85m in military aid is contingent on Egypt “making clear and consistent progress in releasing political prisoners, providing detainees with due process of law, and preventing the intimidation and harassment of American citizens”.
These conditions cannot be waived by the executive branch.
A further $235m is conditioned on Egypt meeting democracy and human rights requirements. These conditions, however, can be waived if the executive branch certifies that it is in the US national security interest to do so.
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The key to saving youth from violent paths? Inclusive higher education
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In our pursuit of transforming the future of education, we must confront the stark reality of global youth unrest. Recent events in countries like France have highlighted the deep divisions and fragmentation faced by young adults. The unfortunately frequent instances of youth responding to violence with violence, mirror their profound frustration and yearning for change.
This surge of unrest is not exclusive to France – it is a global trend. The tragic deaths of individuals like Nahel in France, George Floyd in the United States and Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, to name just a few instances, have ignited worldwide reactions, sparking movements that demand justice and equality from those who feel unheard and unseen.
In the face of these issues, higher education institutions – colleges and universities – have a unique and critical role to play. These places are not mere centres of learning but potent catalysts for transformation. Education today must provide young adults with the necessary knowledge, skills, and critical thinking abilities to engage in constructive dialogue and tackle complex problems.
To effectively drive positive change, higher education must foster inclusive environments that value diversity and create spaces where all voices are heard and respected. Too many young adults feel overlooked and anxious about the future.
These tragic events in different parts of the world have laid bare the systemic issues that afflict our societies. They have kindled a fire in the hearts of young people, inspiring them to seek solutions and demand change.
This is a generation that refuses to be silenced; a generation ready to challenge the status quo and fight for a brighter future. Leaders in all sectors must support them in finding their voice and the opportunities to fulfil their purpose responsibly.
As we process the news and share in the collective anger and pain, we know that violent responses are merely expressions of the frustration and anger felt by those who feel they have no other way to voice their grievances.
Yet any transformation will not stem from conference room conversations and auditorium speeches. It will need a recognition of the overlooked potential of education and employment, especially among the growing young population. It will come when we challenge the quiet acceptance of chronic obstacles in education and embrace greater diversity and inclusion among higher education leadership.
Higher education institutions must up their game and focus on practical solutions if they are to serve as the foundation for the leaders of today and tomorrow to engage in resilient, inclusive and forward-thinking innovations that cultivate peace, security, and sustainable development.
When these institutions foster an environment that not only educates but also empowers students to address societal issues, they cultivate leaders who make themselves and their communities resistant to recruitment tactics for radicalisation and violence.
Higher education has always aimed to equip students with the tools to dissect and understand complex problems, foster critical thinking and facilitate open dialogue. The world’s leading institutions empower students to become active contributors in their communities, promoting civic engagement and human rights.
This is most effective when there is a genuine, deep connection between the theoretical aspects of higher education and the realities of the non-academic setting – the world of work and growth opportunities surrounding these eager young minds.
The World Bank has highlighted youth unemployment in Arab states and its potential radicalisation implications. Universities and colleges can counteract this by prioritising practical skills aligned with job market demands, moving beyond purely academic teachings.
Discussions like those at the United Nations Transforming Education Summit in September 2022 are important but need to result in concrete actions.
One such action is the work of the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation, partnering with 24 universities as part of their outreach to provide 200,000 Arab youth with accessible professional learning for high-demand jobs.
As part of this effort, the foundation leverages participatory design methods to promote wider offerings of professional graduate diplomas that have employment outcomes for these youth. One such approach is in artificial intelligence and data science from the American University of Beirut, which includes regionally relevant applications and the integration of ethics as a core component, with connections to real market opportunities.
We must fervently engage with our youth, especially those who may feel sidelined or despondent, ensuring they feel embraced and empowered. Diversity is the key to understanding and connecting with the lived reality of those who were not born with privilege.
To truly transform higher education, we need practical leadership in higher education that empathises with the passion of youth who are grappling with extreme climates, high unemployment and profound disenchantment.
By nurturing inclusive environments that equip them with the tools and market practice to navigate real-world challenges, we can empower the youth to become positive agents of change and progress.
If we want to see real change, we must be willing to challenge existing norms within these institutions and break down some longstanding barriers to higher education.
If we don’t, we risk seeing further outbursts of anger and violence from a disappointed segment of society, ultimately causing harm to both themselves and the world around them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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Forgetting the Ottoman past has done the Arabs no good
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Imperialism is a difficult subject to tackle in the Arab world. The word conjures up associations with the days of French and British colonialism and the present-day settler colony of Israel. Yet the more indigenous and long-lasting form of imperial rule, Ottoman imperialism, is often left out of contemporary historical debates.
Some of the states that succeeded the Ottoman Empire have chosen to sum up Ottoman rule in local curricula as simply Ottoman or Turkish “occupation”, while others repeat well-rehearsed tropes of “Ottoman atrocities” that continue to have popular purchase on a local level.
In places like Syria and Lebanon, probably the best-known Ottoman official is military commander Ahmed Cemal (Jamal) Pasha, infamously nicknamed “al-Saffah” (the Butcher). His wartime governorship of the provinces of Syria and Beirut was marked by political violence and executions of Arab-Ottoman politicians and intellectuals and remains in public memory as the symbol of Ottoman rule.
But as historian Salim Tamari has pointed out, it is wrong to reduce “four centuries of relative peace and dynamic activity [during] the Ottoman era” to “four miserable years of tyranny symbolized by the military dictatorship of Ahmad Cemal Pasha in Syria”.
Indeed, Ottoman imperial history in the Arab world cannot be boiled down to a “Turkish occupation” or a “foreign yolk”. We cannot grapple with this 400-year history from 1516 to 1917 without coming to terms with the fact that it was a homegrown form of imperial rule.
A substantial number of the members of the imperial ruling class were in fact Arab-Ottomans, who hailed from the Arabic-speaking-majority parts of the empire, like the Malhamés of Beirut and al-Azms of Damascus.
They, and many others, were active members of the Ottoman imperial project, who designed, planned, implemented, and supported imperial Ottoman rule in the region and across the empire.
Al-Azms held some of the highest positions in the empire’s Levantine provinces, including the governorship of Syria, for several generations. The Istanbul branch of the family, known as Azmzades, also held key positions in the palace, the various ministries and commissions, and later in the Ottoman parliament during the reign of Abdülhamid II and the second Ottoman constitutional period. The Malhamés were acting as commercial and political power brokers in cities like Istanbul, Beirut, Sofia and Paris.
Many Arab Ottomans fought until the very end to introduce a more inclusive notion of citizenship and representative political participation into the empire. This was particularly true for the generation who grew up after the sweeping centralisation reforms in the first half of the 19th century, part of the so-called Tanzimat period of modernisation.
Some of them held positions that ranged from diplomats negotiating on behalf of the sultan with imperial counterparts in Europe, Russia, and Africa to advisers who planned and executed major imperial projects, such as the implementation of public health measures in Istanbul and the construction of a railway linking the Hijaz region in the Arabian Peninsula with Syria and the capital.
They imagined an Ottoman citizenship that, at its idealistic best, embraced all ethnic and officially recognised religious groups and that envisioned a form of belonging that, at the risk of sounding anachronistic, can be described as a multicultural notion of imperial belonging. It was an aspirational vision that was never realised, as ethno-nationalism began to influence Ottomans’ self-perception.
Many Arab Ottomans continued to fight for it to the bitter end – until their world imploded with the demise of the empire during World War II.
The horrors of war in the Middle East and the colonial occupation that followed were traumatic events that found peoples of the region scrambling to construct Western-sponsored nation-states.
Nation-building took place as a narrow ethno-religious understanding of nationhood came to dominate the region, sidelining multicultural identities that had been the norm for centuries. Former Ottoman officials had to reinvent themselves as Arab, Syrian, or Lebanese, etc national leaders in the face of French and British colonialism. A prominent example is Haqqi al-Azm, who, among other positions within the Ottoman empire, held the inspector general post at the Ottoman Ministry of Awqaf; in the 1930s, he served as Syria’s prime minister.
These visions of an ethno-national future necessitated the “forgetting” of the recent Ottoman past. Narratives of imagined primordial nations left no room for the stories of our great-grandparents and their parents, generations of people that lived part of their lives in a different geopolitical reality, and who would never be given the space to acknowledge the loss of the only reality they understood.
These are stories of common people like Bader Doghan (Doğan) and Abd al-Ghani Uthman (Osman) – my great-grandparents who were born and raised in Beirut but lived an iterant life as artisans between Beirut, Damascus, and Jaffa until the rise of national boundaries put an end to their world experiences.
These are also stories of better-known families like some of al-Khalidis and al-Abids, notable Arab-Ottoman political families who called Istanbul home, but maintained households and familial connections in Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Their stories and the stories of their communities that existed for centuries within an imperial imaginary and a wider regional cosmology were often summed up in a reductionist and dismissive official narrative.
Their recent history was replaced by a short summary that painted “the Turk” as a foreign Other, the Arab Revolt as a war of liberation, and Western colonial occupation as an inevitable conclusion to the disintegration of “the sick man of Europe”.
This erasure of history is highly problematic, if not dangerous.
As a historian of the Ottoman Empire with Palestinian and Lebanese roots, I truly believe it is no less than a crime to keep millions of people disconnected from their own recent past, from the stories of their ancestors, villages, town, and cities in the name of protecting an unstable conglomeration of nation-state formations. The people of the region have been uprooted from their historical reality and left vulnerable to the false narratives of politicians and nationalist historians.
We need to reclaim Ottoman history as a local history of the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking-majority lands because if we do not claim and unpack the recent past, it would be impossible to truly understand the problems that we are facing today, in all their temporal and regional dimensions.
The call for local students of history to research, write, and analyse the recent Ottoman reality is in no way a nostalgic call to return to some imagined days of a glorious or harmonious imperial past. In fact, it is the complete opposite.
It is a call to uncover and come to terms with the good, the bad, and, indeed, the very ugly imperial past that people in the Arabic-speaking-majority parts of the Middle East were also the makers of. The long and storied histories of the people of cities that flourished during the Ottoman period, like Tripoli, Aleppo, and Basra, have yet to be (re)written.
It is also important to understand why, more than 100 years since the end of the empire, the erasure of the deeply rooted and intimate connections between the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Europe continues, and who benefits from this erasure. We must ask ourselves why is it that researchers from Arabic-speaking-majority countries frequent French and English imperial archives, but do not spend the time or the resources to learn Ottoman-Turkish in order to take advantage of four centuries worth of records readily available at the Ottoman imperial archives in Istanbul or local archives in former provincial capitals?
Have we bought into the nationalist understanding of history in which Ottoman-Turkish and the Ottoman past belong solely to Turkish national historiography? Are we still the victim of a century’s worth of short-sighted political interests that ebb and flow as regional tensions between Arab countries and Turkey rise and fall?
Millions of records in Ottoman-Turkish await students from across the Arabic-speaking-majority world to take the plunge into serious research that uses the full range of sources, both on the local and imperial levels.
Finally, the number of local historians and students with Ottoman history-related disciplinary and linguistic training, in cities such as Doha, Cairo, and Beirut, which have a concentration of excellent institutions of higher education, is alarmingly low; some universities do not even have such cadres.
It is high time that the institutions of higher learning in the region begin to claim Ottoman history as local history and to support scholars and students who want to uncover and analyse this neglected past.
For if we do not invest in investigating and writing our own history, then we give up our narratives to various interests and agendas that do not put our people at the centre of their stories.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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US, UK and Canada sanction Lebanon’s former central bank governor
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Internationally wanted Riad Salameh resigned from the post he held for 30 years after corruption charges were filed against him in the wake of Lebanon’s economic collapse.
The United States, United Kingdom and Canada have placed sanctions on the former longtime governor of Lebanon’s central bank, Riad Salameh, who has been charged with corruption.
The countries announced the sanctions on Thursday, accusing Salameh of contributing to the breakdown of the rule of law in Lebanon through corrupt actions that enriched himself and his associates.
“Salameh abused his position of power, likely in violation of Lebanese law, to enrich himself and his associates by funneling hundreds of millions of dollars through layered shell companies to invest in European real estate,” the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement.
The sanctions also apply to the ex-governor’s brother Raja Salameh and his former assistant Marianne Hoayek. Washington and London also sanctioned Anna Kosakova, who has a child with Riad Salameh, and the US additionally chose to sanction his son Nady Salameh.
The sanctions freeze the assets of Riad Salameh and his associates and prohibit transactions between them and US citizens or businesses.
Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said the sanctions send the message that the countries “will not tolerate the acts of significant corruption that have contributed to Lebanon’s economic collapse”.
Salameh has denied the corruption allegations and said he would challenge them, adding that some of his assets have already been frozen in previous investigations.
Tarnished legacy
The disgraced former governor of the central bank, known as Banque du Liban, left his post on July 31 after serving in the role since 1993. Once feted as a financial genius, Salameh now has a tarnished legacy due to the collapse of Lebanon’s banking sector and corruption charges at home and abroad.
In February, Lebanon charged him with embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion.
In May, French and German authorities also issued warrants for his arrest, with Interpol red notices declaring him wanted by both countries on charges of money laundering.
In March of last year, France, Germany and Luxembourg seized assets worth 120 million euros ($135m) in an investigation into his wealth.
A European diplomatic source has said that Salameh will soon be tried in Paris.
Salameh has said he has been made a scapegoat for Lebanon’s crippling economic crisis.
Decades of corruption by state officials have led Lebanon’s currency to lose 98 percent of its value against the US dollar. Many people hold Salameh and his associates responsible, accusing them of mismanagement of the country’s economy.
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Lebanon’s central bank chief steps down — and many blame him for the country’s economic collapse
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Riad Salameh’s tenure as governor of Lebanon’s central bank on Monday came to an end after 30 years, with many sharply critical of the legacy he now leaves behind.
“The loss of savings for several generations of Lebanese” is all part of Salameh’s legacy, Nasser Saidi, a former vice governor of the Banque du Liban, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Monday.
Lebanon has failed to find an official successor to Salameh, who has been governor of the central bank since 1993 and has worked under 12 prime ministers and recurring political instability.
Wassim Mansouri, the deputy governor will take on the role of governor on an interim basis, he told reporters on Monday. Salameh told CNBC on Monday he hopes his “successor will be successful.”
Lebanon has failed to find an official successor to Salameh, who has been governor of central bank since 1993 and has worked under 12 prime ministers and recurring political instability.
Wassim Mansouri, the deputy governor of the central bank, told reporters that he will take the role on an interim basis.
Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri first became prime minister in 1992 and tapped Salameh to rebuild the country’s post-war economy and banking sector. Under his stewardship, however, Lebanon descended into an economic crisis of epic proportions.
Foreign reserves have dipped below $10 billion, the currency has depreciated by almost 100% in value against the dollar and Salameh himself has been blamed for the collapse of Lebanon’s financial system, which has estimated losses of an eyewatering $70 billion.
In 2022, the World Bank blamed the country’s political elite for a “Ponzi Finance” scheme, saying the depression was “deliberate in the making over the past 30 years.”
An anti-government Lebanese activist displays Lebanese bills during a protest outside the country’s central bank against the continuing downward spiral of the Lebanese pound against the dollar and Riad Salameh’s arrest, under investigation by five European countries.
Picture Alliance | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Even members of the current government have suggested it was time for change at the central bank. In June, Lebanon’s Economy and Trade Minister Amin Salam told CNBC that Salameh had been Lebanon’s central bank head for “way too long.”
Saidi, meanwhile, said Salameh — who faces international arrest warrants and allegations of fraud — is to blame for the country’s economic collapse.
“He is directly responsible, in my view, for conducting monetary and exchange rate policy that has led to the collapse that we have seen. He actually conducted a Ponzi scheme, whereby he was trying to protect a highly overvalued Lebanese pound, by increased borrowing particularly from the banks, the banks, brought in deposits from Lebanese expatriates around the world,” Saidi said.
Despite these many accusations, Salameh left his post on Monday to a crowd of cheering supporters, demonstrating the deep divisions in Lebanese political society and a loyalty to leadership which has been in power since the end of the country’s civil war.
“Lebanon was ruled by a class that diminished and undermined impunity, so it is normal to see Riad Salameh leaving office without any authority questioning him or holding him accountable,” Laury Haytayan, the leader of opposition party Taqaddom, told CNBC on Monday.
Salameh, who faces two international arrest warrants and allegations of fraud, told CNBC on Monday: “It is untrue to hold me directly and solely responsible” for the collapse of Lebanon’s economy.
“The exchange policies are determined by the government and [the Banque Du Liban] applies them in every government that was elected since 1993, their target was exchange stability,” he said, referring to Lebanon’s central bank.
Salameh also pointed to the “waste and losses in the electricity sector,” subsidies, political instability and the “cost of the Syrian refugees,” as contributing factors to Lebanon’s economic decline.
Two major policy pillars
To rebuild Lebanon’s post-war economy, which largely relies on remittances, Salameh offered high interest rates, attracting deposits from the vast Lebanese diaspora, which stands at almost 14 million.
In 2016, Salameh launched a financial engineering operation which combined Lebanon’s local currency and U.S. dollar deposits, attracting foreign reserves in an attempt to prop up the economy.
High interest rates on U.S. dollar deposits helped bail out Lebanon’s ailing banks, which eventually dug into the country’s own reserves, according to the World Bank.
Salameh was also the architect of Lebanon’s dollar peg, which the country still uses today, yet now the economy runs mostly on a black market system with varying rates, and is largely dollarized due to the massive devaluation of the Lira.
Lebanon’s Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh gives an interview with AFP at his office in the capital Beirut on December 20, 2021.
Joseph Eid | Afp | Getty Images
Henri Chaoul, a former advisor to Lebanon’s finance minister and to Lebanon’s negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, told CNBC that Salameh is “substantially” to blame for the country’s economic collapse.
“He had the power and the obligation to say no to two major policy pillars of the last decades: the currency peg and the monetization of the debt. And he failed at both, leading to the catastrophic collapse of the financial sector. Apart of course of all the alleged fraud and aggravated money laundering activities that he is under investigation for.”
Salameh oversaw Lebanon’s debt monetization plan, which allowed the central bank to provide financing for the government. Moody’s warned in 2019 that this could undermine the country’s currency peg and its ability to pay off debts.
Lebanon’s ‘only choice’
Lebanon’s negotiations with the IMF have since stalled after the government failed to implement reforms required to unlock aid. The country has been without consensus on a new president, against the IMF’s demands, since October of last year.
“I think the IMF is the only choice for Lebanon,” Saidi told CNBC.
“Simply because politicians don’t have the courage and don’t have the competence and there’s too much corruption going on. They don’t want reforms because they view the reforms as not serving their own interests, the only way to move forward is to bring in the IMF that will impose conditions” Saidi added.
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Lebanese lawmakers fail in yet another attempt to elect president, end power vacuum
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BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanese lawmakers failed Wednesday in yet another attempt to elect a president and break a seven-month power vacuum that has roiled the tiny Mediterranean country. The ongoing political chaos has blocked progress on a solution to an intensifying economic crisis.
The session — the twelfth try to pick a president — broke down after the bloc led by the powerful political party and militant group Hezbollah withdrew following the first round of voting, breaking the quorum in the 128-member house. All lawmakers attended the session.
Hezbollah’s preferred candidate, Sleiman Frangieh, the scion of a political family close to the ruling Assad family in Syria, trailed behind his main rival, Jihad Azour, a former finance minister and senior official with the International Monetary Fund, in the first round of voting.
Azour, who is supported by the opposition to Hezbollah and some of its nominal allies, received 59 votes to 51 for Frangieh, while 18 lawmakers cast blank ballots, protest votes or voted for minority candidates. However, Azour failed to reach the two-thirds majority needed to win in the first round.
The meeting came after 11 previous sessions by the parliament — the last of which was held in January — failed to elect a replacement for President Michel Aoun, a Hezbollah ally, whose term ended in late October.
Azour has the backing of the country’s largest Christian political parties, the Free Patriotic Movement, which has been allied with Hezbollah since 2006, and the Lebanese Forces party, an opponent to Hezbollah.
After the session broke down, Azour thanked those who voted for him and said he hoped everyone would rally behind a call “to get Lebanon out of the crisis” next time.
Under Lebanon’s complex power-sharing agreement, the country’s president has to be a Maronite Christian, the parliament speaker a Shiite Muslim and the prime minister a Sunni.
Azour is also backed by the majority of Druze legislators and some Sunni Muslims, while Shiite members of parliament have overwhelmingly backed Frangieh.
The new president’s most pressing task will be to get this nation of 6 million people, including more than 1 million Syrian refugees, out of an unprecedented economic crisis that began in October 2019. The meltdown is rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement by the country’s political class that has ruled Lebanon since the 1975-90 civil war ended.
Clinching a bailout deal with the IMF — Azour’s current employer — is seen as key to Lebanon’s recovery. Azour took a leave of absence from his post as regional director for the organization upon announcing his candidacy.
Azour’s supporters accused Hezbollah and its allies of blocking the democratic process.
“This group does not believe in democracy,” said Fadi Karam, lawmaker from Lebanese Forces. Independent lawmaker Waddah Sadek said that “nobody can nominate a candidate and say it’s either them or nobody else.”
Hezbollah has often criticized opposing candidates as divisive and “confrontational,” though Azour has said that he would work to bring together rival political groups and end the economic crisis.
“Who better than Jihad Azour to seal the deal with the IMF that can help guarantee us international investment,” Sadek said.
Hezbollah lawmaker Hussein Haj Hassan claimed Azour and those around him had no political program and called for a “real national dialogue away from the auctioneering and intimidation.”
Harsh Hezbollah critic Ashraf Rifi described the vote as “a confrontation between the state and the statelet” — a reference to Hezbollah’s widespread influence in the country.
Earlier this week, Frangieh said he was not imposing himself but sought “a national consensus or majority.”
Not all lawmakers opposed to Hezbollah support Azour’s candidacy and some see him as representing sectarian parties. Ibrahim Mneimneh said the one thing that many legislators who like him ran on anti-establishment platforms agree on was their opposition to Frangieh.
Michel Douaihy, another independent lawmaker, said Azour had not been the first choice of most independents, but that his candidacy “is the art of compromise at its best.”
No date has been set for a thirteenth attempt to elect a president.
___
Associated Press writer Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed to this report.
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Lebanon military court accuses 5 over killing of UN peacekeeper
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UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon says indictment is an ‘important step towards justice’.
A military tribunal in Lebanon has formally accused five men of killing an Irish UN peacekeeper in December, local media and news agencies reported.
A senior judicial official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, alleged all five are linked with Lebanese group Hezbollah, The Associated Press news agency reported.
The indictment followed a half-year probe after an attack on a UN peacekeeping convoy near the town of al-Aqbiya in south Lebanon, a stronghold of Hezbollah. It included evidence from bystanders’ testimonies, as well as audio recordings and video footage from surveillance cameras, the Lebanese official said.
In some of the recordings of the confrontation, the gunmen reportedly could be heard telling the peacekeepers that they are from Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has denied any role in the killing, calling it an “unintentional incident” that took place solely between the town’s residents and UNIFIL, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon. There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah on Thursday.
UNIFIL commander Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lázaro Sáenz of Spain, adjusts a wreath in front the coffin draped by the United Nations flag of the Irish UN peacekeeper Sean Rooney [File: Hussein Malla/AP Photo] The shooting resulted in the death of Seán Rooney and seriously wounded Shane Kearney. The wounded peacekeeper was medically evacuated to Ireland. Two other Irish soldiers sustained light injuries.
One of the five men indicted, Mohamad Ayyad, is currently in the custody of Lebanese authorities. The four others facing charges – Ali Khalifeh, Ali Salman, Hussein Salman, and Mustafa Salman – are at large.
The UN peacekeeper vehicle reportedly took a wrong turn through al-Aqbiya on their way from the base in the south to the Beirut airport.
Vehicles and armed men surrounded the peacekeepers as they tried to make their way back to the main road.
Initial reports said angry residents confronted the peacekeepers, but the indictment concludes that the shooting was a targeted attack.
UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said the indictment was an “important step towards justice”.
“Attacks on men and women serving the cause of peace are serious crimes and can never be tolerated,” Tenenti told the AP. “We look forward to justice for Private Rooney, his injured colleagues, and their families.”
UNIFIL was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. The UN expanded its mission following the 2006 war between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, allowing peacekeepers to deploy along the Israeli border to help the Lebanese military extend its authority into the country’s south for the first time in decades.
Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon have frequently accused the UN mission of collusion with Israel, while Israel has accused the peacekeepers of turning a blind eye to Hezbollah’s military activities in southern Lebanon.
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Several killed in suspected Palestinian terror attacks in West Bank, Tel Aviv
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Several killed in suspected Palestinian terror attacks in West Bank, Tel Aviv – CBS News
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Israel’s violence is open terrorism — stop calling it ‘clashes’
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Here we go again. The state of Israel is committing unchecked barbarism against Palestinians and the Western corporate media has decided it all comes down to “clashes”.
The latest round of so-called “clashes” – sparked when Israeli police decided to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by repeatedly attacking Palestinian worshippers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque – has produced predictably disproportionate casualties.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested and wounded as Israeli forces have once again flaunted their handiness with rubber bullets, batons, stun grenades and tear gas. In return, the police have suffered minimal injuries, while also undertaking to accompany illegal Israeli settlers into the mosque compound.
And apparently not satisfied with simply unleashing violence in Jerusalem, Israel has also launched a barrage of air strikes on the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon following reported rocket fire.
As with all previous instances of Israeli-Palestinian “clashes”, the media’s choice to deploy such terminology serves to obscure the Israeli monopoly on violence and the fact that Israel kills, maims and mutilates at an astronomically higher rate than its supposed counterpart in “clashing”.
It also obscures the reality that Palestinian violence is in response to a now nearly-75-year-old Israeli policy defined by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the occupation of Palestinian land and the periodic perpetration of massacres – pardon, “clashes”.
Take your pick of contemporary, Israeli military assaults and you’ll find manoeuvres like Operation Protective Edge, the euphemism for the 2014 slaughter of 2,251 people in the Gaza Strip, including 551 children. Over a period of 22 days starting in December 2008, Operation Cast Lead took the lives of some 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza; three Israeli civilians died.
“Clashes” also abounded in 2018 when, in response to the Gaza border protests, the Israeli military killed hundreds of Palestinians and wounded thousands. And in May 2021, an 11-day Israeli rampage titled Operation Guardian of the Walls killed more than 260 Palestinians, approximately one-fourth of whom were children. As it so happens, this last operation was set off by – what else? – “clashes” at Al-Aqsa Mosque.
This bit of trivia has prompted certain news outlets to fret about what the current “spiralling bloodshed” between Israelis and Palestinians may portend – another media catchphrase that ultimately whitewashes Israel’s predominant role in the shedding of blood.
It is difficult, of course, to find any linguistic or moral equivalent to the media obsession with reporting Israeli savagery as “clashes”. One would not perceive an elk as “clashing” with a hunter’s rifle, just as one would not perceive a “clash” between a human neck and a guillotine.
Nor would one describe the United States’s lethal 2015 bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan as a “clash” between a medical facility and an AC-130 gunship.
But while clearly unethical, the Western media’s obsequiousness vis-à-vis the Israeli narrative is nothing new. Much of this has to do with the fervent backing of the US, in particular, for the Israeli point of view, which casts victimisers as victims and slaughter as self-defence.
Perhaps the very founding of the state of Israel in 1948 – which saw thousands of Palestinians massacred and more than 500 Palestinian villages destroyed – was in the end nothing more than one big “clash”. To be sure, Israel’s long-term propaganda campaign to conflate Palestinians with terrorism continues to pay considerable media dividends.
This is the case even among ostensibly more progressive venues that are willing to call out Israeli crimes but that still can’t quite manage to place Palestinians on the same level of humanity as Israelis. In February of this year, for example, The New Yorker magazine’s Lawrence Wright tweeted a video of Israeli soldiers shoving and kicking Palestinian peace activist Issa Amro while Wright was interviewing him in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. The New Yorker writer’s takeaway: “I can’t stop thinking how dehumanising the occupation is on the young soldiers charged with enforcing it”.
In other words: Israeli soldiers are victims of moral degradation and dehumanisation while Palestinians don’t really ever get to be humans in the first place.
Now, as Israeli security forces proceed to dehumanise and be dehumanised in Jerusalem and Gaza, the whole jargon about “clashes” only validates the idea that Israel is fundamentally justified in its violence, which is cast as merely part of a fair, tit-for-tat competition between two equitable sides.
In August 2022, a three-day assault by the Israeli army on Gaza killed at least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children – the bloodiest episode since Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021. Exactly zero Israelis were killed as a result of the August affair and yet, the Western media were still standing dutifully by with breathless reports of “clashes”.
As I noted in an article for Al Jazeera at the time, the online version of the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism as “(threats of) violent action for political purposes”. And the more often we remind ourselves that Israel is literally terrorising Palestinians, the sooner, perhaps, we can put a stop to all this talk of “clashes”.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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Israel conducts airstrikes on Gaza as violence escalates
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Dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel after raids on al-Aqsa mosque | CNN
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Jerusalem
CNN
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Dozens of rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Thursday, the Israeli military said, in a major escalation that comes amid regional tensions over Israeli police raids at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Some 34 rockets were launched from Lebanese territory into Israeli territory, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said, with the majority intercepted but six landing in Israel.
It was the largest such attack since a 2006 war between the two countries left around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis dead.
Videos posted on social media showed rockets streaking through the skies over northern Israel, and the sounds of explosions in the distance.
The country closed its northern airspace in the wake of the barrage. No deaths were reported, and it is not yet known which group in Lebanon launched the rockets.
Israel said it would “decide on the place and time” of its response, an IDF defense official who asked not to be named told CNN. An Israeli military spokesman said they believed a Palestinian militant group was behind the attack, not the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
The Lebanese army confirmed a number of a rockets were launched from the country’s south, but did not detail who had fired them. It said on Twitter that a unit had found “missile launchers and a number of rockets intended for launch” in the vicinity of the Lebanese towns of Zibqin and Qlaileh, and was “currently working to dismantle them.”
Hezbollah has not yet commented on the incident. It comes a day after Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, arrived in Beirut for meetings with Hezbollah officials.
Tensions are sky-high in the region after Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on two separate occasions Wednesday, as Palestinian worshipers offered prayers during the holy month of Ramadan.
Footage from inside the mosque showed Israeli officers beating people with their batons and rifle-butts, then arresting hundreds of Palestinians. Israeli police said they entered the mosque after “hundreds of rioters” tried to barricade themselves inside.
The incident, which was met with widespread condemnation from the Arab and Muslim world, sparked retaliatory rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.
Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told CNN “we are at a very dangerous moment.”
“What we see unfolding on the Lebanese border is obviously a consequence, a reaction to what we saw happening in al-Aqsa [mosque].” Safadi said.
Lebanon and Israel are considered enemy states, but a truce between them has largely held since the 2006 war.
There have been several small-scale rocket attacks from Lebanon in recent years that have prompted retaliatory strikes from Israel. Few casualties were reported in those incidents, with the largest death toll in an exchange of fire in 2015 that left two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish peacekeeper dead. Palestinian factions in Lebanon were believed to be behind those rocket attacks.
The 2006 conflict was the biggest flare-up between Lebanon and Israel since 1982. Around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis died in an exchange of fire that involved a nationwide Israeli aerial assault, and a naval and aerial blockade. Hezbollah fired many rounds of rockets reaching deep into Israeli territory during the conflict.
The Israeli military pinned the blame for the rockets on either Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with international spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht saying the IDF assumed that “Hezbollah knew about it, and Lebanon also has responsibility.”
But he emphasized several times that the IDF viewed the attack as having come from a Palestinian source, and that it did not represent a widening of the conflict to actors outside of the direct Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising hopes that tensions could be ratcheted down after the incident.
The Lebanese foreign ministry also said it was ready to cooperate with the United Nations and take steps to “restore calm and stability” in the south, while calling on “the international community to put pressure on Israel to stop escalation,” the state-owned National News Agency reported.
The IDF has been concerned for some time about an escalation on the Lebanese border, and hosted a high-level seminar in the spring of 2022 to brief journalists and policy makers about it.
The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said Thursday’s escalation of violence between Lebanon and Israel was “extremely serious.”
UNIFIL also said it has directed its personnel stationed at the border between the two countries to move to air raid shelters, as a “common practice.”
The White House said it was “extremely concerned by the continuing violence and we urge all sides to avoid further escalation.”
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Video: Opinion | Meet the World’s Most Honorable Bank Robbers
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new video loaded: Meet the World’s Most Honorable Bank Robbers
Recent episodes in Opinion
Opinion Video features innovative video journalism commentary — argued essays, Op-Ed videos, documentaries, and fact-based explanation of current affairs. The videos are produced by both outside video makers and The Times’s Opinion Video team.
Opinion Video features innovative video journalism commentary — argued essays, Op-Ed videos, documentaries, and fact-based explanation of current affairs. The videos are produced by both outside video makers and The Times’s Opinion Video team.
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Zach Goldbaum and Todd Bieber
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