‘Why Lebanon should join the International Criminal Court’

Mark Kersten at Al Jazeera

What “will international law have to say about the violence and atrocities being waged against the Lebanese people?” says Mark Kersten. The “answer will depend in large part on whether Lebanon finally decides, as Palestine did, to join the International Criminal Court (ICC).” The ICC can “offer a modicum of accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Lebanon.” This “would also provide Lebanese citizens with an independent, impartial and international forum.”

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‘How Giorgia Meloni fell to Earth’

Anna Momigliano at The New York Times

For “three years, Giorgia Meloni’s leadership of Italy has seemed unshakable,” says Anna Momigliano. Since the “beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, she has positioned herself as someone who can curry his favor and avoid his retaliations.” But as Trump’s “popularity craters to new lows in Europe, and the continent begins to find a backbone in its dealings with him, Ms. Meloni is discovering that being a favorite of the U.S. president can be a liability, too.”

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‘We should stop trying to copy unhappy America’

Linda McQuaig at the Toronto Star

Canada has “declined all the way down to the 25th spot when it comes to something that’s really important — happiness,” says Linda McQuaid. In “many ways, happiness is a more meaningful measure of our overall national success than the always-highlighted economic measure of GDP per capita.” Debate is “dominated by talk of how Canada measures up economically, whether we’re as rich as the United States.” The “focus is rarely on whether” Canada’s “social supports are strong enough.”

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‘Like journalists, prosecutors shaped a distorted view of crime. They can help fix it, too.’

Kelly McBride at the Poynter Institute

Journalists “have misled the public about crime and are now trying to correct the problem,” and “prosecuting attorneys have been guilty of many of the same sins,” says Kelly McBride. Both “talk about crime mostly when a crime has occurred.” These “journalists and prosecutors (and police, too) inadvertently reinforce the public perception that crime is a constant, growing threat — even though we know the opposite is true.” This “shapes how people understand their own safety and the policies they support.”

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‘America’s airport problems need to be fixed now’

Chicago Tribune editorial board

The U.S. “cannot function with travelers stuck in security lines for three and four hours,” says the Chicago Tribune editorial board. TSA employees “cannot be expected to go weeks or months without paychecks they need to pay their bills,” and ICE agents “have a job to do other than looking inside travelers’ bags and checking identification, tasks for which they are not directly trained.” Americans “have the right to expect their government to take care of these things.”

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‘Affordable housing is possible, if we stop ignoring the obvious’

Sam Raus at USA Today

American cities are “short on housing yet full of unused space,” says Sam Raus. With “nearly a quarter of the workforce going remote, and no amount of return-to-office mandates likely to change this trend, it’s time for cities to repurpose these empty buildings to meet the demands of the moment.” Turning “cubicles into apartment complexes for those who still live in cities would require state and local politicians approaching zoning policies, building codes and taxation with fresh eyes.”

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‘Israel’s displacement of civilians in Lebanon is a possible war crime’

Nadia Hardman at Al Jazeera

Israel’s “attacks in Lebanon — and the threat of more to come — have caused more than a million people to flee their homes,” but the “laws of war stipulate that civilians cannot be forced to leave their homes unless imperative military reasons dictate,” says Nadia Hardman. The “evacuation must be temporary, and people must be allowed to return once the hostilities end. In short, war is not a license to expel people from their land.”

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‘With Tina Fey as first host, “SNL UK” kicked off with familiar skits and very British humor’

Robert Lloyd at the Los Angeles Times

After “50 years of being practically synonymous with New York City, ‘Saturday Night Live’ has opened the door to London with ‘Saturday Night Live U.K.,’ following in the steps of ‘Law & Order U.K.’ and possibly nothing else,” says Robert Lloyd. Of “all the cities in the world that might conceivably replicate the spirit of the NBC original, the British capital, with its urban dynamism, media concentration and 20,000 comedians, feels like the obvious, and perhaps only, choice.”

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Five key Western allies have “urged Israel not to pursue a ground offensive in Lebanon” after Tel Aviv launched a “significant military operation” in response to Hezbollah missiles, said Politico.

Israeli troops on the ground “could lead to a protracted conflict” with “devastating humanitarian consequences”, said the leaders of the UK, Canada, France, Germany and Italy in a statement. “The humanitarian situation in Lebanon, including ongoing mass displacement, is already deeply alarming.”

Despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024, tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have reignited, with reports of up to a million Lebanese citizens already affected by the renewed conflict.

What did the commentators say?

“Just how far the Israeli military intends to push into Lebanese territory – and for how long – remains unclear,” said Tom Ball in The Times. Troops are heading to al-Khiyam, a “strategically valuable” town just over the border and the “apex of several major routes leading deeper into Lebanese territory”. An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson said the operation is designed to establish “forward defence, which includes destroying terrorist infrastructure and eliminating terrorists”.

Israel’s “extended campaign” against Hezbollah is “likely to continue beyond the end of the war against Iran”, said James Shotter in the Financial Times. Israeli officials had said they expect the joint offensive with the US against Iran to last “weeks”, and the expectation is that the operation in Lebanon “would last at least as long”.

We are going to see a “major impact on the population” of Lebanon, Michael Young, from the Carnegie Middle East Center, told Time. Between 850,000 and one million civilians have been displaced in the Hezbollah-controlled south since the latest conflict began. Israel wants to “ensure that that area becomes uninhabitable”.

The conflict in Lebanon is the “price” international communities must pay for their “silence”, said Laure Stephan in Le Monde. Ever since the signing of the “theoretical truce” in late 2024, world leaders have been “implicitly accepting the rule of force over international law”. This “lopsided ceasefire”, which “Israel never respected”, is the “root of today’s war”.

Despite the “unprecedented efforts” of the US-backed Lebanese government to uproot Hezbollah, it has not made any tangible progress. In fact, “Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm has also weakened the authorities”.

Two “terrible experiments” are playing out simultaneously on the streets of Lebanon: “Israel’s theory of total war and Hezbollah’s theory of nihilistic power”, said Thanassis Cambanis, director of think tank Century International, in Foreign Policy. Like Iran against the US, Hezbollah won’t “slink away” from an existential fight. Even if it can’t maintain control of Lebanon, it can still “act as a spoiler”. “No amount of Israeli warfare will be able to eliminate Hezbollah by force.”

What next?

The French government has drafted a proposal to end the war in Lebanon, said Barak Ravid on Axios. The framework could “de-escalate the war, prevent a prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon” and “increase international pressure to disarm Hezbollah and open the door to a historic peace deal”. The Lebanese government has reportedly “accepted the plan as a basis for peace talks”, which are expected to take place in Paris.

President Emmanuel Macron is “ready to mediate a truce”, said Al Jazeera. Lebanese officials’ offer for direct negotiations with Israel could be seen as a “major concession in a country where ties with Israel, a longtime enemy, are a divisive issue”.

War remains an endemic human tragedy, and movies have long been one of the best ways to demonstrate its horrors to those who have never experienced it. With great power tensions rising in the real world, there has never been a better time for audiences to watch these films — if only to remind themselves of why peace is preferable to conflict.

‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001)

With the U.S.-led 1992-1993 intervention in Somalia struggling to relieve the country’s famine due to state failure, Major General Garrison (Sam Shepard) greenlights an operation to capture the warlord Mohamed Aidid in Mogadishu using U.S. Army Rangers dropped from helicopters. The operation goes awry when one of the Black Hawk helicopters is brought down and its crew, including Durant (Ron Eldard), killed or besieged. With journalist Mark Bowden’s book as the “guarantor of a horrendous authenticity,” director Ridley Scott’s film uses “immense technical skill and spectacular photography” to produce a gripping war film that has nevertheless justifiably taken criticism for its context-free depiction of Somalia’s plight, said Philip Strick at Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ (2006)

Famously conservative icon Clint Eastwood seems like an unlikely choice to make a subtitled film that takes the Japanese view of one of World War II’s closing battles seriously. But that’s exactly what happens in his magnificent “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which depicts the early 1945 American invasion of the strategic island and its airfields, which are about 750 miles from mainland Japan.

Ken Watanabe is General Kuribayashi, who is tasked with defending the island from the impending American assault, and Kazunari Ninomiya plays Saigo, a soldier digging trenches on the beach until Kuribayashi shifts strategy and orders the construction of a network of tunnels and fortifications inland.

The film grapples movingly with how commanders and soldiers understood their predicament, including an unforgettable scene in which a number of soldiers commit suicide. Eastwood’s epic operates in a “poetic mode,” finding a place “where the limitations of a war movie start to vanish” and resulting in the “best of both worlds: an art house combat picture,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008)

So far the definitive statement about America’s decade-long misadventure in Iraq is director Kathryn Bigelow’s deservedly lauded “The Hurt Locker.” Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, in a career-making performance) is the team leader of an explosives disposal unit whose predecessor (Guy Pearce) gets obliterated by an IED in the film’s opening minutes.

James is a renegade constantly at odds with his rule-bound team, short-timers Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who worry with some justification that James’ unorthodox, bespoke and often impulsive bomb-defusing tactics are going to get them all killed. A film that “doesn’t engage the politics of the war in Iraq per se,” it is a “totally immersive, off-the-charts high-anxiety experience from beginning to end,” said Amy Taubin at Film Comment. (Netflix)

‘Waltz with Bashir’ (2008)

Based on his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, director Ari Folman voices his character as he interviews fellow veterans of the conflict — most of whom play themselves. The gorgeous, haunting animation allows the filmmakers to precisely recreate the Lebanese battlefield and grapple with the events that led to the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp outside of Beirut at the hands of Lebanese Christian extremists. Simultaneously a “history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film,” the result is a “work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power,” said A.O. Scott at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Hacksaw Ridge’ (2016)

Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) is a religiously devout pacifist who get drafted in 1942 and becomes an army medic but refuses to carry a rifle or engage in combat, drawing intense scrutiny from his peers and superiors in director Mel Gibson’s engrossing film. Based on a true story, “Hacksaw Ridge” follows Doss from childhood through the war, culminating in his heroic rescue of 75 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa.

Buoyed by a searing performance from Garfield, the film was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards — a triumph for Gibson, whose life and career had been mired in controversy for years. The film, “though corny at times, treads close to madness and majesty alike, and nobody but Gibson could have made it,” said Anthony Lane at The New Yorker. (Disney+)

‘Dunkirk’ (2017)

A structurally daring look at the miraculous evacuation of some 400,000 British expeditionary forces from France who were pinned down by German forces early in the war, “Dunkirk” marked director Christopher Nolan’s departure from his familiar science fiction and fantasy territory. The film is told from three perspectives: Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is an infantryman making his way to the beach for evacuation; George (Barry Keoghan) joins the crew of an unarmed civilian trawler that heroically volunteers to help transport the fleeing forces; and Farrier (Tom Hardy) is an Royal Air Force pilot helping provide cover for the evacuation.

Unlike many ultraviolent war movies of the contemporary era, Nolan’s film “does not revel in realistic depictions of wartime death, with all its blood and viscera,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. Instead, it creates an “impressive tribute to the survivors and the grand-scale efforts of the British people” during one of the country’s finest hours. (BritBox)

‘1917’ (2019)

Director Sam Mendes’ World War I drama is composed of long, unbroken shots assembled together by cinematographer Roger Deakins to give the illusion of being a “oner.” Late in the war, British Lance Corporals Will Schofield (​​George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are ordered by General Erinmore (Colin Firth) to carry a message to a British battalion warning them not to fall into a deadly trap that the seemingly retreating Germans have set for them.

Like “Saving Private Ryan,” it is essentially a road narrative, in which Schofield and Blake see the carnage of war along with the audience. A “ghost train ride into a day-lit house of horror,” the film conveys the “nihilist elation that comes with the moment-by-moment experience of survival, fiercely holding on to life with every eardrum-splitting sniper shot,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (2022)

Though it divided critics, director Edward Berger’s bold, bleak and propulsive adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s groundbreaking 1929 novel more than serves its purpose as a fierce statement against war. It opens cleverly with the journey of a German uniform, stripped from a dead infantryman and sent to be cleaned, repaired and rehomed onto Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), an idealistic volunteer pumped full of nationalist propaganda about adventure and brotherhood and thrust instead into an unceasing and pointless nightmare of trench warfare, deprivation, suffering and death. The “vast machinery of total war has rarely been depicted as viscerally or as coldly” as in Berger’s film, which “almost wades into horror territory, helped in no small part by the booming, anachronistic synths of Volker Bertelmann’s score,” said John Nugent at Empire. (Netflix)

There were tears and cheers on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border yesterday as 20 living Israeli hostages and almost 2,000 Palestinian detainees were released in a prisoner swap. The trade, phase one of a prospective peace deal between Hamas and Israel, was only the latest chapter in a long history of asymmetrical prisoner swaps between Israel and its enemies.

‘Losing dignity’ 

In 1983, six Israeli prisoners held by the Palestine Liberation Organization were released in exchange for a “whopping 4,700 Arabs”, said The Times of Israel. Two years later, Israel agreed to release 1,150 Palestinian prisoners, including “notorious murderers”, in exchange for three captured soldiers.

In 2008, a swap was agreed for the return of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were taken during a month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah. There had been fears that the two Israeli hostages were dead, but it wasn’t until the day of the swap that their fate was confirmed, when Hezbollah handed over two coffins. Israel returned five living prisoners, including Samir Kantar, who was serving a life sentence for a 1979 attack that killed a four-year-old girl and her father, as well as the bodies of 199 militants. In that exchange, it was felt that Israel had lost “a bit of its dignity”, said Der Spiegel.

In 2011, an Israeli soldier hostage, Gilad Shalit, was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners as part of an agreement between Hamas and Israel, and in 2023, a temporary truce saw Israel release 240 prisoners while Hamas freed 105 hostages taken in the 7 October attack.

‘Strength and weakness’

Israel’s “readiness to do a deal” on terms of “extraordinary asymmetry” is a “strength” in that it “reassures the country’s conscript troops and their families that everything possible will be done to secure their return if they’re captured”, said the BBC. But it’s also a “weakness” because it “advertises” the “high price which can be extracted from Israel” for any captive.

The asymmetry of prisoner swaps is one of the reasons for Israel’s contentious “Hannibal Directive”, which allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being taken hostage in the first place. This includes “action that will lead to those captives’ deaths”, said Al Jazeera.

It’s believed that the Hannibal Directive was deployed during the 7 October attacks. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a message sent to Israeli troops about five hours after the attacks began, when Hamas militants were fleeing with their captives, stressed that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”.

An inquiry by a UN-backed commission confirmed at least one instance in which an Israeli tank “applied the Hannibal Directive by shooting at a vehicle” believed to be carrying abducted Israeli soldiers, as well as two other occasions in which the directive was “likely applied”, resulting in the deaths of as many as 14 civilians. Israel said internal investigations into what happened on 7 October are under way.

Lebanon must choose now: disarm Hezbollah, "or watch the slow, irreversible erosion of the state", said Hani Hazaimeh in Arab News (Riyadh). For decades, the Iran-backed Shia militia has been both part of Lebanese politics and a violent, disruptive force that "operates beyond government authority", wielding "enough influence to veto national decisions at will".

Before last year's war with Israel, it was stronger than the Lebanese army – boasting up to 50,000 active fighters and 200,000 rockets. But the war left Hezbollah severely weakened and reeling from the assassination of its long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and many other senior figures in Israeli air strikes. The US has since piled on the pressure to bring Hezbollah's remaining weapons and troops under government control – and, in early August, Lebanon's cabinet took the historic step of approving that plan, promising disarmament by the end of the year in exchange for an Israeli pullback and millions of dollars in reconstruction aid.

It was the right decision. Hezbollah poses as Lebanon's protector; but the truth is that it invites conflict with Israel. Hezbollah's weapons "no longer protect Lebanon – they protect Hezbollah's ability to dictate Lebanon's future". Hezbollah's new chief, Naim Qassem, has flatly rejected disarmament, accusing the government of handing the country to an "insatiable Israeli aggressor". But really he ought to be asking for "forgiveness for dragging Lebanon into a senseless war", said Anthony Samrani in L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut).

The day after the 7 October Hamas attack, Hezbollah joined in, firing rockets into Israel. The blowback was devastating. Israel humiliated the militia with an extraordinary act of sabotage – planting booby-trapped pagers among Hezbollah fighters that injured thousands – then invaded Lebanon. More than 3,900 Lebanese died and a million were forced from their homes.

And that was just the group's most recent escapade, said Ali Hussein in Ya Libnan (Beirut). In 2013, Hezbollah joined the Syrian war to prop up dictator Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran. The resulting flood of Syrian refugees "strained our economy and infrastructure to breaking point". Then, in 2020, thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate that the militia was storing for Syria's barrel bombs exploded at Beirut's port, killing nearly 220 people. Hezbollah's alliance with Iran has "brought Lebanon nothing but war, division and misery".

Hezbollah was supposed to disarm when the Lebanese civil war ended in 1990, said Niv Shaiovich in Yedioth Ahronoth (Tel Aviv), but the idea was "considered taboo" because Iran would not allow it. The ground has shifted following last year's war, during which the militia, according to Israel, lost an estimated 70% of its manpower and firepower. Lebanese leaders can finally stand up to Iran. When the head of Iran's National Security Council, Ali Larijani, came to Beirut last week, the Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, told him bluntly that the era of foreign interference is over, and that Lebanon would not tolerate any rearming of Hezbollah.

Anyone who expects Hezbollah to capitulate is "deluded", said Kim Ghattas in the FT. "This is not the IRA, fighting a local, territorial war of resistance against an occupier." Hezbollah answers to Iran – and with most of its leadership assassinated, it has now fallen "under tight Iranian control". Tehran is itself "on the back foot", following its own 12-day war with Israel; it sees even a diminished Hezbollah as "a vital tool" in any confrontation with the Israelis.

The Lebanese army is seizing weapons and dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure in the south, but is showing no signs of marching into its southern Beirut heartlands. Earlier this month, said Marc Saikali in Ici Beyrouth, Hezbollah's leader gave "what amounted to a declaration of war" – warning that if government forces try to take away its weapons, "there will be no more life left in Lebanon". Freeing our country from Hezbollah may well take another civil war.

What happened

The United Nations Security Council Thursday voted unanimously to wind down its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon by the end of 2026, after nearly five decades of operation. The mandate for the U.N.'s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), renewed annually since 1978, had been set to expire on Sunday.

Who said what

UNIFIL, "initially created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops" after Israel's 1978 invasion, has "played a significant role in monitoring the security situation" in southern Lebanon for decades, said The Associated Press. It has also "drawn criticism from both sides" and from the Trump administration, which views UNIFIL as a "waste of money." Israel considers the U.N. force "toothless," The New York Times said, while Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that has "long dominated" southern Lebanon, sees UNIFIL "as sympathetic to Israel."

The Trump administration had "pushed for an end to UNIFIL since taking office in January and has already overseen cuts in U.S. funding to the force," Al Jazeera said. But Lebanon and European governments pushed back against a quick dissolution, arguing that Lebanon's military is not yet ready to take over the area, giving Hezbollah a window to regroup from last year's drubbing by Israel.

What next?

In January 2027, UNIFIL will begin a yearlong "orderly and safe drawdown and withdrawal" of its 10,800 personnel and equipment from Lebanon, the U.N. said. The goal is to leave "Lebanon fully in charge of southern security."

A number of development programmes and relief assistance efforts around the world have come to a halt this week after President Trump froze all foreign assistance provided by the United States, calling into question the future of foreign aid around the globe.

Even "the most fervent advocates" of US aid can see that not all programmes work well, Rachel Bonnifield, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told Al Jazeera. But the sudden halt in funding has put people in a "very compromised position where they might die".

What did the commentators say?

For aid agencies, the last two weeks "have been marked by fear, chaos and confusion", said Devex. "I've got people crying. I have people saying: 'but we really need to send these medicines. Are you telling me I can't do that?'” said the leader of one humanitarian organisation.

The order to stop aid work, issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, contained an exception for emergency food aid, along with a further waiver for programmes that provide other "life-saving" assistance. "We don't want to see people die and the like," Rubio told SiriusXM. He said there would be a programme-by-programme review of which projects make "America safer, stronger or more prosperous". But leaders of aid agencies told The New York Times that "some programs will be hard to restart after a temporary shutdown, and many could disappear".

There are obvious geopolitical ramifications too. In Pakistan, the loss of US funding may push the country to seek alternative funding sources, possibly from China or the Gulf nations, said The Times of India. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is already "making moves to fill the gaps, taking advantage of the power vacuum that the US has just created", said Devex.

What next?

However unwelcome the cuts are, for some they serve as a reminder that health and welfare systems in a number of countries are overly dependent on foreign aid.

"I think these pauses may end up changing the relationship other countries have with US assistance," Bonnifield told Al Jazeera. "Our governments now know that help is coming from nowhere," Ayoade Alakija, a global health specialist from Nigeria, told the Financial Times. "They need to start funding things themselves and investing in their own health and education."

On January 20, 2025, President Trump placed Cuba back on the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism just one week after the Biden administration had removed the country's designation. That puts Cuba back on a short list with just three other countries: Iran, North Korea and Syria. With a major regime transition underway in Syria following the abrupt resignation of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the country's controversial inclusion on the State Department's list may eventually be scrutinized.

Only eight countries have ever received the designation, which is distinct from the State Department's much larger list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. How did Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria end up on the list and why are they still there?

A short history of a short list

The State Sponsors of Terrorism list was created in 1979 for countries that "have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism," said the State Department. Designation as an State Sponsor of Terrorims carries with it prohibitions on certain kinds of commerce, including the sale of weapons and potentially dual-use items like commercial airplanes and equipment, as well as a ban on U.S. economic assistance.

"Syria is the last country from this original list to remain so designated today," said The Atlantic Council. Its original designation in 1979 stems from the Syrian government's support for "U.S.-listed terrorist groups," including Palestinian guerrilla organizations and the decision to allow those terrorist groups "to maintain headquarters in Damascus," said the Council on Foreign Relations. Over the years, Syria's portfolio expanded to include a significant role in the arming, funding and hosting of the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah, which was founded after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Hezbollah also played a major role in landing Iran on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list on January 23rd, 1984. The action followed five years of escalating tensions between the two countries that began when dozens of U.S. diplomats and embassy workers were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days during the Iranian revolution and culminated in the 1983 Hezbollah suicide bombing of a Marines barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. Today, Iran continues to back Hezbollah as well as "Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza and various terrorist and militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere throughout the Middle East," said the State Department.

North Korea was first designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1988. The bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 from Baghdad to Seoul, which killed all 115 people on board, was "later linked to North Korean agents" said The Washington Post. The designation was rescinded in 2008 "in the hopes of salvaging talks on its nuclear program," only to be reimposed in 2017 by President Trump, said The Atlantic. The pretext was the shocking broad-daylight assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's half-brother at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13, 2017. Analysts at the time warned that the designation would "make diplomacy more difficult without increasing Washington's leverage," said The New York Times. Despite Trump's subsequent summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the designation has not been lifted.

Cuba was initially placed on the list in 1982 for "providing advice, safe haven, communications, training and financial support to guerrilla groups and individual terrorists," said the State Department. The U.S. claimed that Cuba was aiding a number of armed insurgent groups trying to overthrow governments including in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as providing "funding, training, arms, safe haven and advice to a wide variety of guerrilla groups, and individual terrorists" in the region, said the Congressional Research Service.

President Obama removed the designation in April 2015, only to see President Trump place Cuba back on the list with just days left in his first term. President Trump's decision to reverse the Biden administration's last-minute order to remove Cuba from the list "aligns with his administration's hardline stance on Cuba," said CBS News. But while the move was expected, the new Trump administration's "rationale for the policy reversal was not immediately explained," said Politico.

Could more places be removed?

After a country is designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, "it is hard to remove even if it does not support terrorism," said the Brookings Institution. Inclusion on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list is not permanent and can be rescinded if the country in question undergoes "a fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government," as well as provides "assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future," said the Congressional Research Service.

Prior to President Biden's decision to remove Cuba from the list, the last time such a designation was lifted was in October 2020, when President Trump took Sudan off the list when its government agreed to "pay $335m in compensation for its alleged role in the bombing of two US embassies" in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, said The Guardian. Sudan had allowed al-Qaeda, which perpetrated the attacks, to operate out of its territory between 1991 and 1996.

What happened

Lebanon's parliament elected army chief Gen. Joseph Aoun president Thursday, ending a political deadlock that had kept the office vacant since October 2022. Aoun, 60, won 99 of 128 votes.

Who said what

The election of Aoun, widely seen as the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, reflects the "weakened sway of the Iran-backed Hezbollah group after its devastating war with Israel," Reuters said. In his victory speech to parliament, Aoun vowed to carry out judicial reforms, "rebuild what Israel destroyed," and ensure the state's right to "monopolize the carrying of weapons." That last pledge drew "loud applause as lawmakers from Hezbollah — which runs its own military forces — sat still."

The paused war with Israel has cost Lebanon an estimated $8.5 billion in losses and damage, six years into an unrelated financial crisis. The expectation is that Aoun's election will "unlock desperately needed support from foreign donors," The Washington Post said.

What next?

Aoun's power is limited under Lebanon's "power-sharing system, in which the president is always a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament Shiite," The Associated Press said. But "only the president" can appoint a prime minister to form the country's first fully empowered government since 2022.

What happened

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday urged his governing cabinet to approve a ceasefire between his country and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The announcement that Israel was moving forward with the proposal came hours after a series of Israeli air strikes that left dozens dead and injured near downtown Beirut. The agreement came into effect at 4 a.m. local time Wednesday (10 p.m. ET Tuesday).

Who said what

Netanyahu announced his support for the proposal in a televised address that "appeared to be aimed primarily at rebuffing right-wing criticism of the deal in Israel," said The New York Times. The ceasefire is "not the end of the war" between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, said The Jerusalem Post, and Netanyahu and other officials emphasized that Israel was reserving the right to "respond to any threat." The prime minister is putting his weight behind the ceasefire to "focus on Iran, replenish depleted arms supplies, give the army a rest, and finally isolate Hamas" as the war in Gaza rages on, said Reuters.

What next?

The ceasefire was "very fragile" and would be "very difficult to maintain and sustain in the long run," Alon Pinkas, a former ambassador and consul general of Israel in New York, said to Al Jazeera. Hezbollah, which includes a broad social services organization and political wing represented in the Lebanese parliament, will "remain active" by "helping displaced Lebanese return to their villages and rebuilding areas destroyed by Israeli strikes," senior Hezbollah official Hassan Fadlallah said to Reuters.

The new ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel will allow hundreds of thousands of people to return to their homes on both sides of the border.

The "hard-won diplomatic achievement" brokered by President Biden, brings "calm" to one of the most "volatile borders in the Middle East", said Barak Ravid at Axios, but sustaining it will be the US's biggest challenge.

But beyond Hezbollah and Lebanon, attention has already turned to Gaza and whether the ceasefire will help or hinder efforts to bring an end to its humanitarian crisis.

What did the commentators say?

President Biden's successful ceasefire is evidence that "it’s possible to make peace in the Middle East as well as war," said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, but the real test will be how "durable" that peace is.

Israel's war in Lebanon was "successful militarily" and that forced Hezbollah into a position of accepting a cessation of hostilities. However, it's "still unclear" what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is "trying to achieve by continuing the war in Gaza", and what comes afterwards. That makes it "difficult" for anyone to "negotiate an end to fighting".

Israel may also have been "buoyed" by its "battlefield gains" against Hezbollah, said Andrew England in the Financial Times, and a strengthened "sense of military and intelligence superiority" may embolden its military aims elsewhere. But even with the ceasefire, the region remains a "combustible environment" and Israel must avoid the "risk of hubris" with Hezbollah potentially already "plotting its restoration".

The key difference in achieving a peace deal in Gaza appears to be the "lack of will" on either side, said Gregory Holyoke at Euronews, and the prospect is looking like an "increasingly insurmountable task" despite months of talks between various mediators.

And while a successful deal with Hezbollah could be seen as a signal of hope for similar in Gaza, it has seemingly left Palestinians "feeling abandoned and fearful that Israel will focus squarely on its onslaught in the enclave", said Nidal Al-Mughrabi at Reuters, with the US unable or unwilling to broker something similar with Hamas in Gaza.

The Biden administration has "repeatedly told the public it now supports a ceasefire" but has also "preserved Israel's right to pursue its aim of eradicating Hamas", something many officials have already conceded is "impossible", said Nathan J. Robinson at Foreign Policy.

What next?

There are some signs of hope for a ceasefire, however. Hamas is reportedly again "ready" to reach a deal and to "exchange prisoners", said The Times of Israel, and the US is hoping the "loss of Hezbollah's military support" will push Hamas to seek a peace agreement.

The group has previously indicated it wants a ceasefire agreement but has "been unwilling to meet Israeli demands on hostages", while Hamas accuses Israel of "obstructing an agreement".

Months of mediated negotiations have failed to "conclude" a solid ceasefire, said Al-Mughrabi, but US officials are now hoping the Hezbollah agreement will act as a "catalyst for a deal to end hostilities in Gaza".

Israel is said to be "rushing to advance" a ceasefire deal in Lebanon in order to deliver an "early foreign policy win" for President-elect Donald Trump. "There is an understanding that Israel would gift something to Trump", an Israeli official told The Washington Post, after an Israeli minister met Donald Trump and Jared Kushner at Mar-a-Lago.

During his first presidency, Trump recognised "Jerusalem as the capital of Israel" and "Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights", wrote Middle East expert Amin Saikal on The Conversation. Trump "castigated Iran" and oversaw the signing of the Abraham Accords, which led to several Arab states normalising relations with Israel. But the Gaza and Lebanon wars, and skirmishing between Israel and Iran, have "changed the regional texture". With Arab populations "boiling over with frustration", the "transactional" Trump may struggle to strengthen America's "lucrative economic and trade ties" with Arab regimes.

'Penchant for unpredictability'

How Trump might "rearrange the chessboard" of the region is "still unclear", said Aaron Boxerman in The New York Times. The president-elect has "expressed broad support" for Israel's "right to defend itself", but he has also called on Benjamin Netanyahu to "finish up" the campaign. "I'm going to stop wars," Trump said in his victory speech. But the "isolationist forces" in the Republican party and his own "penchant for unpredictability" raise "a mountain of questions", said Tia Goldenberg for PBS News.

The Israeli government must "brace itself" for a future in which the new Trump administration could be "warm and supportive" but also "tight and tough" when that suits the US agenda, said a leader in The Jerusalem Post. "Ultimately", the Trump White House will "act in accordance with American interests, not Israel's".

Some feel an early hint of Trump's intentions was shown by his choice of Mike Huckabee as his nominee for US ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has been a "consistent supporter" of many Israelis' "ambitions to expand into territories that would form part of any future Palestinian state", wrote Joe Inwood for BBC News. The "right wing of Israeli politics" sees the Huckabee selection as "highly favourable" to their "longstanding aims". By contrast, Mustafa Barghouti, a West Bank-based Palestinian politician, said Huckabee has made statements "absolutely contradictory to international law", and that his appointment would be "really bad news for the cause of peace in this region".

'Nothing fundamental will change'

While some commentators weigh up whether Trump's second presidency will be better or worse for the Middle East, others believe it will make little difference to life on the ground. "Many observers" have predicted that Trump's new administration will be "far worse for Palestine and the Middle East" because of his "pro-Israel rhetoric" and "threats to bomb Iran", wrote Muhannad Ayyash for Al Jazeera. Yet a "closer look" at US foreign policy over the past eight years shows that "nothing fundamental will change for the Palestinian people and the region as a whole".

The Palestinian people have "spent generations" waiting for a US president "who would care enough to hold Israel accountable" and "to see our humanity", wrote Mohammed R. Mhawish for MSNBC. Yet each president "brushes off our reality". So, Trump's "brazen support" for Israel "isn't a deviation" but a "natural progression" of the way in which US presidents have "continually prioritised" geopolitical alliances over "Palestinian lives".

Refugee crises are nothing new in the Middle East, wrote Nicholas R. Micinski and Kelsey Norman on The Conversation (Melbourne). The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 brought about "the world's longest-standing refugee situation": six million Palestinians spread across the Levant. The first Gulf War and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq left millions displaced, as did Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah, and subsequent conflicts in Syria, Libya and Yemen. But the current exodus from Lebanon has plunged the region into an unprecedented crisis. In the weeks since Israel launched its full-scale invasion and bombardment, 1.2 million people (a fifth of Lebanon's population) have been displaced – adding to the two million Gazans displaced since last October.

Lebanon was already on its knees before this conflict escalated, said Vivian Yee in The New York Times. It had endured years of unstable government, largely owing to the insidious role played in its politics by Hezbollah, the Shia militia that doubles as a political party. It hasn't had a president for two years – it's now run by a weak caretaker regime – and the crippling economic crisis that took hold in 2019 has left millions impoverished. And after Israel's onslaught began last month, those same people are doing all they can just to survive, said The National (Abu Dhabi). Many have holed up in schools, hotels and nightclubs designated as shelters by the Lebanese government. But huge numbers are fleeing the country. A fortunate minority have stumped up $1,800 for one-way tickets on charter yachts to Cyprus; about 6,000 have taken the bold step of fleeing to Iraq.

What makes this exodus especially tragic, said Tasnim Chaaban in L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut), is that it includes vast numbers of people who'd found, in Lebanon, a refuge from other war zones. Even before this crisis, Lebanon was home to more refugees per head than any other country on Earth, among them 250,000 Palestinians and 1.5 million Syrians – refugees from their own 13-year civil war. Most of the 400,000 people who've fled into Syria since September have been people who not long ago had fled from Syria into Lebanon.

To understand the reasons for the sheer scale of this onslaught, said Daniel Byman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Washington), you have to go back to the 2006 war with Hezbollah, when Israel poured troops into Lebanon expecting to sweep the militia's fighters aside. Israel's failure to do so shattered its reputation for military invincibility, while the defiance displayed by Hezbollah forces "electrified Arab audiences".

After that achievement, the group, backed by Iran, steadily increased its power: it vastly expanded its missile arsenals – locating many of the weapons in civilian areas – and extended its huge network of underground tunnels. But over that same period Israel, too, has been making preparations for another war with Hezbollah, and this time committing itself to pursue a far more destructive doctrine regarding the use of force – namely, to obliterate every village from which Israel is fired on. That massive retaliation is what we're now witnessing, said Mat Nashed in Al Jazeera (Dubai), and the devastation it has caused has severely damaged Hezbollah's reputation and its popularity. Lebanon's Christian and Sunni Muslim factions, long resentful of the way Hezbollah has "hijacked" the state through its military strength, are hoping this could be the moment to banish Hezbollah to the political sidelines for ever.

The EU is now offering financial assistance to Lebanon, said Rym Momtaz of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington), but it needs to do a lot more: it should use its diplomatic and military weight in the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) to push for "a sequenced de-escalation". For, in truth, Europe has a pressing reason to fix this mess – if it doesn't, the fresh influx of migrants pouring into the continent via Cyprus could completely destabilise European politics. Crises in Lebanon have a way of spilling far beyond the nation's borders; and unless checked, this one will prove no different.

What happened

Israeli forces have fired at three United Nations positions in Lebanon since Wednesday, injuring two Indonesian peacekeepers, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said Thursday. Tensions between the Israeli Defense Forces and UNIFIL have increased since Israel launched a ground invasion last week, escalating the country's fight against Hezbollah. Israeli airstrikes hit a crowded neighborhood in central Beirut yesterday, leveling an eight-story residential building and leaving 22 people dead and 117 wounded, said Lebanon's Health Ministry. Lebanese media said the strike was an unsuccessful attempt to kill another high-ranking Hezbollah official, Wafiq Safa.

Who said what

The IDF has "repeatedly hit" UNIFIL positions, including an observation tower at peacekeeper headquarters in Naqoura, striking the "entrance to the bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering" and "deliberately" disabling perimeter cameras, UNIFIL said in a statement. "Any deliberate attack on peacekeepers is a grave violation of international humanitarian law."

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said Israel's "hostile acts" toward UNIFIL "could constitute war crimes." The Israeli military said last night that its troops were operating near UNIFIL positions but had "instructed the U.N. forces in the area to remain in protected spaces." The IDF last week directed the U.N. peacekeepers to evacuate positions within 3 miles of the Israeli border, but they declined. The 50 countries with peacekeepers in Lebanon "decided we need to continue to fly the U.N. flag," UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said to The Washington Post. The U.N. force, established in 1978, was given a broader mandate to keep the peace in 2006.

What next?

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the head of U.N. peacekeeping forces, told an emergency Security Council meeting Thursday night that UNIFIL has temporarily moved 300 peacekeepers to larger bases and would transfer 200 more if security conditions deteriorated further. He said UNIFIL forces, "increasingly in jeopardy," have been confined to bunkers, unable to go on patrol or carry out their other tasks. "We are staying until the situation becomes impossible for us to operate," Tenenti said to Reuters.

What happened

Israelis gathered Monday to mark the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas that sparked an escalating conflict in the Middle East. Israel ramped up its bombing of Lebanon over the weekend and launched a fresh attack in northern Gaza. Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel from Lebanon, injuring 10 people in Haifa and Tiberias. 

Who said what

Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the Oct. 7 attack a "scar on the face of the Earth" at a ceremony at the site of the Nova music festival, where Hamas killed more than 360 concertgoers and abducted dozens more.

Relatives of the remaining hostages gathered outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Jerusalem residence this morning and sounded a siren for two minutes, "replicating a custom from the the most solemn dates on the Israeli calendar, Holocaust Remembrance and Memorial Day," The Associated Press said. Netanyahu's government later today will broadcast a prerecorded state ceremony focusing on acts of bravery.

"No formal commemorative event is planned" in Gaza, the AP said. "The massive destruction and displacement are a constant reminder of the retaliatory Israeli assault on the territory, which has no end in sight."

What next?

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told CNN on Sunday that "everything is on the table" in the conflict. Israel "grabbed the initiative" last month when it hit Hezbollah with exploding pagers, "and it hasn't let go," The Washington Post said. But "experts in Israel and Washington are also asking: Now what?" The priority for those seeking peace "should be a cease-fire in Gaza," Jeremy Bowen said at the BBC. "This year of war started in Gaza. Perhaps it can end there too."

Exactly one year on from Hamas's deadly attack on 7 October it is Israel that is now looking to reshape the Middle East by force.

Despite repeated attempts by US, Egyptian and Qatari diplomats to negotiate a ceasefire and hostage release deal, the conflict in Gaza remains "unresolved" and peace between Israelis and Palestinians seems "less likely than ever", said Foreign Policy.

With Israel now turning its focus towards Lebanon and Iran, the region is "on the edge of an even worse war; wider, deeper, even more destructive", said the BBC's Jeremy Bowen.

What did the commentators say?

With Gaza effectively in ruins and Hamas depleted – if not yet defeated – Israel's pivot towards Hezbollah and Iran "makes sense", said M.L. deRaismes Combes and John Nagl from the US Army War College in Foreign Policy.

Yet "looking at the conflict another way, the Hamas war is only in its infancy". The militant group might suffer "attrition in the short term" but the "manner in which Israel achieves any such pyrrhic victory has in reality already created the next generation of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or whatever other group feels pushed to the brink of despair and anger".

Military experts agree that it is difficult for Israel to achieve a decisive victory against Hamas or Hezbollah. "Things seem to be headed in the direction of a sustained low-intensity war," said the Atlantic Council's Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib in Foreign Policy. In such a scenario, a "steady rhythm of strikes, incursions, attacks, guerrilla warfare, assassinations, and an overall game of whack-a-mole will be a daily occurrence instead of the high-intensity tempo that was characteristic of the first months of the war".

The last year has "seriously exposed Israel's newly minted operational doctrine", which planned for "short decisive" conflicts against non-state actors and avoiding extended wars, said The Guardian. "Instead, the opposite has happened." This has raised "serious questions" as to whether Israel has "any clearer vision for its escalating conflict with Iran".

What next?

At the moment Israel is "not seeking a diplomatic off-ramp", said Dalia Dassa Kaye in Foreign Affairs. "It is looking for total victory." If this means an "escalation and tactical military successes against Hezbollah and Iran, then Israel has indeed succeeded". But this is an "ephemeral victory" that "carries unpredictable costs and outcomes, and it appears uncoupled from any serious momentum toward peace with the Palestinians – Israel's most serious existential challenge".

Some hawks in Israel and the US have begun talking openly about a complete reordering of the Middle East by force. The last time this was contemplated seriously was 20 years ago in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and the allied invasion of Iraq. This "did not purge the Middle East of violent extremism", said Bowen. "It made matters worse.

"The priority for those who want to stop this war should be a ceasefire in Gaza. It is the only chance to cool matters and to create a space for diplomacy. This year of war started in Gaza. Perhaps it can end there too."

Hassan Nasrallah was one of the most revered and reviled figures in the Middle East, said Jared Malsin and Sune Engel Rasmussen in The Wall Street Journal. To his supporters, he was an "almost messianic" character, who commanded the loyalty of Shia Muslims across the region, and who became the "single-most important" actor in Iran's "axis of resistance" during his three decades as Hezbollah's leader. To his adversaries, he was an "antisemitic terrorist ... responsible for hundreds of American and Israeli deaths".

His death is a seismic event – one that deprives Hezbollah of the figurehead and strategist who transformed it from a small militia into a powerful political party with massive military might and "a global reach".

Born in Beirut in 1960, Nasrallah spent his childhood reading Islamic texts while his siblings played football, said Lawrence Joffe in The Guardian. When Lebanon's civil war broke out in 1975, he joined Amal, a party representing the marginalised Shia population; a year later, he met Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the future leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, while studying at a seminary in Iraq.

Following Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Nasrallah joined the paramilitary group that became Hezbollah, said The Economist. A decade later, its leader, Abbas al-Musawi, was killed in an Israeli air strike, and Nasrallah took over. Unlike other paramilitary leaders, he hadn't seen combat, said Raya Jalabi in the FT. But he gained respect as a commander, a respect that grew when his 18-year-old son was killed in a firefight with Israeli troops.

His status was further enhanced when Hezbollah drove Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon in 2000, and by its self-proclaimed victory over Israel in the 34-day war in 2006. All the while, Nasrallah "weaponised his charisma" to hone a "cult of personality": he was "a powerful orator" whose voice was rendered unmistakable to many by a speech impediment that meant he couldn't say his Rs.

Throughout his career, Nasrallah displayed a "gangster's disdain for human life", said The Times. He rejoiced in killing Jews, ordering hits as far afield as Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires. And he was just as careless with the lives of Muslims and Christians: Hezbollah was behind the 2005 assassination of Lebanon's then-PM Rafik Hariri, and supported Bashar al-Assad in Syria's brutal civil war.

His likely successor, Hashem Safieddine, is said to be even more hardline, said Samer Al-Atrush in the same paper. But since Hezbollah's leadership has been "all but wiped out" by Israel's latest attacks, his focus will have to be on survival – his own and his organisation's.

One way or another, however, Hezbollah will "slowly rebuild", said Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, as Nasrallah and his ilk are replaced by "a new and no less embittered generation of leaders" who will remember the "killings" and "maimings" caused by Israel's current campaign. Yes, Nasrallah's killing was a "humiliating" setback for the movement, "but nothing feeds resistance like humiliation".

The Israeli military earlier this week said it had begun a so-called "limited" and "localised" deployment of ground troops in Lebanon as its conflict with militant group Hezbollah continues to escalate.

The last time Israel launched a ground offensive over the border of its northern neighbour was in a bloody and unsuccessful 33-day campaign in 2006, which the government admitted ended "without its clear military victory".

Israel's killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike last Friday dramatically ratcheted up fighting, and both sides are using lessons from the brutal war over 18 years ago to inform their strategies in the latest conflict.

What happened in the 2006 war?

The last Israeli incursion into Lebanon was a "debacle", said Al Jazeera. Airstrikes decimated Lebanese infrastructure and civilian life, while Israeli ground troops were left "bogged down in fierce fighting". A total of 121 Israeli soldiers were killed and 20 tanks were destroyed in the war after Hezbollah fighters laid "carefully prepared ambushes".

It had begun after two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and three were killed by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid. The ground invasion began after the "failure of air power" left it as its only remaining option, which has "so far failed again today", said ABC News.

The 2006 war ended only when both sides adopted a United Nations Security Council resolution, which called for the disarmament of Hezbollah and the full withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from southern Lebanon. However, Hezbollah has "continued to build out its weapons arsenal" and even upgrade it with "precision-guided munitions and drones", said Foreign Policy.

What is Israel doing differently this time?

Israel's failure in the 2006 conflict led to "50 internal inquiries reviewing its armed forces", said The National, and it has since strengthened in power and better equipped its forces with armaments and training.

The Israeli government has long considered Lebanon its "primary foe", said Foreign Policy, and in 2019 created "revised plans" for a "rapid destruction of the group's military capabilities in the event of a future conflict".

That has been demonstrated through its targeted airstrikes on senior Hezbollah figures, including the killing of Nasrallah, which was possible due to "extensive intelligence" on where he would be in "real time".

That approach to intelligence was also evident in Israel's pager attack, which simultaneously exploded the communication devices of Hezbollah members. It's a tactic that has been "decades in the making" and largely due to the "hard-learned lessons" in 2006.

The IDF has also seemingly changed how it will approach ground incursion since 2006, with the current "nature and scale of troops and tanks" on the ground indicating it could be eyeing a "longer invasion" that avoids the bloody stalemate of 2006, said Al Jazeera.

As well as being ill-prepared, Israel's problem back then was "underestimating" Hezbollah's "ability to fight on home turf", and its operations on the ground now still risk it being "bogged down" in another "protracted war".

What about Hezbollah?

Lebanon has remained a priority for the IDF and Mossad since the war ended in 2006. Hezbollah is better armed than ever, and it has been firing rockets into Israel since late 2023 in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. And while Israel has long planned how it would defeat the group on its home turf, Hezbollah has also not been idle since the last war.

It has spent the "last 18 years" preparing "tunnels and positions in solid rock", said Jeremy Bowen at the BBC, and it now has a "formidable arsenal". Unlike Hamas, it is not isolated from supply lines , and while much of its communications have been hampered, it is "obdurate, well-armed and angry" and will find a way to fight back against Israeli forces.

What happens next?

Israel hopes its successful operations so far are a precursor to defeating Hezbollah, and being able to return Israeli citizens to northern settlements near the border. But this "total victory" promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a "mirage", said Arieh Kovler in The Spectator, and there needs to be a "realistic plan that allows the residents of northern Israel to live in peace".

A diplomatic solution also seems off the cards currently given the lack of a ceasefire in Gaza, and this is now the region's "most dangerous crisis", said Bowen, and currently "nothing is stopping it spiralling towards something much worse".

What happened

Israel's military said Tuesday morning it had crossed the border into Lebanon for "limited, localized and targeted raids against Hezbollah" aimed at clearing "villages close to the border" that "pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel." Israeli fighter jets continued striking Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold where Israeli bombs days earlier had killed Hassan Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah officials.

Who said what

"We know that the battle might be long," Naim Qassem, Hezbollah's deputy secretary-general and the highest-ranking official left, said on television Monday, but "we are ready for ground engagement with the enemy if they decide to enter."

Israel has been "emboldened by its recent battlefield gains against Hezbollah and appears intent on delivering a knockout blow to its archenemy," The Associated Press said. But "Hezbollah is a well-trained militia," and while its "capabilities remain unclear," a "ground operation marks a new and potentially risky phase of fighting" for Israel. Hezbollah fought Israel to a stalemate in their last war in 2006.

What next?

The Biden administration, worried that Israel's multi-front battle could escalate into a regional war with Iran, is sending a "few thousand" more troops to the Middle East, the Pentagon said Monday. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant the U.S. "agreed on the necessity of dismantling" Hezbollah's "attack infrastructure along the border," but he also "reaffirmed that a diplomatic resolution" is needed "as soon as feasible."

What happened

On Sunday Israel attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, hitting the three Iran-backed proxies as it amassed troops along its northern border for a possible ground invasion of Lebanon. Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon over the weekend killed longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top leaders of the militant group. Two weeks of Israeli attacks have killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, displaced up to a million others and nudged the region toward all-out war.

Who said what

Nasrallah's death is "major blow to Iran," weakening Tehran's "best armed and most well-equipped ally in the region," Reuters said. In a show of "nervousness by the Iranian authorities," Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been "taken to a secure location." The crumbling of Hezbollah has opened "fissures" in Iran's government, The New York Times said. Significantly, Khamenei "signaled that it would be Hezbollah, not Iran," that struck back, suggesting he's choosing "lying low in the interest of self-preservation" over "all-out war with Israel."

Israel didn't just kill Nasrallah and his senior leadership team, it also "eviscerated decades of myths and assumptions about Hezbollah's military might" and its stature as a "regional powerhouse," The Washington Post said. Hezbollah "appears to have gravely overestimated its own strength and underestimated Israel's willingness to take it on" and the "extent to which Israeli intelligence had penetrated the organization."

What next?

Hezbollah may have "become a victim of its own hubris," The Wall Street Journal said, but "Israel now risks falling into a similar trap, especially if it launches a ground invasion of Lebanon," where Hezbollah "retains thousands of battle-hardened fighters and a large arsenal." Hezbollah is expected to pick Hashem Safieddine, head of its executive council and Nasrallah's cousin, as its new leader.

A radical Islamist Shia political party and militant group based in Lebanon, Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US and other Western nations. But the Iran-backed group functions more like a state within the Lebanese state than a traditional terrorist outfit.

How does Hezbollah operate in Lebanon?

It has 13 lawmakers in the Lebanese parliament (out of 128), it runs an extensive network of social services – including clinics, schools and youth programmes – and it has a lucrative smuggling and money-laundering operation.

With a highly trained military wing, Hezbollah has been called the world's most heavily armed non-state actor. It claims to have 100,000 fighters (though independent estimates put it between 20,000 and 50,000), as well as a massive arsenal of small arms, drones and, according to the CIA, upwards of 150,000 rockets and missiles. It's a well-trained, technologically savvy, battle-hardened organisation.

When did it emerge?

During the Lebanese civil war, when Israel invaded over its border into southern Lebanon in 1982, in response to attacks from the exiled Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Southern Lebanon's largely Shia population, traditionally the poorest of the country's three big sectarian groups, was caught in the crossfire and took up arms against Israel. Seeing a chance to spread its Shia Islamic revolution, Iran's rulers provided funding and training to several Lebanese Shia groups, which united under the name Hezbollah – or "Party of God" – and fought a brutally effective guerilla campaign, pioneering suicide bombing as a weapon (it is blamed for the attack on a US Marine barracks in 1983 that killed 241).

When Israel finally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah won much credit from the Lebanese, and across the Arab world. Hassan Nasrallah, its leader since 1992, hailed it as "the first Arab victory in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict".

What does Hezbollah want?

Its founding 1985 manifesto declared that its aims were to drive the Israelis out of Lebanon and to eliminate the State of Israel – still a fundamental ambition today. It also aimed to oppose US "imperialism", to spread the Iranian revolution, and to create an Islamist state in Lebanon – which has a substantial Christian population. Hezbollah has since softened the latter goal, unveiling a new document in 2009 that said the group supports "true democracy". It still serves the interests of Iran, which the US says provides up to $700m a year in funding. But it has autonomy and its own specific aims; it should not be seen as a mere proxy.

How many wars has it fought in?

In 2006, Hezbollah sparked a new war with Israel with a cross-border raid, in which it killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others. The month-long conflict, in which some 1,100 Lebanese and about 160 Israelis were killed, ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire. Israel's campaign was also immensely destructive of Lebanese civilian infrastructure: it attacked Beirut airport and industry.

Hezbollah's next major conflict began in 2012, when it sent thousands of fighters to help Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad – a member of the Shia offshoot Alawite sect – crush a largely Sunni uprising. The group's fighters battled alongside Russian forces, experienced brutal urban combat, and emerged a formidable military force – but at a considerable cost to their image as freedom fighters in the Arab world.

What is its relationship to Hamas?

Hezbollah is a long-term ally of the Palestinian terrorist group, which is also backed by Iran. But relations have not always been warm. Hamas, a Sunni organisation, backed the Sunni rebels in Syria's civil war; after a rift, it reconciled with Hezbollah in 2019, when it became clear that Assad would remain in power.

Some Hamas officials have suggested that Hezbollah helped train and equip its fighters for the 7 October massacre in Israel last year; Nasrallah denies the claim, saying the slaughter was a "100% Palestinian" operation. However, Hezbollah expressed full-throated solidarity with Hamas following the atrocity. "Our hearts are with you," a top official said at a Beirut rally on 8 October. "Our history, our guns and our rockets are with you." And since the event, there has been a rise in clashes along the Israel-Lebanon border.

What has happened since 7 October?

Before it, Hezbollah's attacks had been sporadic. Since then, the group has launched more than 8,000 rockets at northern Israel and military positions on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and attacked military targets with drones and anti-tank missiles. About 60,000 people have been evacuated from northern Israel. In July, 12 Israeli children and teenagers from the Druze sect were killed in Majdal Shams, a town in the Golan Heights. Israel has responded with a series of targeted attacks on Hezbollah personnel, which escalated sharply last week.

How might Hezbollah respond?

Although Nasrallah's rhetoric has been bellicose, so far his response has been limited. In theory, a full attack on Israel would be devastating. Hezbollah has long-range precision-guided missiles which, if launched from its extensive network of defences and tunnels, could overwhelm Israeli defences, hitting Tel Aviv and other cities.

But there are good reasons for showing restraint. Firstly, Iran may be urging caution, because it doesn't want to expend the deterrent posed by its armed ally on Israel's border. Lebanon has also been in a dire economic crisis since 2019, with over 40% of the population in poverty. This has helped reduce support for Hezbollah. And the public remembers the devastating effects of the 2006 war; soon after, Nasrallah was asked whether, with hindsight, he would have ordered the raid that sparked it. "No, absolutely not," he said.

Almost one year on from the 7 October terrorist attacks by Hamas, Israel is on the verge of all-out war with Lebanon, leading to the prospect of the country fighting on two fronts. 

Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue the deadly airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon that have killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of thousands over the last few days. Hezbollah is also continuing its rocket attacks on northern Israel. At the same time, there is no let up in the war in Gaza, with Israeli forces still launching attacks on Hamas positions in the territory.

Prime Minister Netanyahu says he won't back down until his goals are achieved, but military analysts are sceptical the country can afford a war on two fronts. 

What did the commentators say?

"This war seems like the mother of all wars," said Dany Bahar, a senior fellow at the non-profit think tank the Center for Global Development. And "that means it is expensive", he told The Washington Post. The price paid by the economy has been "often lost in the turmoil and tragedy of the past year", said the newspaper. Israel's credit score has been downgraded, its GDP has fallen "sharply" and tourism is down 75% since Hamas's attack last year. 

Earlier this month, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had to request an emergency deficit increase. "Israeli economists are resigned to things getting worse," said The Economist. Any wartime government must fund its military, usually through deficit spending, but also stay "robust enough to clear its debts when peace arrives", meaning the "economy rests on a knife edge".

Israel's educated workers are leaving the country "in droves" as the war in Gaza has "ground" its economic sector to a standstill, said Adrian Finnigan, on Al Jazeera's "Counting the Cost". The economy – "once seen as an entrepreneurial engine" – is losing the trust of the international community. More than 46,000 businesses have closed and it is "challenging" to attract new talent to the country.

But this is not necessarily damaging the economy, said Eyal Winter, an economics professor at Lancaster University. Many of them are in the tech sector and can do their job from anywhere in the world. "They don't resign, they don't take a leave of absence," he said. They simply continue their work online. 

War could even benefit the economy "if conducted wisely", Israeli journalist Meirav Arlosoroff said in Haaretz. The threat from Hamas "has been lifted" and will not surface "for years to come", while "a 'good' war" with Hezbollah would probably leave it "battered and bruised enough" to stop it being a concern in the north.

There are two provisos, however: first, that no economic crisis arises in the meantime, and second, that any war with Hezbollah follows the example of the 2006 Lebanon war, a "relatively short conflict that ended decisively and damaged Hezbollah's military capabilities".

What next?

Arlosoroff's hopes for a short war look unlikely. Israel would have a true fight on its hands if full war broke out in Lebanon, as Hezbollah has a much more sophisticated military operation than Hamas, Yoel Guzansky, who served on Israel's National Security Council, told CNN. "Hezbollah is not Hamas."

The continued fighting means the mood is "pessimistic", despite ongoing diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire, said BBC. Netanyahu is under pressure from Israeli hard-liners to continue the attacks, while Hezbollah has said it will not stop until a ceasefire has been declared in Gaza. 

Ultimately, it is not the economy that will decide whether Israel fights on two fronts, said Winter, but whether the government has the support of the people. "And you may be surprised by the Israeli support to the war against Hezbollah."

What happened

Israel took steps to prepare for a ground invasion of Lebanon Wednesday as the U.S., France and other European and Arab nations scrambled to prevent a full-scale war, proposing an "immediate 21-day cease-fire across the Lebanon-Israel border to provide space for diplomacy."

Who said what

The cease-fire deal was worked out in 48 hours on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Its dozen signatories said the recent intensification of fighting is "intolerable and presents an unacceptable risk of a broader regional escalation." U.S. officials said they were optimistic Lebanon and Israel would accept the proposal, with Lebanon responsible for Hezbollah's compliance. 

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, told soldiers near the Lebanon border yesterday that ongoing Israeli airstrikes are "both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah." Israel has killed about 600 people in Lebanon since Monday, according to Lebanon's health ministry. Hezbollah has continued sending missiles into Israel, including its first aimed at Tel Aviv. Israeli air defenses shot down that ballistic missile, but Hezbollah faces the "consequential" choice to either "unleash more of its advanced weapons, striking deeper into Israel and potentially triggering a full-scale war," The Wall Street Journal said, "or hold back and risk diminishing its reputation as one of the fiercest fighting forces in the Middle East."

What next?

"Hell is breaking loose in Lebanon," U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said at an emergency Security Council meeting Wednesday night. "War is not inevitable," French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told the Security Council. "We are counting on both parties" to accept the 21-day cease-fire "without delay." Barrot is set to travel to Lebanon to try to persuade officials in Beirut.

A year of escalating violence between Hezbollah and Israel has exposed Lebanon's ineffectiveness as a state. While Hezbollah's militia is a designated terrorist organisation, and the world's biggest non-state army, the Iran-backed movement's political wing is the dominant force in the complex power-sharing arrangement of Lebanese politics.

The growing threat of an Israeli ground invasion into southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's stronghold, has put the Lebanese government's capacity to respond in the event of all-out war under scrutiny.

What did the commentators say?

Lebanese politics is "characterised by a corrupt, sectarian structure", after its many years of bloody civil war, said Dr Lina Khatib and Jon Wallace for Chatham House.

Religion plays a crucial and somewhat paralysing role. A Maronite Christian must serve as president, a Sunni Muslim as prime minister and a Shia Muslim as the speaker of Parliament. All religious sects are represented in the government, the military and the civil service, and political parties are "defined more by religious affiliations than economic or social policy".

The system may look like an attempt to "ensure equality", but it is more of a "division of power between the elites" rather than a recipe for "ensuring good governance". The effect is a "weak, corrupt, patronage-based system", and a government "largely made up of competing bureaucratic fiefdoms rather than a single unit attempting to govern the Lebanese state". 

Hezbollah is the "dominant Shia force in Lebanon's politics" – and the "most influential political organisation" in the country. "It probably could take over the Lebanese state by force, but it is far more effective to exercise power in Lebanon's weak state without taking on responsibilities of office."

The group effectively operates as a "state within a state", said The Times in an editorial. Its "heartland" is Southern Lebanon, a predominantly Shia Muslim area where the group stays within "easy striking distance" of Israel. That border area is a "no-go zone" for Israeli civilians, thanks to Hezbollah's Iran-supplied rockets – tens of thousands have already fled. 

Many Hezbollah leaders have been "culled" by exploding pagers and airstrikes, but the group still maintains an "enormous network of subterranean tunnels" shielding more troops and weapons – over a much wider area than those of Gaza. If Israel does mount a ground invasion, or even keep up its current level of airstrikes, the consequences for southern Lebanese civilians on the other side of the border will be "dire". 

But for too long, a "shadow terrorist state has poisoned the well of Lebanon's national life, depriving it of sovereignty, stability and prosperity", said The Times. "The demise of the so-called Party of God cannot come soon enough."

What next?

Hezbollah's militia is a designated terrorist group, but it is also a "legitimate and constitutional" political force, said Euronews. So when Hezbollah unilaterally targets Israel, Lebanon's other political forces are "completely paralysed".

Meanwhile, Lebanon's army is "nowhere to be seen", said the news site. It is "not even trying" to shoot down Israeli missiles. Its absence, and its "insufficient weaponry", casts doubt on Lebanon's "capacity to confront a major conflict".

Khalil Helou, an on-leave general and a professor of geopolitics at St Joseph University of Beirut, said the army had been "left to itself" in the crisis.

"Now whoever commands the army, whoever is the commander-in-chief of the army, they must take the decisions that they find suitable," he said.

If the Israeli army does turn airstrikes into a "boots-on-the-ground operation", the Lebanese military will be faced with a "major dilemma". 

"To confront Hezbollah is an immediate and automatic recipe for civil war," said Helou. The army's "absolute priority" is Lebanon's internal stability. It has never used its force to disarm Hezbollah, but has also avoided confrontation with Israel's forces when Israel invaded in 2006, despite the bombing of some of its bases. 

Should Israel launch a ground invasion, the most likely scenario is that the Lebanese army withdraws, and lets Israel and Hezbollah fight it out.

What happened

Israeli airstrikes killed at least 492 people in Lebanon Monday, including 35 children and 58 women, and wounded more than 1,600 others, Lebanon's health ministry said. Israel early this morning said it had struck about 1,600 Hezbollah targets and the operation was ongoing. Hezbollah fired about 250 rockets and drones into Israel Monday, Israel's military said.

Who said what

Monday was the "deadliest day of Israeli attacks in Lebanon since at least 2006," the last time Israel and Hezbollah engaged in all-out war, The New York Times said, and the "pace and intensity of the airstrikes" were even greater. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel does not "wait for the threat — we take action before it." He also recorded a message warning civilians in southern and eastern Lebanon to evacuate and "get out of harm's way now." Turkey said Israel was trying to "drag the entire region into chaos." 

Hezbollah has been firing rockets and drones at Israel since the Gaza war started following Hamas' Oct. 7 terrorist attack, and Israel has responded with it own strikes, but the dramatic escalation and rising civilian death toll in the past week mark a "very worrying shift," risking a "full-scale war," David Wood at the International Crisis Group said to The Washington Post. "Until now, there had been a real effort to minimize civilian casualties because that is what is likely to trigger a massive operation."

What next?

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said it was "in everyone's interest" to resolve this conflict "quickly and diplomatically." Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said that "in light of increased tensions in the Middle East," the U.S. is "sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel" to join the 40,000 troops stationed in the region.

The imminent risk of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah has put renewed focus on the Lebanese militia group and its role – and support – within the deeply divided country.

Dubbed a "state within a state", Hezbollah has "several concerns" to bear in mind when it comes to deciding its next steps, Jon Alterman, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox. 

The first is "maintaining Iranian support" and staying "aligned with Iran's assessments and regional strategy". The other is domestic. It's estimated that 85% of Lebanese people are now living below the poverty line. "The country's been reeling economically, and if Hezbollah seems to invite a devastating Israeli assault on Lebanon, then some number of Lebanese would consider that reckless and damaging," Alterman said.

What did the commentators say?

Hezbollah is "one of the most heavily-armed, non-state military forces in the world", said the BBC. Funded and equipped by Iran, the Shia group has been designated a terrorist organisation by the US and other Western governments, as well as by Israel, Gulf Arab countries and the Arab League.

Within Lebanon, however, it operates as a "legal political party and as a security force", effectively governing large swathes of the country in the south and east, said Foreign Affairs. 

Over three decades, Hezbollah has become a "political and social powerhouse" in Lebanon, said The Guardian, "running medical clinics, schools, a regional television network and even a hilltop museum that has been popular with European tourists". 

Yet the popularity of Hezbollah among Lebanese citizens remains "sharply divided across sectarian lines", according to polling carried out earlier this year by The Washington Institute think tank. Whereas 93% of Shias expressed a positive view of Hezbollah, with 89% saying they have a "very positive" opinion, only 34% of Sunnis and 29% of Christians said the same.

A nationally representative survey by Arab Barometer, carried out between February and April 2024, drew a similar conclusion. Despite Hezbollah's significant influence in the country, just 30% say they have "quite a lot or a great deal" of trust in the organisation. Once again levels of trust vary greatly by sect.

What next?

In October 2019, Hezbollah became a target of mass protests after "government mismanagement and years of slow growth" had saddled Lebanon with one of the world's highest public debt burdens, said the Council on Foreign Relations. "Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens disillusioned by the economic slump called for the government, including Hezbollah, to cede power to a new, technocratic leadership." 

But the war in Gaza has changed public perception of the group. Both the Washington Institute poll and the Arab Barometer survey recorded a jump in approval since they were last carried out in 2020 and 2022 respectively, despite Lebanon's recent economic and political woes. Tellingly, support for Hezbollah – specifically its role in regional politics – has risen not just in the Shia population but across other major sects in the country.

This "likely points to sympathy for Hezbollah's stance toward Israel rather than deep support for the group itself", said Foreign Affairs. Still, if Israel invades Lebanon to attack Hezbollah, support for the organisation would "likely rise further".

Lebanon's major communities have "largely been consistent in urging restraint and would prefer to see Hezbollah avoid a war with Israel", said Rola El-Husseini, an associate professor from Lund University in Sweden, on The Conversation. But should war break out, the various Lebanese sects will "probably all rally around Hezbollah, as was the case in 2006".

At 3:30 pm on Tuesday, hundreds of pagers across Lebanon began beeping. A few seconds later, the devices — all believed to belong to members of the Lebanese Shiite Muslim political party Hezbollah — exploded. At least nine people were killed and thousands more wounded by the powerful blasts which ripped through homes and public spaces alike, said Lebanese officials. One day later, during a public funeral for some of those killed, a second wave of remote detonations rocked the already anxious nation, as walkie-talkies and other portable electronic devices exploded in unison. At least 14 people were killed and hundreds more hurt following Wednesday's detonations, said the Lebanese Health Ministry.

While not officially confirmed as such, the pager bombs are widely understood to be the result of an intricate Israeli intelligence operation involving intercepted devices implanted with explosives before being dispersed to Hezbollah personnel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not address the operation directly in a brief statement posted on X, and instead reiterated his promise to bring home the approximately 60,000 Israeli residents who were evacuated from the country's north as a result of continual Hezbollah rocket fire.

Netanyahu's promise notwithstanding, where can Israel, Lebanon, and the wider region go from here? After nearly a year of war on its southwestern border, is Israel in the early stages of opening another front to its north?

A 'tactical success' with 'no clear strategic effect'

The suspected pager sabotage "could have been a brilliant and innovative operation" showcasing that for Israel's "imaginative spy craft planners the sky is really the limit," Yossi Melman said at Haaretz. Instead, the "implementation was wrong, and the whole project is unlikely to live up to its planners' expectations as a strategic game-changer."

The fundamental question "hovering" over the operation, said The Washington Post, is "why now?" With Israeli domestic politics at a boiling point, and international efforts to contain the ongoing violence already engulfing Gaza, observers have been left questioning the "timing of the attack and what it signaled about Israel's intentions in Lebanon." The lack of a wide-scale military follow-up suggests that the "timing wasn't the optimal one," former senior Mossad operative Oded Eilam said to the Post.

The one-two punch of explosive mobile devices was a "tactical success that had no clear strategic effect," The New York Times said. While the operation "impressed many Israelis" in terms of sheer complexity and operational scope, "their core frustration remained: Hezbollah is still entrenched on Israel's northern border, preventing tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel from returning home." To that end, with Netanyahu, it is "hard to tell how much of this whispered campaign is really about military intentions" compared to "domestic politics and the prime minister's constant need to tend to his coalition to keep him in power," The Guardian said.

'Limits, rules, and red lines'

Although longstanding low-grade fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah has intensified in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, the mobile device attacks "eclipse previous provocations and, cutting as it does to the heart of Hezbollah, may force the retaliation that both its leadership and its allies seem to prefer avoiding," Al Jazeera said.

In his first public response to the bombings, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Israel of crossing all "limits, rules, and red lines," calling the attack a "declaration of war." But Nasrallah's tone "indicated that the group will measure its reaction" so as not to "spark a major war with Israel," said the BBC. The attacks may create a "snowballing effect of pressure" for the group, The Jerusalem Post said, however, "Hezbollah is in a position where it will want to weigh its options with Iran and other Iranian-backed proxies, such as the Houthis and militias in Iraq, as to its next steps."

While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called on "all parties to maintain restraint and avoid escalation on the border between Israel and Lebanon," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has postponed his planned visit to Israel this coming weekend, just days after telling Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that "priority should be given to reaching a deal to release the hostages held by Hamas and establish a ceasefire in Gaza, and to reach a diplomatic solution on the border with Lebanon that would allow civilians to return to their homes," Axios said.

What happened

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said yesterday that Israel's detonation of thousands of sabotaged pagers and walkie-talkies this week "crossed all boundaries and red lines" and the country would "face a severe and fair punishment." As Nasrallah's speech was broadcast from an undisclosed location, Israeli fighter jets flew low over Beirut. Last night, Israeli jets carried out more than 70 airstrikes in Lebanon, purportedly targeting about 100 Hezbollah rocket launchers.

Who said what

The exploding handheld devices, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands, were a "huge and severe blow" to Hezbollah, Nasrallah said. But the attack, which could be considered "war crimes or a declaration of war," won't stop the militant group's rockets into northern Israel. He reiterated the attacks would stop when Israel ceased attacking Gaza.

The pager bombs "humiliated" Hezbollah, "piercing its reputation as one of Israel's most sophisticated foes," The New York Times said. But a forceful retaliation could "ignite a wider escalation" as many of the group's fighters lost hands and eyesight in the explosions. In this "new phase of the war," military action will ensure Israelis can return to their homes near the Lebanon border, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. "As time goes by, Hezbollah will pay an increasing price."

What next?

The escalating attacks were a "blow to President Joe Biden's beleaguered efforts" to get a Gaza ceasefire, The Washington Post said. As the U.S. and its European allies urged Israel and Hezbollah to cool their fight, "Washington's grip on the crisis appears more tenuous than ever."

The White House has insisted that a diplomatic solution between Israel and Hezbollah was "achievable" and "urgent", even as Israel launched major strikes on Lebanon.

After senior diplomats from the US, Britain, Germany, France and Italy met in Paris yesterday, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, urged against "escalatory actions by any party" and Britain called for a ceasefire between the two foes.

What did the commentators say?

The "deadly explosion" of pagers and walkie-talkies "dealt another blow" to Joe Biden's "beleaguered efforts" to reduce tensions in the Middle East, said John Hudson in the Washington Post.

Although "the absence of a full-blown war" between Israel and Hezbollah has been "touted by US officials as a core achievement" of the past 11 months, the recent escalation means "Washington's grip on the crisis appears more tenuous than ever".

The US has "sought to downplay its ability to tamper tensions", said Al Jazeera. It provides Israel with $3.8bn in military aid annually as well as "staunch diplomatic support" but "pushed" on whether the Biden administration could prevent a wider war, Washington said that was “not just a question for the United States”.

After Blinken called for restraint, the UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, "went further", said Politico's London Playbook, calling for the first time during the current conflict in southern Lebanon for an "immediate cease-fire".

A war involving both Israeli and the Lebanese armed forces, "the latter still receiving support from UK troops inside Lebanon", would be a "diplomatic nightmare for Britain", said Larisa Brown in The Times, because London has "tried to be a friend of both".

Experts are "divided" on whether the pager attacks "weakened Hezbollah to the extent it's more willing to accept a diplomatic agreement", or if the group "will indeed act" on its threat to retaliate, said Shannon K Kingston for ABC News.

"Oftentimes", Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told the broadcaster, "shows of force like this that knock one combatant back on its heels could be openings to actually secure a negotiated settlement".

But Dan Byman, a senior adviser to the State Department and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Hezbollah is now much less likely to accept any offered settlement.

"It would be hard for Hezbollah to cut a deal after this humiliation", he said, because "it would look weak and as if you were caving under Israeli pressure", which it "would be".

What next?

The UN Security Council was scheduled to discuss the crisis this afternoon. The "emergency meeting" was requested by Algeria and will be "dedicated to discussing the Israeli cyber-terror attacks", said The Palestine Chronicle.

The UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon has already urged de-escalation, saying it had witnessed "a heavy intensification of the hostilities across the Blue Line” and throughout its area of operations".

Israel's Ambassador to the UN has already "lambasted" Iran for "pulling the strings" of "terrorist" groups across the Middle East, said The Algemeiner. Danny Danon said the Security Council "and the world" must "wake up to the reality of the threat Iran poses".

But a chink of light appeared in the Israeli media today, noted The Guardian. Reports emerged that Tel Aviv had submitted a new ceasefire proposal to the US, "under which all hostages held in Gaza would be released at the same time in exchange for ending the war" and the Hamas leader, along with his family and thousands of operatives, would be allowed to leave Gaza for a third country "through a safe passage".

What happened

At least 20 people were killed in Lebanon Wednesday and more than 450 injured after Hezbollah-issued walkie-talkies detonated, the government said. Lebanon was still reeling from thousands of exploding Hezbollah pagers that killed 12 people, including two young children, and wounded about 2,800 on Tuesday. The sophisticated remote blasts were widely attributed to Israel, which hasn't confirmed or denied its involvement.

Who said what

The scale of the sabotage "deeply unsettled" Hezbollah, The Wall Street Journal said. The explosions maimed hundreds of its fighters, revealed serious security breaches and "exposed the identities of thousands of Hezbollah operatives, many of whom worked covertly — a coup for Israeli intelligence and a likely surprise for some Hezbollah members' relatives and neighbors."

The explosives-laced pagers, from an Israeli intelligence front company in Hungary, "began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers," The New York Times said, citing 12 officials briefed on the operation. Production ramped up after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah ordered militants to ditch their phones and carry the low-tech communication devices in February. The exploding walkie-talkies had "new batteries that arrived in a recent shipment" and were "distributed to a narrower range of Hezbollah members," the Journal said.

The "potentially indiscriminate casualties" from exploding handheld devices in homes, shops, cars, cafes — "where the holder of the pager happened to be" — raised concerns, The Associated Press said. "Weaponizing an object used by civilians is strictly prohibited" under international law, said Mary Ellen O'Connell, a law professor at Notre Dame, to the outlet.

What next?

Nasrallah was expected to deliver a major speech today. The United Nations Security Council is scheduled to meet Friday to discuss the pager blasts, at Algeria's request.

Israel's intelligence agency Mossad is reportedly behind the operation that caused thousands of Hezbollah's pagers to detonate across Lebanon. 

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the "unprecedented" security breach among Lebanon's armed militant group. It killed at least 12 people and injured more than 3,000, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry – "including many of the group's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut". But two senior sources told Reuters that it was the work of Mossad.

Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed group, has vowed revenge against Iran's long-time foe Israel, whom it holds "fully responsible" for the pager attacks. American and other officials briefed on the operation have also pointed the finger at Israel, said The New York Times. After nearly a year of escalating tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Hezbollah, "most people" in Lebanon assume that the exploding pagers are Mossad's work, said The Times. If so, it would "simply be the most striking example yet" of the intelligence agency's methods.

How far back does this go?

Mossad has a "decades-long" history of using telephones and explosives to track and assassinate targets abroad, said the Financial Times.

But the practice exploded into the world's consciousness in 1972, after the Palestinian group Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage during the Olympics in Munich. All the hostages were killed – nine died in a botched rescue attempt, along with five of the eight terrorists – in what became known as the Munich massacre. 

In revenge, Israel launched Operation Wrath of God, a covert years-long campaign of car bombs and booby-tracked packages to kill members of the militant group and of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Most famously, Mossad operatives "swapped out the marble base" of the phone used by Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris, for a replica "packed" with explosives. When he answered the phone, "a nearby Israeli team remotely detonated the explosives", killing Hamshari. The operation became "part of Israeli spy legend".

Have there been other notable operations?

Too many to count, said Foreign Policy. But Mossad's early rudimentary operations quickly developed into more sophisticated methods combined with advanced surveillance and cyber capabilities.

In 1979, the assassination of PLO leader Ali Hassan Salameh with a car bomb in Beirut showcased the group's growing confidence with explosives.

Most prominently, in 1996 Israel's internal security agency managed to trick Hamas's chief bomb maker into answering a phone call from his father. The phone had been brought into Gaza by a collaborator, and Yahya Ayyash was killed when the hidden explosives were detonated. The "sophisticated" assassination of a man known as "the Engineer" "deprived Hamas of a key and uniquely talented asset".

What about the Iranian scientists?

In the past two decades, Mossad's primary focus has been Iran – in particular, its shadowy nuclear and missile programmes. 

In 2004, Israel's government ordered Mossad to "prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons", said The New York Times. Over the next few years, the agency carried out "a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks" on Iran's nuclear facilities, and continued "methodically picking off the experts" leading the weapons programme. Its agents assassinated "five nuclear scientists and wounded another". 

The notorious culmination came in 2020, when Iran's chief nuclear weapons scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot dead by a remotely controlled machine gun. Iran blamed Israel, but Tehran's "far-fetched" explanation for what happened – a "killer robot" – was "widely mocked" and assumed to be a cover-up for its own failures.

It was a "straight-out-of-science-fiction story", said the NYT. But this time, "there really was a killer robot".

How does the pager operation differ?

Even the "futuristic" assassination of Fakhrizadeh required "human hands on the ground" to get the gun into the country and into position, said The Times.

We don't yet know why the pagers exploded – whether packed with explosive substances or altered in some way – but the execution must have been more "hands off" to remotely detonate up to a thousand devices at the same time.

The 1996 assassination of Ayyash, one of Israel's "more celebrated operations", still relied on an informant to plant the booby-trapped device, said The Spectator. "The complexity, scale and scope of the pager-bombs make the Ayyash hit look like child's play."

The militant group had only turned to pagers to avoid Israeli surveillance of smartphones. But in the same way that "killing Ayyash didn't stop Hamas", the "pager bombs won't stop Hezbollah", said the magazine.

What happened

Israel and Hezbollah exchanged their heaviest fire in years yesterday as Israeli fighter jets struck thousands of missile launchers in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah sent hundreds of rockets and drones into Israel. The intense cross-border skirmish was a "dramatic but contained escalation that stopped short of all-out war," The Washington Post said.

Who said what

Hezbollah's attack was a "preliminary response" to Israel's July 30 assassination of top commander Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Sunday in a televised address. The group could strike Israel again if it determines the damage "was not satisfactory," but "for now we consider the response over." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the preemptive airstrikes were "not the final word," though an Israeli military spokesperson said almost all Hezbollah rockets and drones were shot down and the attack did "very little damage."

Three Hezbollah-aligned fighters were killed in Lebanon during Israel's attack and one Israeli Navy officer died. But the "heavy firepower and lack of civilian casualties might allow both sides to claim a sort of victory and step back" from a "long-feared war," The Associated Press said. Hezbollah wants "to say that we've registered a response," Mohanad Hage Ali, a Beirut-based fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said to The New York Times, "and now move on from this phase of anticipation of a wider escalation."

What next?

Hezbollah "has said it will halt its attacks along the border if there is a cease-fire in Gaza," the AP said. But Israel and Hamas left another round of Gaza peace talks in Cairo yesterday with no agreement.

What happened

The Israeli military on Tuesday announced it carried out a missile strike against a Hezbollah commander in suburban Beirut. The attack is believed to be retaliation for a rocket launch from Lebanon that killed at least a dozen children this week in the Druze Arab village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the incident. 

Who said what

The attack on Majdal Shams "crossed a red line," Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. Israel and Hezbollah militants have been "exchanging near-daily strikes for the past 10 months against the backdrop of the war in Gaza," the Associated Press said. Those volleys have largely been kept at a "low level that would not escalate into full-on war." The intended target of Tuesday's strike was Fuad Shukr, a "senior Hezbollah official and close adviser to Hassan Nasrallah, the group's secretary general," The New York Times said. It is unclear whether Shukr survived.

What next?

Diplomats have scrambled to "fend off" any escalation into a full war between the neighboring states, The Washington Post said. Intensified violence along Israel's border with Lebanon is not "inevitable," American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said to reporters on Tuesday. However, "if Israel is attacked, yes, we will help Israel defend itself," he added. "We have been clear about that from the very beginning." 

"What I worry about every single day is that a miscalculation or an accident… hits a bus full of children, or hits another kind of civilian target, that could force the political system in either country to retaliate in a way that slides us into war."

US envoy Amos Hochstein's grim prediction from May, as told to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, could be about to come true. Israel is preparing to retaliate against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which it blames for a rocket attack on the occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 Israeli children over the weekend.

"Even though both sides probably understand that a fuller or deeper-scale war is in neither side's interest," he said, events could force them into a full-blown conflict that would have devastating consequences for them both, and the region.

What did the commentators say?

Since the Hamas attacks on 7 October, war between Israel and Hezbollah has constantly appeared "at once imminent and at least a few weeks away", said UnHerd.

Despite numerous tit-for-tat strikes – which have killed more than 450 people in Lebanon since October and nearly 50 Israelis – a "consensus" had been emerging that an "all-out war would not happen until autumn at the earliest – and not before Israel had wound down its campaign in Gaza".

Saturday's strike, resulting in the biggest single loss of life in cross-border attacks since October, seems to have changed that calculation and hardened public opinion inside Israel.

Amid intense international efforts to de-escalate tensions, and with neither side wanting a full-blown conflict, the question everyone is asking is does Saturday's attack represent the "miscalculation or accident" Hochstein warned of?

It is still "unlikely due to structural factors," said Foreign Policy, including the "desire by both to avoid a destructive regional war, and Washington's uncertain security support for Israel in such a military conflict".

The problem facing Israel is that it "cannot go it alone in a drawn-out war against multiple, well-armed foes from multiple directions". Israel will respond, but "perhaps like the choreographed aerial tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran in April, it will most likely refrain from escalating to the point of no return".

What next?

The risk is that both sides continue to box themselves in rhetorically and strategically so that the only way they can emerge without losing face to their respective publics is to go to war.

Senior Israeli officials are publicly using strong language to warn Hezbollah that fighting could break out at any time. "We are on the precipice of potentially a regional or world war. Iran is behind all the aggression in the region and their ambitions are global," Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Israel's special envoy for foreign affairs, told Politico. Saturday's "murder of those innocent children has crossed a red line".

But with Hezbollah – "Iran's strongest proxy", which is estimated to have at least 150,000 missiles and rockets pointing south – the "fear is of a war that would devastate Lebanon, and do serious damage to Israel", said CNN.

As Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CNN: "It has the potential to create a situation that we have never seen in this region: a major regional war, which could draw in the Gulf." He warned this could also lead to direct confrontation between the United States and Iran.

"As the temperature rises in the region, so do concerns," said Politico. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatened on Sunday to send troops into Israel to intervene on behalf of Palestinians.

With his popularity at home plummeting, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing "all he can for his political survival", said the BBC's Mark Lowen. While a second front against Hezbollah could "simply be unfeasible" militarily right now, the fear is that "weakened and under pressure from far-right bellicose ministers, he may now be tempted to expand the fight into Lebanon in part for domestic political aims".

A permanent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas would "likely forestall a war in Lebanon", said Foreign Affairs. Hezbollah "remains committed to halting hostilities if Israel strikes a cease-fire agreement with Hamas in Gaza" and "amid the long war there and increasing tensions in the West Bank, Israel would likely prefer a diplomatic resolution to the tensions on its northern border".

But what each side wants and what it will get could be two very different outcomes. As Hochstein warned: "Wars have started historically around the world even when leaders didn't want them, because they had no choice."

World leaders mounted a diplomatic effort to dissuade Israel from increasing its attacks on Lebanon amid fears that an all-out war would envelop the region in response to a rocket strike that killed 12 people, including children, in the occupied Golan Heights.

Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pledged a heavy response to the attack on the town of Majdal Shams. "Hezbollah is responsible for this and they will pay the price," he said.

Hezbollah "firmly denies" it was behind the strike that killed children playing on a soccer field, suggesting it may have been an Israeli interceptor missile that went astray.

As tensions rose French President Emmanuel Macron told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that France remained committed to doing "everything to avoid a new escalation in the region."

So far the skirmishes that have killed both civilians and soldiers in Lebanon and Israel have been "relatively contained," said the BBC. But now "the question is how far Israel will go in response to Saturday's tragedy."

A "war against Lebanon is a regional war," said Lebanon's Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib to CNN.

"One rash move – one miscalculation – could trigger a catastrophe that goes far beyond the border, and frankly, beyond imagination."

That was the stark assessment of UN Secretary-General António Guterres last Friday, as tensions between Israel and Lebanon's Iran-backed militia group Hezbollah threaten to boil over into open war for the first time in nearly two decades.

Since Hamas's 7 October attacks on Israeli citizens, Western officials have been working tirelessly to try to prevent the war in Gaza from spilling over. But despite "strenuous efforts and stern warnings", the risk of an "expanding regional conflict is now rising by the hour", said Politico.

If that happens "it will be nothing short of a game-changer", Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told CNBC. Compared to Hamas, Hezbollah is "a much more formidable fighting force and widely recognised as the most powerful non-state military in the world", he said. Its involvement would have huge consequences "not only for Israel, but also for the entire region".

What did the commentators say?

Founded in 1982 by a group of radical Shia clerics in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, Hezbollah, or the Party of God, has a "well-resourced" medium-sized fighting force "that can defeat most Arab armies", said Time.

With backing from Iran estimated by the US to run to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, recent estimates by the Atlantic Council put Hezbollah's manpower at roughly 30,000 fighters and 20,000 reservists. Yet this number "likely does not include the thousands of non-combatant workers and volunteers across the country, including women who are not allowed to be official members of Hezbollah", said the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. The US State Department said that these numbers also fail to account for the thousands of members and non-member supporters worldwide.

ABC News reported that thousands of fighters from other Iran-backed groups in the Middle East are ready to come to Lebanon to join Hezbollah in its battle with Israel "if the simmering conflict escalates into a full-blown war".

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on Wednesday that militant leaders from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other countries have previously offered to send tens of thousands of fighters to help Hezbollah, but that the group already has more than 100,000 fighters.

Since the last full-blown war with Israel in 2006, Hezbollah has "significantly expanded its arsenal and capabilities", said The Guardian. This includes acquiring suicide drones that Israel has struggled to counter, as well as anti-aircraft missile capability and an array of missiles that experts now believe number between 120,000 and 200,000, making it "the world's best-armed non-state group".

It has also gained vital battlefield experience. Hezbollah played a crucial role supporting the Assad regime during the brutal Syrian civil war, and has spent much of the last decade engaged in fighting in Iraq and Yemen.

What next?

After a short pause for the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday, Hezbollah has resumed its daily rocket and drone attacks along Israel's northern border, with its fighters and commanders being targeted by Israeli strikes in response.

Nasrallah has made it clear that Hezbollah is not currently seeking all-out war – and that his forces will continue their current wave of attacks for as long as the fighting in Gaza continues. He also warned that "no place" in Israel would be safe if a fully-fledged conflict breaks out.

As of today, The Spectator said, "the tactical advantage is clearly with Israel". And more than a third (36%) of Israelis believe the country should launch an immediate attack, a poll from the Jewish People Policy Institute found.

The reality is "neither side will fight with kid gloves – both have the capacity to inflict terrible damage on the other", said Politico. "Israel has the ability to flatten Lebanon and has warned it will do so in the event of war – what's happened to Gaza only reinforces that threat. And Hezbollah isn't the Hezbollah of 2006. It's much better armed" and "has made clear it will take the fight right into the heart of Israel."

If war against Hezbollah does begin, the Gaza fighting will have been only an "overture", said journalist and Middle East analyst Jonathan Spyer in The Spectator. "And if Tehran's most prized proxy is threatened with destruction, the prospect of the direct entry of Iran and its remaining proxies into the fight will be very real."

Israel is already fighting a war against Hamas in Gaza. Now it may be ready to expand the battle to Hezbollah. Israeli leaders are contemplating a "limited war" against the Islamic group in Lebanon, Axios said, because low-level fighting between the two sides has "dramatically escalated" in recent weeks. The Biden administration is working to discourage that idea, warning that an attack on Lebanon "could push Iran to intervene" and make a limited war not so limited. 

"A full-blown war appears to have become more likely," Nadeen Ebrahim said at CNN. Clashes between the two sides "have grown in number and scale" since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, forcing the evacuation of thousands of Israeli civilians from the area. The most notable escalation? An attack on northern Israel that caused wildfires to break out across the region. "Whoever thinks that they can hurt us and that we will sit idly by is making a big mistake," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

What did the commentators say?

"As Hezbollah escalates, Israel must fight back," Richard Goldberg said in The New York Post. More than 100,000 civilians have been evacuated from the northern Israel region bordering Lebanon, and cannot return safely "without security guarantees" that will not be satisfied by a "phony" cease-fire deal. The Biden administration should cease its efforts to restrain Israel as it fights back against its Iran-backed enemies, said Goldberg. "Americans would never surrender to a Hezbollah-like terror threat on our own border," he added. "Biden should not demand that of Israel, either."

"Israel is about to make a disastrous mistake in Lebanon," Joel D. Parker said in Haaretz. Israel leaders have performed miserably in the war against Hamas, stumbling diplomatically and creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza that has prompted criticism even from close allies like the United States. Similar images from a war in Lebanon would invite a "global backlash" and even a censure from the United Nations. "It's essential that … Israel does not repeat the mistakes it is making fighting the Gaza War," Parker said. A war against Hezbollah might be justified, but "Israel needs to think hard about the pitfalls before it jumps into them headfirst."

What next?

"Despite the escalation, analysts say that both sides realize a full-scale war would pose significant risks," said The New York Times. Lebanon is reeling from the effects of a "historic economic collapse" that would be compounded by an invasion. And nobody wants a wider regional war. But Netanyahu is under pressure from right-wing allies in the Israeli government to launch an attack. The Biden administration is trying to bring both sides to negotiations, "but Hezbollah says it will not negotiate until the war in Gaza ends."

This creates a paradox, The Economist said. "Diplomacy, not war, is the preferred outcome on both sides." But it is not clear that "lasting calm" is at all possible between Israel and Hezbollah, given the decades of conflict behind them. "Even the best diplomatic outcome, Israeli officers warn, would be temporary," the outlet added. For Israel, which already has one war on its hands, there are no perfect options. Said one Israeli official: "There is no good timing to go to war with them." 

Amid the violence that has exploded since Hamas' attacks in October last year, dating app users in Israel and Lebanon appear to be witnessing a Shakespearean twist to the tragedies all around them.

The two countries are "on the brink of war", said The National, but residents are reporting that apps are increasingly showing them potential matches with residents from the other side of the border. More than 60% of Tinder profiles in Lebanon in February were Israeli, said L'Orient-Le Jour.

What is causing it?

The phenomenon appears to be the unexpected side effect of Israeli forces' interference with GPS signals. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "ramped up" the technique in an effort to "thwart" drone attacks from Hezbollah and Hamas, Haaretz reported in October. 

There are two primary types of interference, according to CRFS: jamming and spoofing. GPS jamming is a "relatively uncomplicated technique" that involves producing a radio frequency signal powerful enough to "drown out" transmissions from GPS satellites. The target will be "instantly aware that something is wrong" as it will not be able to produce a geolocation result.

Spoofing, on the other hand, is a "more insidious form of attack". Instead of blocking a user from being able to see their location, it sends them "false" information that suggests they are somewhere that the user will know they are not. For example, it could be used to "tell a ship out at sea that it is currently located on land". This is a far more targeted version of interference than jamming.  

It seems jamming is causing the dating app geolocation confusion. Israel has long been using advanced technology like drones and GPS to defend its borders, according to The Times of Israel, but this appears to be the first time this match-making mishap on dating apps has been recorded.

What has the reaction been?

A number of people in Israel and Lebanon have taken to social media to share the "surprising matches" they have started receiving on dating apps, said The National. 

"I think Israelis and Lebanese alike have grown accustomed to total separation to the point where encountering the 'enemy' is basically unthinkable," a Tel Aviv resident, told The National. "Now, with a little bit of GPS jamming, these two enemies are casually swiping past each other."

However, these minor interactions may only serve to remind Lebanese and Israelis of the seemingly insurmountable divisions separating the two countries. 

"I keep seeing them and they're absolutely gorgeous, but I can't do anything because we're divided by an apartheid wall and a genocidal army that doesn't take too well to Arabs," a Lebanese dating app user told the news site.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the worst terrorist attack in the history of Iran, which risks pushing the already unstable Middle East one step closer to regional conflict.

At least 84 people were killed when two blasts "ripped through the crowds" in the city of Kerman in southern Iran, said The Guardian, near the tomb of Qasem Soleimani on the fourth anniversary of his assassination by the US. The senior Revolutionary Guards commander had been "a staunch enemy" of Islamic State (IS), which "resents the damage he did to its cause in Iraq and Syria".

Iran initially blamed both the US and Israel, leading to fears of an all-out confrontation. The bombing came less than 24 hours after Israel assassinated the deputy head of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, in Lebanon, provoking an angry response from Iranian proxy Hezbollah. 

With the West already threatening military action against Iran-backed Houthi rebels attacking shipping in the Red Sea, both Tuesday's strike on Lebanese soil and Wednesday's bombings in Iran risk increasing tension between Iran, Israel and the US.

What happened?

The site of the attack was "highly symbolic", said the Financial Times (FT). Known as Iran's "shadow commander", Soleimani was the country's most powerful military figure and is "revered as a national hero by the Islamic regime and its supporters". 

He was killed in a US drone strike on Baghdad in 2020 ordered by the then president Donald Trump, who described him as "the number one terrorist anywhere in the world". 

Early confusion over the cause of Wednesday's bombing – after the mayor of Kerman said it was an accidental gas explosion – quickly gave way to speculation and blame. Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi flatly accused the "criminal America and Zionist regime", warning they would pay "a very high price", while Soleimani's successor, Ismail Qaani, also blamed both Israel and the US for the "terror attack". 

Iranian officials pointed out that the bombings took place the day after Iranian opposition figure Vahid Beheshti had appeared at Israel's parliament urging the direct targeting of Iran. As recently as last week, a senior Iranian commander was killed during Israeli air strikes in Syria.

Who was behind the attack?

Iran has "multiple foes", noted The Associated Press, "including exile groups, militant organisations and state actors". But based on the target and the methods used, Islamic State was assumed by many to have been the culprit. A senior Biden official said the explosions bore the hallmarks of IS, which is composed of loose affiliates around the Muslim world.

On Thursday, the terrorist group posted a statement on its affiliate Telegram channels claiming that two of its members had detonated explosive belts. The statement, titled "And Kill Them Wherever You Find Them", named the two bombers (who were brothers) and said they targeted a gathering of "polytheists". 

But the group offered "no further proof", said CNN, and their account of the blasts "differs from that given by Iranian media". The death toll provided by IS was "significantly higher" than that reported by Iranian officials.

Is Islamic State back?

Put simply, it never went away.

For years, Sunni extremist groups including IS have conducted large-scale attacks against civilians in the Shiite-majority Iran. IS considers the Shia branch of Islam to be heretical, and has previously targeted shrines and religious sites in Iran, which is led by a theocratic government ruled by Shiite clerics.

The bombing in Iran was "the latest bloody episode" in IS’s targeting of Iran, which it considers "an irredeemable sectarian foe", said The New York Times. The Iranian authorities have claimed to have thwarted at least a dozen more IS attacks, said the paper. 

IS Khorasan Province, its much-feared branch in Afghanistan, has "repeatedly threatened Iran" over its polytheism, and has claimed responsibility for several attacks on the country, the most recent being in 2022 when a gunman killed 13 people at a shrine in Shiraz. 

Although there is "no love lost" between IS and Iran, a former Pentagon official in the Trump administration told the paper, "it does seem like an odd time to launch an attack with the current conflict in Gaza and the unified Muslim support for the Palestinians".

What happens next?

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has vowed a "harsh response" to the attacks. The president has cancelled a scheduled trip to Turkey, and the country will want to limit the amount of traffic crossing the border with Afghanistan, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian.

There is "no sign" that Iran will take swift retribution for the attack, said Wintour. However, it will attempt to "harness a wave of sympathy in the Islamic world to press its call for an end to what it regards as the US's destabilising interventions in the Middle East".

Hamas has blamed Israel for an explosion that killed its deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut on Tuesday.

The group said Al-Arouri, one of its founders, was killed by an Israel Defense Forces drone in a "cowardly assassination". It added that the blast in Lebanon highlighted Israel's "failure" to "achieve any of its aggressive goals in the Gaza Strip". Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the incident.

For Israel, the explosion also risks escalating already heightened tensions with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has said the "dangerous development" will not "go without a response or punishment".

'A serious blow'

Even before the war in Gaza, the rhetoric maintained by Hezbollah was that any assassination by Israel on Lebanese soil would initiate a "harsh" response, said Amos Harel at Haaretz. However, things "look a bit different now, in light of the war", and though Hezbollah has "paid its dues" with daily attacks on Israel across its border, it has carefully limited them to "remain below the level of war" and avoid escalation. Following through on its promise to respond would undo that, reducing its "room to manoeuvre and increase the chances of a mutual miscalculation".

 A "significant response" from Hezbollah over the alleged assassination would potentially send the "conflict spiralling into an all-out war on the northern border", agreed The Times of Israel, something both sides may have initially wanted to avoid. What may be different about this particular killing, however, is that al-Arouri was "regarded as close" with the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and was scheduled to meet him the day after his death.

The location of the attack, in Beirut's southern suburb of Dahiyeh, "a neighbourhood that is a stronghold" for Hezbollah, is also important, said Nicole Johnston at Sky News. The strike there represents a "serious blow" to the Iranian-backed group "on their home turf", and could be the moment that intensifies the fighting from the "calibrated and contained" approach it has had so far.

'Campaign of assassinations'

The killing of Al-Arouri is the "first strike in a campaign of assassinations overseas" that Israel has promised since the Hamas attack on 7 October, said Jason Burke in The Guardian. As an "influential" leader and Hamas's "main link" to Iran and Hezbollah, Al-Arouri was almost certainly a "carefully chosen" target, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling the press in November that he had instructed the Mossad to take out key Hamas leaders "wherever they are".

Though immediate questions turn to the nature of the Hezbollah response, the assassination will "alarm the wider Middle East" and stoke "fears attacks like this could happen anywhere, at any time", added Johnston at Sky News. There are "top leaders of the political wing of Hamas" located in Qatar as well as Lebanon, and they are known to "frequently visit Egypt and Turkey", potentially spreading the reach of the war in Gaza.

The consequences of assassinations are "often very unpredictable", concluded Burke, and the "strategic fallout" for Israel "could be very significant". Israel's risk in killing Al-Arouri in Beirut could lead to a situation it has "sought to avoid", fighting in a "two-front war" with Hezbollah and Hamas.

As the Israel-Hamas war rages in Gaza, could the Lebanon-based Hezbollah enter the fray? Here's everything you need to know: 

What is Hezbollah?

A Shiite Muslim political party and militant group based in Lebanon. Formed by revolutionary guerillas, the Iran-backed Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and many other Western nations. But the virulently anti-Israel group functions more like a state-within-a-state in Lebanon than a traditional terrorist outfit. It has dozens of lawmakers in the Lebanese parliament, runs an extensive network of social services — including clinics, schools and youth programs — and has a lucrative smuggling and money-laundering operation. With a highly trained military wing, Hezbollah has been called the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor. It has some 20,000 active fighters and 30,000 reservists, as well as a massive arsenal of small arms, drones and an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles — including several hundred long-range missiles that can reach across Israel. "They are arming to the teeth," said Naveed Ahmed, a Middle East–based analyst. "It’s a very skillful and advanced military organization."

What are its roots?

Hezbollah formed in 1982, after Israel occupied southern Lebanon and sought to quash the Palestinian militants based there. The region’s largely Shiite population was caught in the crossfire and took up arms against Israel. Seeing a chance to spread their Islamic Revolution, Iran’s Shiite rulers provided funding and training to several Lebanese Shiite groups, which united under the name Hezbollah, or "Party of God." The group pioneered suicide bombing as a weapon of war and won credit from many Lebanese when Israel withdrew in 2000. Six years later, Hezbollah sparked a new war with Israel with a brazen cross-border raid, in which it killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others. The monthlong fight, in which some 1,100 Lebanese and 159 Israelis were killed, ended in stalemate. Hezbollah’s next major engagement began in 2012, when it sent thousands of fighters to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — a member of the Shiite offshoot Alawite sect — crush a Sunni uprising. The group’s fighters battled alongside Russian forces, experienced brutal urban combat and emerged a formidable military force.

What does Hezbollah want?

To eradicate Israel, which Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has called "an aggressive, illegal and illegitimate entity." In its founding manifesto, Hezbollah vowed to create an Islamist state in Lebanon, which has a substantial Christian population. It has since softened that goal, unveiling a new political document in 2009 that said the group supports "true democracy." Hezbollah also serves the regional interests of Iran, which the U.S. says provides up to $700 million a year in funding. But while it’s linked ideologically and politically to Tehran, Hezbollah has a "great deal of its own autonomy" and "shouldn’t be understood as a traditional proxy," said Middle East specialist Thanassis Cambanis.

What is its relationship to Hamas?

Hezbollah is a long-term ally of the Palestinian terrorist group, which is also backed by Iran. But relations have not always been warm. The Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas backed opposing sides in Syria’s civil war; Hamas reconciled with its Lebanese counterpart in 2019 when it became clear Assad would remain in power. Some Hamas officials have said Hezbollah and Iran helped train and equip its fighters for the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel; Nasrallah denies the claim, saying the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis was a "100% Palestinian" operation. But Hezbollah has expressed full-throated solidarity with Hamas following the atrocity. "Our hearts are with you," a top official said at a Beirut rally on Oct. 8. "Our history and guns and our rockets are with you." Such rhetoric has raised fears Hezbollah may join the war — as has a rise in clashes along the Israel-Lebanon border.

What’s happening there?

Since Oct. 7, Hezbollah has repeatedly attacked Israeli positions along the frontier while Israel has struck at Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon and Syria. More than 70 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in clashes, according to the group, while Israel says at least eight of its soldiers have died. Villages and communities on both sides of the border have been evacuated. Amid growing fears that Hezbollah will launch an assault, raising the odds of a wider regional conflict, the U.S. has moved warships into the eastern Mediterranean and warned the group to stand down. In public statements, Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders have walked a careful line. In a recent speech, Nasrallah threatened escalation and said that "all scenarios are open." But he stopped short of declaring war and experts say there are strong reasons to believe he won’t.  

Why might Hezbollah stay out of the war?

Lebanon has been in a dire economic crisis since 2019, with its currency losing 98% of its value and more than two-thirds of the population sinking into poverty. Economic woes have cut support for Hezbollah, which last year lost its majority in parliament. The public has little appetite for war and if it is dragged into one, “Hezbollah’s achievements over the past 30 years will go down the drain,” said Hilal Khashan of the American University of Beirut. Some experts think Iran does not want its prized asset weakened by a major conflict. But others say it will be hard for the linchpin of the Iran’s "Axis of Resistance" to stand by as Israel occupies Gaza. As tensions rise, there’s plenty of room for a miscalculation or retaliation spiral. The situation, said Hussein Ibish of the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute, "could easily get out of control."

Hezbollah’s U.S. targets

Before al Qaida attacked the U.S. on 9/11, Hezbollah held a grim record: It had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group. Its first strike came in April 1983, when a suicide bomber in a rigged pickup rammed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. Six months later, a suspected Hezbollah agent drove a truck laden with 12,000 pounds of TNT into a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut. The blast killed 241 U.S. personnel who were in Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping force. Hezbollah was thought to have orchestrated the 17-day hijacking of a TWA flight from Athens to Rome in 1985; the hijackers shot dead a U.S. Navy diver onboard after their demands for the release of hundreds of Lebanese Shiites in Israeli pris- ons were not initially met. Hezbollah has never struck inside the U.S., but according to a 2022 U.S. government–backed report, it seeks "to develop the operational capacity to do so." FBI director Christopher Wray recently warned of the increased threat of attacks inside the U.S. by Hezbollah and other Islamist groups. "We are in a dangerous period," he said.

This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.

Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Hezbollah against making the "biggest mistake of their lives" by entering its war against Hamas.

The group, which wields significant power as a political party and militant group in Lebanon, has been exchanging artillery fire with Israel's military on their shared border since Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October. This has escalated fears that an outbreak of hostilities between the long-standing enemies could spark a regional conflict that brings in Iran and even the US.

If Hezbollah decides to fully join the conflict "it will be nothing short of a game-changer", Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told CNBC. Compared to Hamas, Hezbollah is "a much more formidable fighting force and widely recognized as the most powerful nonstate military in the world", he added. Its involvement would have huge consequences "not only for Israel, but also for the entire region".

How did Hezbollah emerge?

Founded in 1982 by a group of radical Shia clerics in the midst of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), with backing from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah, or the Party of God, has been blamed for "major and bloody acts of violence in Lebanon, against Israel and internationally too", said The Guardian.

While its original manifesto stated the group's goal was to expel the Christian-affiliated Lebanese Social Democratic Party, as well as Israel, France and the US, from Lebanon, Hezbollah's "main enemy" has long been Israel, said Kali Robinson for the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hezbollah was the only militia to keep its weapons at the end of the civil war in 1990, and it continued to fight Israeli forces occupying the country's predominantly Shia south, according to Reuters. Years of guerrilla warfare led Israel to eventually withdraw in 2000 but a full-blown war erupted in 2006 after Hezbollah crossed into Israel, kidnapping two soldiers and killing others. The resulting conflict lasted five weeks and claimed the lives of 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in Lebanon, and 158 Israelis, most of them soldiers.

Designated as a terrorist organisation by the US and UK, Hezbollah pioneered the use of mass casualty suicide attacks and is believed to be responsible for the 1994  bombings of a Jewish community centre in Argentina, which killed 85 people, and the Israeli Embassy in London. In 2012, a suicide bomb targeting a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria killed six people, with the EU blaming Hezbollah.

How did it consolidate influence?

In the years since 2006, tensions between Hezbollah and Israel have remained "relatively dormant", said Al Jazeera, even as its political and paramilitary wings have grown in size and influence. The party marked its integration into mainstream politics in 2009 after amending its charter to be more open to democracy, and gained vital battlefield experience during the Syrian civil war, where it played a crucial role supporting the Assad regime. It has spent much of the last decade engaged in fighting in Iraq and Yemen.

With the backing of Iran, estimated by the US to run to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, Hezbollah is "a well-resourced armed group with a medium-sized force that can defeat most Arab armies", said Time. Analysts put the size of its fighting force between 50,000 and 100,000, making it "the most powerful non-state actor" in the region, Hilal Khashan, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, told the magazine.

While there is no evidence of direct involvement in the Hamas attacks earlier this month, experts see the influence of Hezbollah. The attacks, said Matthew Levitt, from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, were "straight out of the Hezbollah playbook".

What are the chances of war today?

With "more sophisticated weaponry, well-trained and battle-experienced troops, and closer ties to Iran", Hezbollah's military capabilities "far outweigh those of Hamas, making it a more dangerous opponent to Israel", said ABC News.

If Hezbollah's leaders, most likely taking direction from Tehran, decide in favour of escalating current hostilities, this "could lead to a bloody and difficult two-front conflict for Israel and so – potentially – to a regional conflagration as Syria, Iran, the US and other actors become involved", reported The Guardian.

Yet as Lebanon faces the worst economic crisis in its history, with triple-digit inflation and a currency that has lost more than 90% of its value since 2019, the group "doesn't have the domestic popular support it had in 2006 to support a military operation in Israel's current war with Hamas", said CNBC.

Some analysts believe that Hezbollah, though dedicated to the destruction of Israel, has "too much to lose to risk an all-out conflict, given its political and extensive commercial interests", said The Guardian. Instead, it is looking to provoke a "short, limited war" rather than a full-blown regional conflict.

With Netanyahu threatening to hit Hezbollah with "unimaginable force" that would mean "devastation for them and the state of Lebanon", a military move from the group would represent a huge gamble.

Fears of a broader regional conflict in the Middle East intensified on Sunday as Israel's border with Lebanon saw its worst violence since 2006.

Hezbollah militants fired rockets and an anti-tank missile into the north of Israel, which responded with air strikes and shelling. 

As Israel prepares for an expected ground invasion of Gaza, its national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi warned Hezbollah not to start a war on a second front, threatening the "destruction of Lebanon" if it did.

What did the papers say?

Some Israeli "hardliners" may feel the time is right to deliver a "decisive blow" against Hezbollah while the West is "fully behind them" in the wake of the Hamas attacks, said Politico.

But going to war with Hezbollah is a "very different prospect than going to war with Hamas", it added, because Hezbollah is a "far larger and more capable military force". The Hamas rocket attacks would be a "light summer shower compared to the deluge Hezbollah could bring down on towns and cities", forcing the country into "lockdown".

Hezbollah has its own reasons to avoid full conflict, said Politico, because the end result would be a "grave weakening" of its forces, which would "erode its deterrence value to Iran".

But Iran's foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, said last week that there was "every possibility" of a second front if Israel's blockade of Gaza continued. He spoke of "game-changing" plans to capture the Galilee and northern Israel.

He also warned that the group could destroy Tel Aviv "tower for tower" and that Israel's nuclear reactor is an easier target than Iran's nuclear installations are for the West.

"Hyperbole perhaps", said The Economist, but "by allowing Hezbollah to open a second front with Israel", Iran would hope to "kill off the Abraham accords between Israel and some Arab countries" and spark an "anti-Western surge across the Middle East".

On the other hand, said the magazine, "many believe that Iran wants to preserve Hezbollah's rocket arsenal in order to deter an attack on Iran's nuclear programme". China and the US also remain a "source of restraint on Iran".

A "conflagration" on the Lebanese-Israeli border is "unlikely", agreed Imad K. Harb in an article for Arab Center Washington DC, because "an Israel that is busy in Gaza" is unlikely to want to be "distracted" by a war with Hezbollah that "may not be a swift campaign and may not reap the desired results".

There is only a "remote" chance that Hezbollah would want a war with Israel, he argued, because it would "most assuredly end with the destruction of whatever still works of Lebanon's infrastructure". Also, Hezbollah can "no longer count on" the endorsement of "large and important political factions in Lebanon" and the country "cannot practically expect" to receive financial support from Arab countries for rebuilding.

But there remains a risk of escalation due to simple "misunderstanding" at the northern border, Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli intelligence, told Foreign Policy. Hezbollah has a "false sense of self-confidence" that can "lead them into a miscalculation" by "assuming that action by them will be interpreted by us as minor, while we will interpret it as major".

What next?

The Israeli defence ministry has announced that it will evacuate residents who live within two kilometres of the Lebanese border amid growing concerns that Hezbollah will "enter the fray", said The Telegraph.

All eyes are on Gaza because, "as the ground offensive looms", analysts fear the move could be the "red line" that prompts Hezbollah to "fully enter the conflict" and open the war on another front.

The ramifications of this could be profound. "Will there be world war three?" asked Niall Ferguson in The Sunday Times. If Israel "finds it cannot contend with a three-front war", with the West Bank joining Gaza and Lebanon, and then turns to the US for military help against Iran, we will have "reached one of history's hinges", he said, and "the future of the world will turn on it."

Israel is mobilising tens of thousands of soldiers along the Gaza border ahead of an expected ground assault in response to the weekend's deadly attacks by Hamas.

A key question going forward is whether "this outbreak of violence draws in other countries or groups", said Vox. 

The United States, a key player in the region, "seems to anticipate escalation", said the website, from both Iran, and Hezbollah, a Shia militant group based in southern Lebanon. 

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has also said it shelled Syria after rockets hit open areas on Israeli territory. The IDF did not accuse any group of the rocket attack but security sources told The Wall Street Journal that they had come from Iran-backed militia in the country, and experts are warning that the situation could evolve very quickly into a broader cross-border conflict.

What did the papers say?

In a joint statement, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the US said that "this is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage", signalling concerns over opportunistic actions being taken by other countries or militant groups.

But despite speculation over Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in the attacks "there are no concrete details linking them yet", said Vox. Iran has denied direct involvement in the attacks, but has in the past "played a major role in helping Hamas with its rocket and missile programs, and mortar programs", Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox.

Reports from The Wall Street Journal that Iranian security officials may have helped plan Saturday's attack were quickly knocked down. Both US and Israeli officials have so far said there is no indication of Iran's involvement in the planning of the attacks, while Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, told The Wall Street Journal the attack was a "Hamas decision".

There are also fears that the conflict could spill over into neighbouring Lebanon, a country "already reeling from a historic economic meltdown", said Al Jazeera. Cross-border violence has forced "hundreds of Lebanese to remain inside their homes or flee towards the southern suburbs of Beirut".

There have been clashes along the northern border after armed militants crossed the border into Lebanon and were killed by Israeli troops. Although "paling in comparison to the fighting that has taken place around Gaza", said The New York Times, the clashes have "deepened unease over the possibility that the conflict – already the broadest invasion in 50 years – could spread to multiple fronts".

What next?

The Middle East is facing significant geopolitical implications, especially concerning Iran's alleged backing of the Hamas attacks. A broader confrontation between the West and Iran would have "grave" consequences for the wider geopolitical landscape including the diversion of "military and financial resources away from Ukraine", said Sky News.

Saudi Arabia had been on the verge of recognising Israel and the 2020 Abraham Accords, normalising relations between Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan, and Iran felt the "balance of diplomacy in the Middle East turning against them", according to military analyst Professor Michael Clarke, speaking to the broadcaster. 

Dr Ali Bilgic, a reader in international relations and security at Loughborough University, told the broadcaster that using Hamas to attack Israel serves Iran's strategic goal of regaining influence in the region. "It would give Iran the means of asserting itself as leaders in the Muslim world – and defenders of Palestinian rights against the Israeli regime," he said. 

Some of Washington's closest Middle East allies, particularly Qatar and Turkey, "have sharply broken with Washington on the war and largely backed Hamas", said Semafor's Jay Solomon. Qatar issued a statement on Saturday holding Israel "solely responsible" for the conflict and calling for an immediate cease-fire. The Biden administration has condemned that statement but the oil-rich Gulf state "may play a central role in negotiating the release of kidnapped Israeli and American citizens being held in Gaza, similar to ways it helped free Americans held by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021", said Solomon. 

More broadly, the Israel-Hamas war points to a world "in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar", said David Leonhardt in The New York Times. With the US fading as a dominant global power, "political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs".

Israel and Hamas have agreed to extend their ceasefire in the Gaza Strip for a further 24 hours after intense negotiations.

The agreement keeps alive "tenuous hopes for a lasting halt to the fighting", said The New York Times. Officials with knowledge of the talks told the paper they hoped that the succession of short-term pauses "would pave the way toward a larger goal: negotiations over a longer-term cease-fire to bring the war to a close". 

The lull in hostilities enabled an increase in deliveries of food, water, medicine and fuel into Gaza, which has faced weeks of siege and bombardment since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, taking some 240 hostages. But aid groups said that these deliveries – carried in on about 200 lorries a day – were insufficient to meet the critical humanitarian needs of Gaza's 2.3-million-strong population.

What the papers said

The sight of children reunited with their families after seven weeks of hell is joyous, said The Wall Street Journal. But these scenes shouldn't blind us to Hamas's cynical tactics. The group is "manipulating human sentiment" to buy itself time and to widen the split in Israel between those who want to prioritise the release of hostages and those focused on military aims. Welcome as they are, the releases have given Hamas an undeserved image boost, said The Times. They'll also "make hostage-taking an ever more tempting option in future terrorist attacks".

For the traumatised inhabitants of Gaza, the truce has delivered relief from relentless bombardment and some desperately needed aid, said The Guardian. Let's hope that the pause in fighting, and the sight of family reunions, changes the dynamic of this conflict and builds support in Israel for a longer-term ceasefire deal. Alas, there "appears to be no real desire for peace by the leaders on either side", said The Independent. But the truce, reached with the help of intense US pressure and "exemplary diplomacy by Qatar", has at least shown "how a more lasting peace might eventually be navigated".

Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to achieve two things when he launched the ground invasion of Gaza: the destruction of Hamas and the return of all hostages. He has made some progress on both fronts, said James Shotter and John Paul Rathbone in the FT. Israel has secured control of most of the northern half of Gaza, at a lower than expected cost of about 70 troops. Officials estimate that about 5,000 of Hamas's 25,000 or so fighters have been killed.

The plan now is to advance into the south of the Strip, which is a more complex undertaking. With about two million Palestinians crammed into this half of Gaza, a mechanised infantry push of the sort deployed in the north is unthinkable, said Michael Clarke in The Times. The area has a population density of about 9,000 people per square kilometre – 40% higher than Greater London. Last week, Palestinians were advised to move for their own safety to Mawasi, a small coastal town of 14 square kilometres at the extreme corner of the Strip. "UN agencies chiefs pointed out that this was not just deeply undesirable, but physically impossible."

For all its recent military gains, Israel is little closer to achieving its "unattainable" aim of eradicating Hamas, said Patrick Cockburn for the i news site. Its generals talk of destroying Hamas's "command and control" centres, as if a ragtag bunch of guerrillas "requires a series of mini-Pentagons in order to function". What groups like Hamas really depend on is a measure of popular support – and polls suggest that Hamas is gaining more of it. But while Israel is still a long way from wiping out Hamas, it's doing a good job of destroying Gaza. 

The UN says that 41,000 homes, housing 45% of the population, have been destroyed. Israeli military strategists need to face up to some hard truths, said Paul Nuki in The Daily Telegraph. The reality is that most Hamas fighters, as is the way with terrorist insurgents, have "stashed their grab bags and vanished into the general population in the south of the Gaza Strip". Trying to kill them within that crowded zone would risk causing "civilian carnage", at great cost to Israel's international support. The potential "incremental military gain" is too slight to warrant such a move.

What next?

According to Israeli media, Netanyahu is reluctant to extend any ceasefire beyond ten days, the maximum stipulated in the original ceasefire deal. Hamas indicated this week that it was open to releasing hostages of all categories, including soldiers, under the right exchange terms.

Israel's campaign in Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 15,000 Palestinians, according to the latest data from the enclave's Hamas-controlled health ministry. The UN warned this week that, owing to overcrowding and a lack of food, medicine and clean water, deaths from infectious diseases could eventually outstrip those from war

The head of Lebanon’s central bank has stepped down after 30 years in the job, leaving the country in a deepening state of crisis.

Riad Salameh had been a “poster child” for the economic resurgence that helped Lebanon out of 15 years of civil war in the years after 1990, said Al Arabiya News.

But he is now widely seen as being responsible for soaring inflation and the currency losing 98% of its value, and left his job “under a cloud of investigation and blame”, said France 24.

His departure, on the eve of the third anniversary of the Port of Beirut blast that killed more than 200 people, is just one of the challenges facing the embattled nation.

An economy at rock bottom

The current financial crisis began in 2019 when “the value of the Lebanese pound plummeted and inflation soared”, said the BBC. Since then, the country has been “in the midst of one of the world’s most prolonged and acute economic crises”, with more than 80% of the population living in poverty, added the broadcaster.

The crisis has “pulverized” the Lebanese pound and “wiped out the savings” of many Lebanese, as the banks “ran dry of hard currency”, said France 24.

Salameh has been criticised for borrowing new money to pay existing creditors, a policy that has been compared to a Ponzi scheme. He rejects the comparison, but Alarabiya News said Lebanon is now “nothing more than a spoiled trust-fund baby that refuses to go to work and to acknowledge that living on the past glories does not make a nation”.

Lebanon’s government and politicians “have not taken any measures to mitigate or alleviate its impact on the population”, wrote Dalal Mawad in The Guardian, in an extract from her book, “All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive”.

“Nothing has been done”, she added, “no reforms, no structural changes, no meaningful change of power and no accountability.” The World Bank put it more formally, describing the economic situation in Lebanon as one of the worst crises in the world since the 19th century, with “deliberate inaction” to blame.

A political stalemate

Politically, Lebanon is in stalemate. The Mediterranean country has been without a president for nine months, and its government has been running in a limited caretaker capacity for a year.

In June, Lebanon’s parliament failed for the 12th time to elect a president and “break a political deadlock that has gripped the country for months”, said Al Jazeera.

A bloc led by Hezbollah withdrew after the initial round of votes, preventing a second round of voting. This thwarted a bid by their rivals to elect a top International Monetary Fund official as president and meant continued deadlock.

Consequences of the blast

On the eve of the third anniversary of the catastrophic explosion in Beirut’s port that killed 235 people and damaged more than half of the city, Amnesty International criticised an “unacceptable lack of justice, truth and reparation”.

The authorities “have had three years to investigate what caused the devastating explosion in Beirut’s port and to hold those suspected of criminal responsibility to account”, said a spokesperson, but “to this day, absolutely no one has been held responsible for the tragedy”.

The domestic investigation into the blast has been suspended since December 2021, due to a series of legal challenges filed against judges involved in the case by politicians who have been targeted by the investigation.

In March, the United Nations Human Rights Council expressed concern that the investigation had been “hampered by systemic obstruction, interference, intimidation, and a political impasse”.

Writing for Foreign Policy, David Schenker, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there is a “pervasive culture of impunity” in Lebanon.

Banks across Lebanon are closing their doors following a wave of hold-ups by desperate depositors as the country’s economic woes worsen.

Strict daily withdrawal limits aimed at preventing a run on Lebanon’s faltering currency have triggered “an unprecedented wave of hold-ups by frustrated depositors seeking access to their savings”, reported Al Jazeera.

“In the past two months alone”, said The Guardian’s Middle East correspondent Martin Chulov, “more than a dozen bank ‘robberies’ have taken place”, some of which “have involved real guns and bad tempers” while others “were bluffs that won the day”.

What has happened to the Lebanese economy?

GDP has shrunk from $52bn in 2019 to just $22bn in 2021, in an economic downturn triggered by “years of state corruption, waste and unsustainable financial policies”, said Reuters.

Inflation has soared to more than 200%, “and the vast majority of all new spending has been served by dollars brought into the country, not by bank reserves”, said The Guardian’s Chulov.

The Lebanese pound currently trades at around 38,000 to the dollar. Under limits imposed by banks, “most withdrawals of foreign currency have to be carried out at an exchange rate unfavourable to depositors, meaning that depositors will lose almost 80% of the value of the money in their savings if they withdraw it”, Al Jazeera reported.

Amid what the World Bank has described as the world’s worst economic crisis since the 1850s, banks have also been suspending front-office services in recent months to protect their staff and resources.

“Many banks are bankrupt,” said lawyer Dina Abou Zour, founder of a group called the Depositors’ Union that is fighting people’s right to access their savings.

Abou Zour told The Guardian that “there are no changes in sight. That’s what’s making depositors lose hope.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has criticised the government for failing to implement much-needed reforms to tackle the economic meltdown. “Those reforms are key to unlocking an IMF bailout to help ease the crisis, which economists argue has been caused by decades of wasteful spending and corruption,” said Al Jazeera.

Why are citizens raiding banks?

“Post-civil war Lebanon can be described as a series of calamitous events impacting a people who are already no stranger to being taken advantage of by their political system,” wrote forensic anthropologist Julian McBride for global news and analysis site Geopolitical Monitor. Officials who “have taken advantage of Lebanon’s sectarian-based political system in order to remain in power indefinitely” have taken the country to “a critical point due to the excessive mismanagement of public funds”.

Citizens are bearing the brunt of the economic collapse, driving some to desperate measures. A 28-year-old woman called Sali Hafiz has been “lauded as a national hero after forcing staff at a BLOM Bank branch in Beirut to give her thousands of dollars from her own account by waving a replica gun in order to fund her sister’s cancer treatment in hospital”, Al Jazeera reported.

Amid a wave of public sympathy, “her gamble paid off”, said The Guardian’s Chulov, with a judge last week handing Hafiz “a small fine and a six-month travel ban – a veritable slap on the wrist for anyone convicted of a bank heist”.

Just hours before Hafiz was sentenced, a Lebanese MP, Cynthia Zarazir, had “staged a sit-in with her lawyer at her own branch until officials agreed to hand over $8,500 (£7,600) from her account, which she wants to use for her sister’s cancer treatment”, Chulov reported. “Two more branches faced similar standoffs.”

Other cases include a man armed with an assault rifle who held up a Beirut bank in August and demanded $20,000 to pay for a family member’s medical treatment.

“He too was treated lightly by investigators and court officials, all of whom seem out of ideas about how to deal with a phenomenon that has the broad support of a desperate population,” Chulov added.

What next?

The banks “informal capital controls have left depositors mostly locked out of their accounts as the currency lost more than 95% of its value, pushing 80% of the population into poverty”, said The Times.

There appears no easy solution for Lebanon, which was once “regarded as a global economic powerhouse in the wake of independence from France”, said McBride on Geopolitical Monitor.

“One of the central difficulties is making public officials more accountable” without “stoking conflict amongst and between the religious communities that they belong to”, he continued. “The same warlords, thieves, and drug traffickers that fought in the civil war now rule Lebanon and hide behind their political parties and their religious sect to avoid blame and accountability.”

But if reforms are not implemented, Lebanon “could suffer even more humanitarian catastrophe and, eventually, a state collapse that would produce disastrous consequences across the wider geopolitics of the Middle East”.

Hezbollah has lost control of Lebanon’s parliament after voters shunned the Islamist party and militant group in the first election since the country’s economic crisis.

Early results suggest the party, which is led by Hassan Nasrallah and backed by Iran, has won less than the 64 seats needed for a majority when its final tally is combined with its ally, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) led by President Michel Aoun. The Islamist party has governed alongside its Christian allies since 2018.

The potential change of leadership follows “years of disaster” in Lebanon, said The Times, including a banking collapse, widespread energy shortages and a chemical explosion in Beirut two years ago that killed 200 people.

Hung parliament

Preliminary results suggest Lebanon is heading for a hung parliament, a result that would be “a major blow” to Hezbollah and “could fracture parliament into several camps and polarise it more sharply” between the Islamists’ allies and opponents, Reuters said.

Opposition to Hezbollah is “not currently united into a single bloc”, the news agency added. And any political “deadlock” will almost certainly “derail reforms required to unlock support from the International Monetary Fund to ease Lebanon’s economic crisis”.

While candidates from established parties failed to secure seats in Sunday’s vote, “several anti-establishment” figures won the backing of voters, Al Jazeera reported.

Among the 76 winners announced by interior minister Bassam Mawlawi yesterday were “at least nine anti-establishment opposition” figures, the broadcaster said. This included candidates who defeated parliament’s deputy speaker Elie Ferzli and Talal Arslan, the leader of the highly influential Druze sect.

Unofficial results also show Hezbollah’s Christian ally – the FPM – has “lost ground” to the right-wing Saudi-backed Christian Lebanese Forces (CLF), euronews said. With “an estimated 20 seats”, the CLF may now “become the largest Christian party in the parliament”.

Political reversal

While results are still yet to be published in full, early indications suggest that the election has prompted “a reversal of Lebanon’s last election in 2018”, Reuters reported. Four years ago, Hezbollah and its allies secured a majority, “pulling Lebanon deeper into the orbit of Shi’ite-led Iran and away from Sunni-led Saudi Arabia”.

The success of the CLF, which is backed by Saudi Arabia, “could open the door for Riyadh to exercise greater sway in Beirut”, a long-standing “arena of its rivalry with Tehran”. Such an outcome would be a direct threat to Hezbollah, which has been sanctioned by the US over its close links to Iran.

The rise of “anti-establishment” candidates should also be seen as “a strong message to ruling class politicians”, euronews said, who have overseen “a devastating economic collapse that has plunged the majority of the country into poverty”.

But the result also looks likely to produce “a fragmented parliament” that “will make it harder for Lebanon to pass the new laws needed to begin the financial recovery”.

Spent force

Voter turnout was down to 41% from 49% in 2018, indicating that Hezbollah “may have failed to mobilise their supporters”, euronews reported.

The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections has also alleged “that its members were threatened and attacked by several groups”, the broadcaster said, “mostly in areas controlled” by the Islamist group.

The extent to which the result will impact Hezbollah’s influence remains to be seen, with some observers pointing out that Lebanon’s prescribed power-sharing agreement means it is impossible to sideline the group.

The nation shares power among its religious communities, with government positions normally “passed down among political families”, The Times said. By convention, the president is a Maronite Christian, the premier a Sunni Muslim and parliament’s speaker a Shia Muslim.

But if the group feels that its political influence is waning, it could begin a “wave” of political assassinations driven by a fear its critics “are rising”, warned The Jerusalem Post’s senior Middle East correspondent Seth J. Frantzman.

Hezbollah has “previously tried to consolidate power over all institutions in Lebanon” either through “using the weapons it has or through partnerships”. And it could become more dangerous as it begins “losing steam”.

“Much remains to be cleared up about how Hezbollah will react” to the disappointing result, but “its leadership is aging, and it has fewer friends in the region”, Frantzman added. “The only thing it still has is its illegal masses of weapons.”

A year ago today, Beirut was rocked by a catastrophic explosion that would claim the lives of at least 215 people, injure more than 7,500 and leave hundreds of thousands homeless and displaced.

Twelve months on, “ground zero of Lebanon’s apocalypse” is haunted by the “stench of dead rats” that “seeps from hulking piles of rotting grain”, says The Guardian’s Middle East editor Martin Chulov. “Broken silos teeter above, their sides ripped apart by the catastrophic blast that also broke the soul of Beirut.”

The explosion in the city – which has rebuilt itself after so many crises, from its emergence out of French colonial rule in the early 1940s to the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 – served to “shatter a city that was already at a tipping point”.

“The seismic force of the shock wave” was “carried around the world in high-definition horror”, Chulov adds. “Even amid the chaos of a country that had allowed this to happen to its people, this was surely a moment of reckoning.”

‘The year from hell’

One year on from the blast, families of the dead remain trapped in “the ugly loop of that day”, writes The Independent’s Middle East editor Bel Trew, “because so little has changed and there has been so little progress”.

In a country racked by political stasis, corruption and an imploding economy, “no one has been held responsible for what is believed to be one of the single largest non-nuclear explosions in modern history”, she adds, creating a “year from hell” for Beirut’s citizens.

“This is despite a damning paper trail showing that senior officials from the port authorities to the president knew about the deadly stockpile of ammonium nitrate behind the explosion, but did nothing about it.”

Officials “have spent the past year shamelessly obstructing victims’ quest for truth and justice”, an Amnesty International report says, making “relentless efforts to shield officials from scrutiny” while “repeatedly hampering the course of the investigation”.

The first judge overseeing the investigation was dismissed after he “summoned political figures for questioning”, the human rights organisation explains, while authorities have “so far rejected the new investigative judge’s requests to lift MPs’ immunity and to question senior members of the security forces in connection with the tragedy”.

“Lebanese authorities promised a swift investigation; instead they have brazenly blocked and stalled justice at every turn, despite a tireless campaign for justice and criminal accountability by survivors and families of victims,” says Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

“The Lebanese government tragically failed to protect the lives of its people, just as it has failed for so long to protect basic socio-economic rights… Given the scale of this tragedy, it is astounding to see how far the Lebanese authorities are prepared to go to shield themselves from scrutiny.”

Writing in The Economist, Margaret Kadifa, whose grandmother survived the blast despite being thrown to the ground by the force of the explosion, notes that “Lebanon was already on its knees when the blast happened”.

“The financial system had collapsed, causing spiralling inflation and shortages of basic goods”, she says, and “things have got even worse in the past year”. While “rebuilding is something the Lebanese are good at… this time is different”.

“The port explosion and financial crisis were not chance events”, she adds. “They were catastrophes caused by decades of government incompetence and corruption.”

Adding to the widespread sense of betrayal is the “fact that thousands of the estimated 77,000 residences damaged or destroyed in the explosion have yet to be fully rebuilt”, The Independent’s Trew says.

“The waterfront closest to the port, once an impressive skyline of apartment blocks, businesses and bars, is still a jagged-tooth wasteland”, while “families have begun looking outside for help, urging the international community not to intervene but to cut diplomatic ties with those implicated in the explosion”.

That diplomatic help has so far not arrived, with Al Jazeera reporting that the position of the international community remains that the country’s leaders are “to blame for the political and economic crisis”, meaning reform must come before a bailout.

“We have no truth, no justice, no one has been held accountable. And we have no space to grieve,” says Paul Naggear, whose three-year-old daughter Alexandra was one of the youngest victims of the blast.

“Even the same day of the funeral when she was buried, my wife and I knew we needed to fight, we needed to be vocal,” he told The Independent. “It is criminal to ask the same people that killed us…to form a government and to rule us again. This is intolerable.”

‘Dysfunction of a state’

If little has changed in the notoriously divided political culture of Lebanon’s ruling elite, the blast has served to drive its residents “from street protests to political action”, says France 24.

Within days of the blast, “a tent city – dubbed ‘the Basecamp’ – had sprung up” to aid the victims, “comprised of NGOs and volunteer groups offering a range of emergency services in the absence of a comprehensive state response”.

Much of the response was organised by lawyer Hussein El Achi, who was “convinced him to join the fight for change from the inside” following his growing frustration with “interference in the investigation” and “Lebanon’s sectarian kleptocracy”, the broadcast adds.

El Achi is not alone, with protests breaking out that saw demonstrators “blocking major roads and clashing with security forces in Beirut” after “a months-long effort to form a new government by the prime minister-designate” failed, Sky News reports. The formation of a new government is a precursor to any reform that would unlock aid.

“Instead of giving birth to an era of redemption, the explosion has come to define the utter dysfunction of a state that has failed for all intents and purposes”, says The Guardian’s Chulov. The political class remains “unable to form a government” and is instead “bickering over the allocation of ministries as prizes to bolster their fiefdoms”.

Last week, Lebanon named its richest man, Najib Mikati, a two-time prime minister and resident of its poorest city, Tripoli, as its designated leader. He will now be tasked with forming a government where his predecessor Saad Hariri, another former leader, failed.

But as the “sheer scale of Lebanon’s meltdown continues to be absorbed by its people”, others “are starting to confront an unpalatable view that the state’s very foundations were flawed at each of its incarnations”, Chulov adds.

“If now isn’t the moment to change, then when is?”, asks Yarr Hadid, a 24-year-old student with plans to leave the country. “Are we to accept that this is how it is in Lebanon?”