Tag: israel

Under Israeli pressure, US seizes Max Blumenthal’s devices on return from Tehran reporting trip


On July 10, 2026, American journalist Max Blumenthal was traveling back to the United States from Iran, which he had visited to report on the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the largest gathering in human history. While in Iran, Blumenthal interviewed members of Iran’s negotiation team, top political officials, academics and average citizens for a series of video and print reports for this news outlet, which he founded.

He also documented several US and Israeli war crimes from the ground, including the destruction of an entire neighborhood in Eastern Tehran which left at least 40 civilians dead.

Upon reentering the country at Dulles International Airport, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) interrogated Blumenthal about his trip, searched his belongings, and demanded that he provide access to his smart phones. When he refused to open his phones, CBP officers forced him to turn them over for detention. Other journalists and travelers have been threatened with the loss of their passports for a month for failing to hand over their devices.

Blumenthal entered Iran exactly as reporters working for establishment media outlets like CNN and NBC did – on a press visa granted by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. While in Tehran, he participated in official press events alongside those mainstream reporters, who were also in the country to cover the Ayatollah’s funeral. When journalists from CNN, NBC, and other American outlets returned to the US, however, they were not subjected to the same harassment Blumenthal experienced, nor were they required to give the US government their electronic devices.

Blumenthal is a widely recognized journalist in American independent media, with a record of reporting spanning 25 years. He is the author of four books, including a New York Times bestselling volume, and numerous widely viewed documentary films. Having reported from numerous countries and conflict zones around the world, he is the winner of several awards, including the Online Journalism Award and, most recently, the Pierre Sprey Award for Defense Reporting and Analysis.

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The Inconvenient Jew Is One of Zionism’s Biggest Problems

Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter recently offered what he apparently believed was a devastating answer to those decrying the genocide in Gaza.

“Jews do not use children’s blood for rituals,” Leiter said. “Jews do not poison wells. And Jews do not starve populations or commit genocide.”

The smear in this common Zionist talking point is obvious: Those who accuse the Israeli government belong in the same moral category as those who spread medieval blood libels against innocent Jews. To say the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has committed genocide is not merely to criticize a government, an army, or a political ideology. It is to accuse “the Jews.”

But there is a growing problem for Zionism and its favorite smear: the moral indignation of Jews.

According to a new AP-NORC poll, 30% of Jewish adults in the United States say Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Only 49% say it has not. Among religiously unaffiliated Jews, the share rises to about four in ten. Also, only about four in ten Jewish adults believe Israel’s continuing military operations in Gaza are justified, while roughly six in ten view Netanyahu unfavorably.

In light of the grave public perspective of a growing percentage of Jews, the Zionists look more and more foolish. Their go-to argument – if you can even call this substanceless insult an argument – has become an argument ad absurdum: Nearly one-third of American Jews, Zionists believe, are secretly medieval antisemites; Jewish critics of Netanyahu believe Jews poison wells; Jews who watch children starve in Gaza and call it genocide are not morally serious observers but morons trafficking in blood libel … against themselves.

But the absurdity is rapidly leading to yet another Zionist offense – as if a genocide were not enough. Since the inconvenient Jew is now one of Zionism’s biggest problems, the Jew himself – insofar as he accepts the universal human principles that genocide flies in the face of – must be treated as an impossibility.

He cannot be debated honestly, because his very existence blows the argument apart. He proves that Jewish identity does not require loyalty to Netanyahu. He proves that revulsion at starving children is not (forgive the grotesque suggestion – it is not mine but Zionism’s) an anti-Jewish prejudice.

So Zionism does to the inconvenient Jew what it does to every inconvenient person.

It erases him.

He becomes “self-hating,” “brainwashed,” “disloyal,” or – perhaps most insultingly of all – “not a real Jew.”

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Congressman Outraged After Brief Detention By Gun-Wielding Israeli Settlers In West Bank Visit

A group of extremist Jewish settlers equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank, the Democratic representative has disclosed.

“We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” Khanna told Reuters on Thursday.  “And these hoodlums come in with machine guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block off the road.“ Khanna said, adding, “And then they call the IDF and ​the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.“

Khanna’s aide, Cameron Kasky, said the delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them. 

Khanna’s visit to the occupied West Bank comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Israel’s favorability rating among Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in May 2026, according to recent polls. 

The US lawmaker’s confrontation with extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank. 

As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an “unprecedented” expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.

Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a “systematic campaign” of “Jewish terrorism” intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.

An Oxfam analysis based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.

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The Board That Wanted a Country

This investigation is about a body whose legal personality remains contested, whose accountability framework remains opaque, and whose money has been routed through a private JPMorgan Chase account outside the official World Bank fund created for Gaza reconstruction. The Board of Peace was announced by Donald Trump in January 2026 as the vehicle for Gaza’s post-war governance and reconstruction, with Trump as chair and Tony Blair among its founding executive members. What emerges from official filings, leaked governance drafts, congressional hearing records, financial reporting, and testimony from former insiders is not simply a reconstruction body, but an attempt to privatise the governance architecture of Gaza’s future.

The timing of this story is critical because the contracts have not yet been awarded, the official World Bank fund has received no donor money, and several of the people involved in designing or executing the system sit at the intersection of government, finance, technology, Gulf capital, and post-war reconstruction planning.

The name “Board of Peace” does not necessarily refer to some peace mechanism. The entity will be best characterized as a financial, legal, and political architecture for governing 2.3 million Palestinians through a structure Palestinians did not elect, that member-state parliaments did not ratify, and that no court or auditor has yet clearly shown it can compel.

The Mandate Returns

The piece that sparked this investigation was published by Follow the Money, which reported that Tony Blair had become “Trump’s Gaza salesman in Europe,” using his institute and his contacts to lobby European policymakers into joining the Board of Peace. That reporting was important, but the framing understates the story. Blair is not merely the salesman. He is one of the architects of the governance model that European officials were later asked to legitimise.

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The Israeli Spy Behind Prageru’s Plan To Rewrite American Education To Indoctrinate Children

PragerU is trying to take over American schools. The right-wing, pseudo-educational group is now an official educational partner in at least ten states, and blitzes children with highly questionable messaging on race, history, and politics. Even more concerning, PragerU is led by former Israeli spy, Marissa Streit, who has stated she uses the tactics and techniques honed by IDF military intelligence on the American people.

Streit’s company is involved in a big-money operation targeting children with neoconservative, pro-war, pro-business, pro-Israel messaging, attempting to indoctrinate them at their youngest and most impressionable age.

MintPress explores this increasingly powerful group, with ambitions to completely overhaul the American educational system.

Leave Our Kids Alone

You have probably seen a PragerU video. An estimated one-in-three Americans have. The billionaire-funded media machine is a powerful force on the American right, providing highly-produced conservative content attempting to push U.S. politics and society rightwards.

Recently, however, PragerU has set its sights on children, and is seeking to hijack the American education system. Since 2023, it has signed deals with ten states – Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah – to become an official education provider, supplying books, videos, and other content to schools across the United States. Students in New Hampshire, meanwhile, can earn credits by completing online PragerU courses. And with PragerU Español, it has plans to expand into Latin America as well.

Florida was the trailblazer in this phenomenon. As part of his Stop WOKE Act – a bill that sought to eradicate liberal ideology from public life – Governor Ron DeSantis partnered with the organization, identifying it as one that “aligned with the state’s revised civics and government standards.” PragerU now provides ultra-conservative “American values” messaging for use in grades K-12.

Florida’s post Stop WOKE Act curriculum now requires middle school teachers to instruct students on the benefits of slavery for black Americans, including that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

It has also rewritten the 1920 Ocoee Massacre – a pogrom that saw a white mob kill dozens of black residents and permanently ethnically cleanse the Florida town of its black population – as an “act of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

College students at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, meanwhile, can earn extra credit by taking a PragerU history course. This, despite the fact that, despite its branding, PragerU is not an accredited educational institution, let alone a university.

Oklahoma, however, has gone even further. Last year, the state’s superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, launched a controversial teacher evaluation test developed by PragerU to vet teachers for their ideology and filter out applicants considered insufficiently conservative. The plan even withheld teaching certificates from educators from what Walters described as “woke states.” Walters left his position to head the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative pressure group opposed to teachers unions.

Free Healthcare is Slavery, But Actual Slavery is A-OK

The PragerU content being shown to American schoolchildren contains a number of highly controversial viewpoints presented as common sense. Most “lessons” are presented in cartoon format, with one about the founding of America including an animated Christopher Columbus stating that slavery was “no big deal.” “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” he said; “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.” Further justifying the enslavement and genocide of two continents, Columbus tells those watching that, “The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful.”

Another video lesson grossly distorts the views of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, with an animated Douglas justifying slavery in America, stating that “the founding fathers made a compromise [supporting slavery] to achieve something great: the making of the United States.”

PragerU Kids videos also cover more contemporary issues. One video, titled “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue,” deals with the murder of George Floyd, whom the narrator describes as a “black man who resisted arrest.” The video claims that “violent protests” and “looting” were sparked by “false claims” of racist policing spread by unnamed “activists.” Mateo, a Los Angeles child, is aghast by protestors “threatening police,” or, as the video calls them, “protectors,” and decides to stand firmly in solidarity with the Blue Lives Matter movement.

Another educational resource approved for use in schools is a lecture called “Is Fascism Right or Left?” by controversial conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, in which he insists that, “Fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left.” In 2014, D’Souza pled guilty for violating federal campaign financing laws.

Unsurprisingly for a conservative movement funded by fracking billionaires, PragerU also instructs children to reject the overwhelming consensus on climate change. However, it takes it to absurd levels, comparing the supposed oppression of climate skeptics to the living in Warsaw Ghetto, where upwards of 300,000 Jewish people were killed by the Nazis.

In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,” the titular character is fed propaganda at school about the disastrous impact of human-made climate change, only to have her eyes opened by her conservative parents. Ania is ostracized by the other children for merely expressing her concerns. Luckily, her grandfather Jakub gives her the strength to continue, by telling her about the Warsaw Uprising. “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” viewers are told.

On India, American children are told that the country benefitted greatly from British imperialism, who “spread the influence of Christianity and Western values through India” and “discouraged or even outlawed harmful traditions,” and “gave” India its independence in 1947. “Western influence helped transform the country in many positive ways, but some ancient customs are harder to change than others,” the video concludes, framing India’s problems as entirely down to their own backward culture, rather than centuries of direct rule and oppression.

Another video lambasts Canada’s free healthcare system and highlights the supposed dangers of socialized medicine, while extolling the for-profit privatized American system, despite it being by far the most expensive, comparatively, and having the worst outcomes of any developed country, according to international studies.

PragerU also sets its targets on Cuba, China, Venezuela, and North Korea as well, publishing videos demonizing those countries as authoritarian nightmare regimes in need of U.S. intervention.

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Israel Debated: Why Palestine Is Rewriting the Rules of Domestic US Politics

A major showdown on the House floor seemed imminent. An amendment, advanced by the Rules Committee, was poised to force a rare and telling record vote on stripping Israel of $3.3 billion in annual US military aid.

Brought forward by Republican Representative Thomas Massie and drawing support from key progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greg Casar, the measure was set to put every lawmaker’s stance on unconditional foreign assistance under a public microscope.

However, the high-stakes vote never actually happened. On June 30, the entire legislative package collapsed under the weight of Washington’s internal political warfare. In a dramatic procedural twist, a coalition of Democrats and disgruntled conservative Republicans voted down the mandatory ‘rule’ required to even begin debating the underlying State Department spending bill.

But even if the vote on Massie’s amendment had occurred, the result would have been entirely predictable. It would have been defeated, as support for Israel on both sides of the congressional aisle remains structurally entrenched – even as the American public shifts against Israeli policy in historic numbers.

According to a watershed Gallup poll published on February 27, a plurality of Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, leading by a margin of 41 percent to 36 percent. This marked the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric over two decades ago that Israel did not hold the upper hand in public sympathy.

Yet the shift is part of a broader, undeniable trend. A nationwide survey published in late June 2026 by Quinnipiac University revealed that an unprecedented 48 percent of American voters now think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel – the highest percentage recorded since the pollster first began tracking the question in 2017.

This is precisely why Massie’s amendment carries such profound weight. It is significant not because US politicians have suddenly developed a collective moral conscience, but because recent election cycles represented the first time in modern American history where Palestine factored as a major, decisive variable in how citizens cast their ballots.

For years, conventional political analysts dismissed pro-Palestinian mobilization, claiming Americans only vote based on immediate socioeconomic interests and rigid party loyalties. That assessment has since proven faulty.

The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable following the fallout of the 2024 presidential race, a reality later confirmed by those within the inner sanctums of power. In the post-election debates, senior administration insiders admitted that the handling of the Gaza genocide alienated core voter blocks.

The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable after the 2024 presidential race. According to Axios, top Democratic strategists conducting the party’s post-election audit explicitly admitted to advocacy groups that internal party data proved the administration’s Gaza policy was a “net-negative” on the ballot.

This finding – disclosed during internal briefings by DNC autopsy author Paul Rivera – confirmed that the party’s unconditional backing of Israel directly fractured its base, and ultimately contributed to its loss of the elections.

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The Commies Are Coming! The Israel Factor Behind the New Red Scare

In June, a slew of progressive Democrats won primaries in some cases upending incumbents with long careers in Washington. Following in the footsteps Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City in 2025, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier bested their opponents and in the case of Lander and a Chevalier, defeated sitting House members.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, 29-year-old Merat Kiros beat 30-year House incumbent Dianne DeGette in their Democratic primary. So what is the through line here? Israel. All have criticized the war in Gaza and pledged not to take money from AIPAC or vote for more military aid for Israel.

These current political events encapsulate a party enmeshed in inner turmoil. While party leaders and the consultant class want to ignore it, ordinary voters, especially Democrats, have been turning against Israel over its war in Gaza, the annexation and settler violence in the West Bank and its expansionist policies in Lebanon and Syria. This, many say, cost them the presidency in 2024.

On the other hand, while the progressive wing, many of whom are carrying the mantle of the Democratic Socialists of America, are gaining traction, the MAGA movement is struggling to reconcile President Trump’s war and the fraught economy at home. Many on the Right, too, are blaming the Israeli government’s zeal for conflict and its grip on Trump’s foreign policy and say this is far from “America First.”

To keep these two factions from working together, Trump and the Republicans have exhumed the Cold War era “Red Scare” against the upstart progressives. It’s an age old wedge — the Commies are coming! Will it work?

Here to talk about it this week are Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute, who resigned the State Department in 2024 in protest of the Biden Administration’s Gaza policy. Also joining us is Erik Sperling, Executive Director of Just Foreign Policy and former staffer to Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna and John Conyers.

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Photo of bound Palestinian detainee corroborates Israeli torture reports, say rights groups

An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.

The image was shared on a now-deleted personal social media account, with the Hebrew-language caption “good morning”. It was brought to wider public attention by a Palestinian writer and activist who goes by Tamer.

“Both abusive treatment of detainees and the public sharing of humiliating or degrading images of them can constitute war crimes,” said Oneg Ben Dror from the prisoner and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).

The photo “confirms what thousands of testimonies from Palestinian detainees have exposed, and what we and other organisations have been reporting for nearly three years now,” she added. “Israeli detention facilities are torture camps for Palestinians.”

Israel’s military confirmed the authenticity of the photo. “The incident does not align with IDF values and regulations,” a spokesperson said, adding that an inquiry was under way.

Holding and photographing the man semi-naked also broke international law, said Sari Bashi, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “There is no security justification for holding a detainee in his underwear,” she said. “Forced nudity followed by capturing and sharing sexualised images on social media is a form of sexual violence and also a war crime.”

After the photo was widely shared on social media at least two mothers claimed the bound man as their son, highlighting the painful limbo of Palestinian families searching for loved ones missing since their detention by Israeli forces, Bashi added.

“This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have published humiliating photos of Palestinian detainees while depriving families of information or access to them. It has become a grotesque and unlawful way for families to get information about their loved ones.”

Rana Abu Nasser is sure the photo shows her son Osama, who was seized with his one-year-old son in March, near the shifting “yellow line” that marks the boundary of Israeli military control in Gaza. “I know the details of his body,” she told Reuters. “He has swelling in his foot and scars on his leg – the same swelling on his left leg I saw in the picture.”

Joudeh al-Ghoul wept the first time she saw the photo, instantly sure it was her son Amin, missing since his arrest in November 2023, when he was trying to travel from southern Gaza to the north. “It’s him, his hair and chin. He is ​my son. A mother’s heart can recognise her son. ​I hugged the mobile phone and started crying,” she said. “He is my son, my soul, my life.”

The Israeli military declined to comment on whether the detainee had been identified or given medical support, and whether his family in Gaza had been notified.

For seven months at the start of the war the Israeli military refused to provide basic information about the status of people detained in Gaza, in effect implementing a policy of forced disappearance.

From May 2024 Israel provided an email address for enquires about Palestinians from Gaza, but that provided only a partial, limited improvement. Israeli authorities had denied holding hundreds of missing Palestinians whose arrest was confirmed by witness testimony, the rights group HaMoked said this year.

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Leak from Israel to Embarass Trump for NATO

A ton of emails have come in about the Israeli leaked video and the timing. Footage has surfaced from Israel, which has been long rumored to have existed. Channel 12 has aired the leaked video in time for the NATO conference confirming Israel ordered the Hannibal Directive in the early hours of October 7th, 2023. This takes place at the Israel police command center.  The video shows what they said:

“(Strike) Gaza. Break it all apart. Along with the soldiers who got abducted.”

In the first hours of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, while conversing with Israel’s Police Chief Kobi Shabtai, another senior officer calls to implement the HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE, and destroy Gaza along with the Israeli captives. Minister Itamar Ben Gvir later arrives and orders to stop filming the meeting. This video has been leaked to discredit Trump at the NATO meeting.

The HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE is a highly controversial Israeli military policy. The most widely accepted explanation for its name is that it is named after the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, who chose to take his own life by poison around 181BC rather than be captured by his Roman enemies. The name is seen as a chillingly apt reference to a policy that emphasizes preventing capture at almost any cost.

Its primary intent was to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces, even if it meant TERMINATING the soldier’s life, by authorizing the use of massive force to stop a kidnapping in progress. The Israeli perspective was to ensure that enemy forces could NOT take an Israeli soldier hostage. The underlying concern was that captured soldiers could be used as bargaining chips to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

In essence, while it was supposed to be officially a “last resort,” the directive allowed for the use of overwhelming firepower, potentially including artillery or airstrikes, on a vehicle carrying a captured soldier, even if that meant the soldier might be killed in the process. The instruction was to prevent the escape of the captors “at any cost,” which critics argue effectively prioritized preventing the kidnapping over the soldier’s personal safety.

In 2016, the Israeli claimed to have military revised the directive to emphasize the soldier’s life as paramount. However, a 2022 report indicated that the Israeli military had officially rescinded the HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE, replacing it with updated, more refined protocols for hostage and missing persons situations.

In the context of the October 7 Hamas Attacks, the policy has drawn significant attention since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel. While the directive was officially rescinded before the attacks, its legacy and application have been debated. Multiple investigations and news reports had alleged that the HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE was activated during the chaos of the October 7 attacks. For instance, some reports indicate that the IDF ordered that “no vehicle can leave” the attack area, which allegedly led to a policy of “shoot to kill and leave no one behind.”

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After Displacing Hundreds of Thousands, Netanyahu Claims Lebanese Christians Want Israel to Annex Their Villages

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that some Christian villages in Lebanon have “asked to be annexed” by Israel to gain protection from the Iran-backed terrorists of Hezbollah.

“Among the Christian villages in Lebanon, some have even asked to be annexed to Israel, because we protect them from the fanatics of Hezbollah who want to kill them. And we do the same thing with Christians everywhere,” Netanyahu said in a Fox News interview.

“It’s not only the Christians in Lebanon who asked for our protection. It’s the Druze, it’s Muslims, the Sunni Muslims and quite a few of the Shiite Muslims, too,” he added.

Netanyahu did not specify which villages have made such requests to Israel. The mayor of the Christian village of Rmeish, Hanna al-Amil, quickly denied Netanyahu’s claim as “absolutely out of the question” in an interview with Lebanese public television.

“Fifteen Christian towns had issued a statement two days ago denying these allegations,” he said.

Amil was referring to a statement on Friday in which 13 Christian-majority border villages, including Rmeish, reiterated their commitment to the Lebanese government. The statement was issued in response to media rumors that some of these villages had asked Israel for protection.

The signatories said they had “no power, nor the legal right” to request protection from a foreign government. They reaffirmed their “loyalty to their national identity” and “attachment to their Lebanese flag.”

Amil told Arab News on Monday that the loyalty statement from the Christian border villages should be taken as their final word on the subject.

“The border villages have remained committed to the Lebanese state and its legitimacy throughout the war without wavering. Their residents take pride in their national identity and regard Lebanon as their final and permanent homeland, with no alternative on offer,” he said.

“They reject any attempt to twist their position or exploit their suffering in the service of agendas that have nothing to do with them. The fabricated reports serve only one purpose: to damage the reputation of the border communities and sow confusion,” he added.

Some residents of the Lebanese border region made it clear they were not pleased by the actions of Hezbollah, which triggered Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion, and were not happy with Beirut’s inability to protect them.

“For three years now, we have been suffering because the Lebanese state failed to extend its sovereignty over its own land,” Rmeish civil activist Gaby al-Hajj told Arab News, looking back to hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel during the Gaza War.

“That left us at the mercy of illegal weapons, and we are paying for it now,” al-Hajj said. “The Israelis have us under siege – yet we refused to leave our villages. We have not turned our backs on Lebanon and we will not. We have held on, regardless of the cost.”

Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri on Monday praised the loyalty statement from border villages, and warned Lebanese citizens to ignore “Israeli political misinformation” intended to “sow discord among border communities.”

Berri also urged the Beirut government and its allies to halt the “systematic destruction and the ongoing demolition of villages.”

Israel issued evacuation orders to border towns before launching its latest operation against Hezbollah, warning that it could not overlook these villages because Hezbollah operatives were known to hide in them.

As the statement on Friday pointed out, many of the Christian villagers refused to evacuate. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have demolished buildings and homes in southern Lebanon that were allegedly used by Hezbollah to hide its fighters and weapons.

Residents of the Marjeyoun district of Lebanon’s southern Nabatieh province said they received text messages from the IDF on Monday, warning them not to allow displaced residents to return to their homes. Israeli forces conducted drone strikes against suspected Hezbollah operatives who tried to enter restricted parts of Nabatieh on Monday.

The IDF has issued periodic warnings to the mayors of Christian villages, telling them not to allow “strangers” who might be Hezbollah fighters into their towns.

The U.N. mission in Lebanon, UNIFIL, said over the weekend that some displaced civilians have begun returning to their villages, and the mission aids them when possible.

“We’re not able to offer support in areas where the situation remains volatile, but we are continuing to remove rubble and unexploded ordnance from roads to allow passage, while supporting municipalities and repairing essential infrastructure such as water and electricity,” said UNIFIL spokeswoman Kandice Ardiel.

“The sooner people can return home, the better for long-term stability,” she said.

The Lebanese Health Ministry has estimated about one-fifth of Lebanon’s population, or more than one million people, have been displaced since Hezbollah launched the conflict by attacking Israel on March 2. Lebanese Social Affairs Minister Haneen El Sayed said on Saturday that about 400,000 displaced persons have returned to their homes.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said last Wednesday that the IDF “will not withdraw from the security zones” it has created in Lebanon and Syria.

“The Israeli army will remain in the security zones in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza until further notice to protect our residents and communities from jihadist elements,” he said.

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