Tag: lebanon

Israel Used Palantir Technology In Its 2024 Lebanon Pager Attack

Palantir software was used by Israel in its 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon, according to a new book by Alex Karp, co-founder of the Palantir tech company. On September 17, thousands of pagers belonging to Hezbollah members, including civilians not involved in any armed activity, were detonated across Lebanon.

Many showed “error” messages and vibrated loudly prior to exploding, luring Hezbollah members or, in some cases, their family members to stand close by at the point of detonation. The next day more communication devices exploded, including at the public funerals of Hezbollah members and civilians who had been killed the previous day.

While many Israeli figures celebrated, praised and even joked about the attacks, United Nations experts called them a “terrifying” violation of international law. In total, 42 people were killed and thousands wounded, many left with life-altering injuries to the eyes, face and hands.

Karp’s new biography reveals that Israel deepened its use of the company’s technology after it launched the war on Gaza in October 2023, deploying it in numerous operations.

“The company’s technology was deployed by the Israelis during military operations in Lebanon in 2024 that decimated Hezbollah’s top leadership,” wrote Michael Steinberger, author of The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State.

“It was also used in Operation Grim Beeper, in which hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were injured and maimed when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded (the Israelis had booby trapped the devices).”

He said that the demand for Palantir’s assistance by Israel “was so great that the company dispatched a team of engineers from London to help get Israeli users online“.

The involvement of a range of tech companies in Israel’s attacks on its neighbors in recent years, as well as for attacking and surveilling Palestinians, has sparked anger from rights campaigners and UN officials.

In a report produced by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese in July, several tech companies were accused of profiting from crimes including illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide in occupied Palestine. The report referenced AI systems that were developed by the Israeli military to process and generate targets during the war on Gaza.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defense infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision making,” the report said.

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Disregarding Ceasefire, Israel Hits Beirut

The Israeli military struck Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, Sunday for the first time since June, killing a Hezbollah leader. The attack killed at least five people and injured 28 others, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Israeli strikes in Lebanon have continued despite a ceasefire struck last year.

In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the strike targeted and killed Hezbollah’s chief of staff, Haytham Tabtabai. Hezbollah confirmed the official’s death.

Netanyahu described Tabtabai as a “mass murderer” and said he was responsible for the deaths of Israelis and Americans.

“The policy I am leading is absolutely clear: Under my leadership, the State of Israel will not allow Hezbollah to rebuild its power, and we will not allow it to pose a threat to Israel again,” he said. “I expect the Government of Lebanon to fulfill its commitment to disarm Hezbollah.”

The U.S. designated Tabatabai as a terrorist in 2016 and offered up to $5 million for information about the military leader.

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Israel bombs Lebanon using banned cluster munitions

The Israeli military has used widely banned cluster munitions in its recent 13-month war on Lebanon last year, The Guardian reported on 19 November, citing photos of munition remnants found in the south of the country.

The British paper commissioned six different arms experts to view the photos, which appear to show the remnants of two different types of Israeli cluster munitions, the 155mm M999 Barak Eitan cluster munition and 227mm Ra’am Eitan guided missiles.

The M999 Barak Eitan releases nine submunitions, which explode into 1,200 tungsten shards, while Ra’am Eitan-guided missiles each hold 64 bomblets.

The cluster munitions were found in three locations in southern Lebanon, where Israeli bombing has been most deadly: the forested valleys of Wadi Zibqin, Wadi Barghouz, and Wadi Deir Siryan.

Cluster munitions are container bombs that release many smaller submunitions, or “bomblets,” over an area several hundred meters wide, killing anyone within the range.

However, up to 40 percent of the bomblets fail to explode, killing and maiming civilians accidentally encountering them for years or even decades after a war is over.

As a result, 124 nations have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which forbids their use, production, and transfer. Israel is not a signatory to the convention.

“We believe the use of cluster munitions is always in conflict with a military’s duty to respect international humanitarian law because of their indiscriminate nature at the time of use and afterwards,” stated Tamar Gabelnick, the director of the Cluster Munition Coalition.

During the 2006 June war, Israel dropped four million cluster bombs on Lebanon in the final days before a ceasefire was reached. An estimated one million unexploded bomblets remained, killing 400 people since that time.

“Cluster munitions are banned internationally for a reason. They are inherently indiscriminate, and there is no way to employ them lawfully or responsibly, and civilians bear the brunt of the risk as these weapons stay deadly for decades to come,” said Brian Castner, the head of crisis research at Amnesty International.

During its war on Lebanon that began in October 2023, Israel has killed almost 4,000 people.

Israel continues to carry out near-daily strikes, in particular in Lebanon’s south, killing both civilians and Hezbollah members.

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Israel Massively Escalates Strikes on Lebanon as Hezbollah Threatens Retaliation

Israel’s long-threatened escalation of their attacks on Lebanon seems to have begun in earnest on Thursday, with massive numbers of strikes reported against several towns and villages in the country’s south.

The IDF issued evacuation warnings for at least five sites in southern Lebanon, and is claiming, as they so often do, that everything they are attacking is Hezbollah infrastructure. Early indications are that a substantial number of civilian casualties have occurred. The most recent toll has one confirmed killed and nine wounded, though those tolls are expected to rise.

This comes amid an Israeli security cabinet meeting, at which the Northern Command will reportedly present various options for the direction and scale of a military escalation in Lebanon, in spite of a ceasefire nominally having been in place for the past year.

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Leaked: How British Intel Infiltrates Lebanon

In a markedly revealing September 22nd interview with The National, US special envoy to Syria Tom Barrack made a number of stunning admissions about the state of play in Lebanon. Despite Western governments for months demanding Beirut disarm Hezbollah, he acknowledged the Resistance group had “zero” incentive to voluntarily do so, as “Israel is attacking everybody” across West Asia. As such, Hezbollah’s “argument gets better and better”, and its public support grows. Barrack went on to propose arming the Lebanese Armed Forces for the purpose:

“[The LAF] is a good organisation and it’s well-meaning, but it’s not well-equipped…Who are they going to fight? We don’t want to arm them so they can fight Israel…So you’re arming them so they can fight their own people, Hezbollah…our enemy…We need to cut the heads off of those snakes and chop the flow of funds. That’s the only way you’re going to stop Hezbollah.”

Barrack’s comments are a uniquely candid admission of Washington’s overarching strategy in West Asia. Namely, to construct intelligence, military, and security apparatuses in pliable puppet states for the purposes of internal oppression, posing no threat whatsoever to the Zionist entity, while Tel Aviv attacks “everybody” in the region with total impunity. Yet, efforts to bring Lebanon to heel, and neutralise Hezbollah’s influence in the country, have been ongoing for many years – with London secretly leading the charge.

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A Warning from Lebanon

In not quite one year since the ceasefire deal in Lebanon, Israel has broken the ceasefire 4,600 times. It has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon. It was supposed to withdraw completely.

This situation is being replicated in detail in Gaza. In particular, the ceasefire in Lebanon is “guaranteed” by the USA and France and overseen by an international committee referred to as “the Mechanism”. The “Mechanism” is chaired by the USA. Accordingly the guarantors have refused to acknowledge a single breach of the ceasefire because the US-controlled “Mechanism” calls them counter-terrorist operations aimed at disarming Hezbollah.

The United Nations defers to “the Mechanism” and thus to the USA, and the presence of UN peacekeeping troops in Southern Lebanon is therefore useless. Lebanon is now under control of the US/Israeli puppet administration of General Aoun and effectively being run by US Special Envoy Tom Barrack.

Barrack stated that the borders of Israel and Syria are meaningless and that “Israel will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want to protect the Israelis and their border to make sure on October 7th it never happens again”. This is from the “guarantor” of the Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

There can be no doubt that Trump’s US-chaired “Board of Peace” for Gaza will take exactly the same line as “the Mechanism” in Lebanon. It is axiomatic that Israel will never honor any agreement. They never have.

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Israeli airstrikes devastate south Lebanon’s power grid, destroy reconstruction equipment

Israeli warplanes carried out a series of intense airstrikes along Musaylih Road in southern Lebanon overnight on 11 October, cutting off the main route and plunging large parts of the south into darkness after severing key power lines.

At least 10 strikes hit six excavation and bulldozer depots, destroying more than 300 engineering vehicles and heavy machines, and leaving one person dead and seven wounded.

Electricité du Liban (EDL), Lebanon’s main electricity provider, said the strikes caused severe damage to the national grid. A 66 kV tower was completely destroyed, cutting the Zahrani-Musaylih line and disrupting power to the main 66 kV substations in Sidon and Siblin. 

The unprovoked attack also severed the primary 220 kV Zahrani–Tyre transmission line, forcing the shutdown of several substations across southern Lebanon, including Tyre and Wadi Jilou.

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US Provides Lebanese Government With $230 Million in Military Aid as It Pushes Hezbollah Disarmament

The Trump administration has approved $230 million worth of military and security aid for Lebanon as it’s pushing the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, Reuters reported on Friday.

The Hill reported that the US sent $230 million on September 30 as a last-minute action before the government shutdown so the funds wouldn’t expire. “It’s not a huge amount, but for a small country like Lebanon, that’s really significant,” a congressional aide told reporters on October 1.

A Lebanese source told Reuters that $190 million will go toward the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and $40 million is for the Internal Security Forces. On September 10, the US Department of War announced a $14 million weapons package for the LAF that it said would help “dismantle weapons caches and military infrastructure of non-state groups, including Hezbollah.”

In an interview released on September 22, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey, who has also been involved in talks with Lebanon, said that the US was arming the LAF so it could fight its own people.

“We’re going to arm them so they can fight Israel? I don’t think so,” Barrack told The National. “So you’re arming them so they can fight their own people, Hezbollah. Hezbollah is our enemy. Iran is our enemy.”

Barrack’s comments came as critics of the US policy in Lebanon have been warning that the push to disarm Hezbollah could lead to a civil war. The US has also continued to strongly back Israel’s action in Lebanon, even though it has flagrantly violated the ceasefire deal signed in November 2024 and continues to conduct near-daily strikes. Since the truce deal was signed, Israel has killed hundreds of people in southern Lebanon, including at least 103 civilians.

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‘Near Daily’ Israeli Assaults on Lebanon Have Become Non-News for Western Media

The Israeli military unleashed a large wave of air strikes on densely populated towns in South Lebanon on Thursday, September 18—although you’d never know it from the Western corporate media, who have increasingly lost interest in reporting on Israel’s unceasing war on its northern neighbor. This proceeds unabated in spite of a ceasefire, brokered by the United States and France, that ostensibly took hold last November. Prior to Thursday’s strikes, area residents were given an hour to evacuate.

The BBC (9/18/25) was one of the few corporate outlets that managed to find a bit of space for these events, under the headline, “Israeli Air Strikes Hit Southern Lebanon.” The outlet noted that

an Israeli military spokesman said the targets were infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah and in response to the group’s attempts to re-establish activities in the area. He provided no evidence.

The piece also explained that Israel “has carried out air strikes on people and places it says are linked to Hezbollah almost every day, despite a deal that ended the war with the group in November.”

Reuters (9/18/25) managed an even shorter writeup—and took Israel’s word for it in the headline: “Israel Attacks Hezbollah Targets in South Lebanon.”

No casualties were reported in these particular attacks, but the fiery spectacle naturally sent a whole lot of people fleeing in terrorized panic. The fact that such terrorism by the state of Israel transpires “almost every day” is perhaps part of the reason the media have largely relegated it to the realm of non-news.

Another part of the reason might be that outlets are too busy serving as apologists (FAIR.org, 4/11/25, 4/25/25, 6/6/25) for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the nearby Gaza Strip, which Israel launched in October 2023, and which has thus far officially killed more than 65,000 Palestinians, including 20,000 children—although this is likely a grave underestimate.

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The Gaza War Isn’t Over, But Israel Has Already Lost

The Israeli regime has lost its multi-front war in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Yes, really. It may not look like it, but the defeat is real and  baked into Israel’s future.

Let me first make the case for Israeli “victory”:

Since its 2023 invasion of Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces report fewer than 800 troops killed, while in turn killing tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of mostly civilian Palestinian Arabs (and 250 or more inconvenient journalists).

Since the beginning. They’ve established their ability to attack any point in Gaza at will, driving a displaced, hungry population back and forth over piles of bodies, while seizing more land in the West Bank and Syria, liquidating Hezbollah’s Lebanese strongholds, trading missile strikes with Yemen’s Houthis, and even emerging relatively unscathed, if not particularly successful, in an intermittent war with Iran.

Top Israeli regime officials confidently assert that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and annexation of the West Bank are inevitable.

Yes, that sounds rather like multiple “victories,” accomplished and pending.

But those victories didn’t come from nowhere. They were enabled by decades of massive financial, military, and diplomatic support from the United States.

Yes, other regimes too, but most of those “allies” are moving in the other direction already — cutting off arms sales, recognizing a Palestinian state, and sanctioning Israeli war criminals.

It’s quickly coming down to the “no daylight between us” US/Israel relationship under which the former annually shovels billions of dollars, and when requested direct military assistance, at the latter, no questions asked (US law “guarantees” Israel a “Qualitative Military Edge”), while using its own sanctions power and veto on the UN Security Council to protect Benjamin Netanyahu and Friends from the consequences of their actions.

That relationship is nearing its end.

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