Tag: lebanon

White House ‘signed off’ on Pakistan’s declaration that Iran ceasefire included Lebanon: Report

The White House was directly involved in “shaping” the ceasefire announcement by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, having reviewed and approved it before publication, according to a New York Times (NYT) report on 8 April.

The report says Washington saw and signed off on the statement in advance, indicating that the announcement was not an independent diplomatic move but part of coordinated communication. 

US President Donald Trump had issued an 8:00 pm deadline on Tuesday for Iran to surrender, saying that he would erase an entire civilization if Tehran did not agree to his terms for a deal.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.

The NYT report notes that, behind the scenes, US officials were actively seeking a way out as the deadline approached, even as US President Donald Trump was threatening Iran with annihilation if it did not open the Strait of Hormuz.

It asserts that diplomatic channels were far more active than the public messaging indicated, with the ceasefire appeal reflecting a managed effort rather than a spontaneous initiative.

Sharif’s post itself had appeared earlier with the header “Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X,” fueling speculation that the text had been provided externally before publication. It called for extending the deadline by two weeks, reopening the Strait of Hormuz as a “goodwill gesture,” and implementing a temporary ceasefire across all fronts. 

Iran’s 10-point plan includes US non-aggression, sanctions removal, compensation, troop withdrawal, uranium enrichment, and Iranian control of Hormuz, alongside a halt to fighting across all fronts, directly naming Lebanon. 

The Pakistani premier’s statement on X explicitly stated that “the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”

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Trump claims Netanyahu will scale back strikes on Lebanon 

US President Donald Trump has said he asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back the bombing of Lebanon as Gulf countries and some NATO members insisted that a ceasefire in the area must be part of a broader truce with Iran.

Despite Trump’s assertion, Lebanese media reported Israeli strikes across the country on Friday morning. An estimated 1,800 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the start of the escalation in the Middle East, with more than 300 dying on Wednesday alone. The attacks triggered significant public outcry, including from US allies in the EU.

Iran has insisted that fighting in Lebanon must cease as part of the two-week truce framework with the US – something Washington and the Jewish state have opposed.

The exact outlines of a potential US-Iran peace deal remain unclear, after Iranian media shared a plan envisaging non-aggression, Tehran’s control over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of some uranium enrichment, stopping Israeli attacks on Hezbollah, and the lifting of all sanctions. The US previously opposed many of the terms.

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Scenes of devastation after Israel bombs Lebanon 100 times in 10 minutes

Israeli strikes rained down on residential areas and estates in central Beirut today without warning, hours after a ceasefire was announced between the US and Iran.

Israel has said the agreement does not extend to its conflict with the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, however.

Today, the IDF launched more than 100 strikes on Hezbollah targets within 10 minutes in Beirut, southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa valley.

At least 254 people have been killed by Israeli strikes across Lebanon today, according to civil defence authorities.

The highest death toll was ⁠in the capital Beirut, where Israeli strikes killed 91 people. These tolls are expected to rise.

Black smoke towered over several parts of the seaside capital, and booms interrupted the honking of traffic on what had been a blue-sky afternoon, as ambulances raced toward open flames.

At least one apartment building was struck as emergency responders searched charred vehicles. There was no sign of Hezbollah launching strikes against Israel in the first couple of hours after the attacks.

Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that the airstrikes hit at least five different neighbourhoods in Beirut’s central and coastal areas.

Lebanon’s minister of social affairs, Haneed Sayed, said the strikes were in the ‘heart of Beirut’ where half of the internally displaced people had been.

She said Lebanon’s government is ready to enter into negotiations with Israel for an end to hostilities, an offer that the president previously made.

Israel has not responded.

Hezbollah had fired missiles across the border days after the US and Israel attacked Iran, resparking a lengthy regional conflict.

Israel responded with widespread bombardment of Lebanon and a ground invasion, and claims to have killed hundreds of Hezbollah fighters.

Israel has killed more than 1,530 people in Lebanon, including more than 100 women and 130 children, in the attacks. More than one million people have been displaced in Lebanon.

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Lebanon excluded from US‑Iran ceasefire deal because of Hezbollah, Trump says; Israel hits 100 targets

Israel carried out its most intense air campaign on Lebanon since the outbreak of the current conflict, striking more than 100 Hezbollah targets across Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and southern Lebanon in roughly ten minutes, the Israeli military said. The assault came hours after the announcement of a temporary two‑week US–Iran ceasefire. Meanwhile, in a brief exchange with a PBS correspondent, US President Donald Trump confirmed that Lebanon was excluded from the truce because of Hezbollah.

Israel struck Hezbollah targets across Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon within about ten minutes, the Israeli military said. Earlier, Israel had also made clear that the truce did not extend to its operations against the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Lebanon’s health ministry said the strikes killed dozens and wounded hundreds, with ambulances unable to keep up with the wounded and emergency responders tackling fires and collapsed vehicles across the country.

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Israel Carpet Bombs Lebanon After Announcement of Iran Ceasefire

sraeli forces launched some of the most intense bombardments of Lebanon in recent years on Wednesday, striking Beirut and towns and cities across the country just hours after a ceasefire deal that reportedly includes Lebanon was announced.

The Israeli military announced on Wednesday that it targeted over 100 sites with strikes over just the course of 10 minutes in Lebanon. The UN also reported that it has recorded over 60 locations struck. The intensity of the strikes was unprecedented in recent times, one Al Jazeera reporter said, reminiscent of the scale of Israel’s invasion of Beirut in 1982 or Israel’s beeper attack in 2024.

Video of the strikes circulated online. One showed a massive fire in the wreckage of destroyed buildings in Beirut, sending plumes of dark smoke into the air. Another video purportedly taken in Beirut showed the top floors of a building completely destroyed and smoking, while the streets below were covered in flaming debris.

Another video from Tyre, in southern Lebanon, showed an Israeli strike hitting a building in the city center, with the explosion spreading horizontally across what appeared to be several city blocks and sending a plume into the air that shot higher than the hills in the background.

The death toll is unclear, but early reports have said that hundreds have been killed by the strikes.

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Iran Launches Missiles at Israel, U.S. Installation Amid Ceasefire Announcement

Just after the United States announced a ceasefire with the Iranian regime, that regime launched ballistic missiles at civilian targets in Israel. Another missile salvo reportedly targeted a U.S. base or diplomatic installation in Iraq, though that strike might have occurred just before the ceasefire. In any case, I think the Iranian regime achieved a new record for a shortest ceasefire ever, even outdoing its terror proxy Hamas, which is stunning.

Of course Donald Trump wants the war to end — who outside of crazed jihad-lovers in America would not rather have peace? — but the question is whether we can trust the Iranian regime. Trump did indicate the ceasefire was temporary, up to two weeks, likely as a test, and it seems the Iranian regime couldn’t wait to illustrate for the president just how temporary the ceasefire was to be. 

Fox News reported that an Iranian barrage bombarded Israel just after the ceasefire announcement. An Iranian media account called The Hormuz Letter claimed Iranian missiles were targeting Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and a U.S. base in Baghdad as well, and that the missile launch occurred just after the ceasefire announcement. Just yesterday, Iranian missiles killed two generations of the same family in Haifa, Israel.

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Israel excludes Lebanon from ceasefire, oil prices dive as Iran signals Hormuz green light

US President Donald Trump has announced a two-week suspension of bombing of Iranian energy infrastructure, agreeing to a “double sided ceasefire” contingent on Tehran agreeing to the “complete” and “immediate” opening of the Strait of Hormuz. The news prompted oil prices to drop by around 13% and shares to rise in early trading in Asia.

Israel has refused to include Lebanon, which it is currently invading, in the ceasefire.

Trump said Iran’s 10-point proposal delivered via Pakistan offers a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” He warned, however, that he would order devastating new airstrikes if no final deal is reached by the new deadline.

Tehran said the move represents a “historic and crushing defeat” for the US, claiming Washington has been forced to accept Tehran’s 10‑point plan as the basis for talks.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has announced that negotiations with the US will begin on Friday, April 10, in Islamabad, allocating a two‑week period that may be extended by mutual agreement.

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The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War The New Normal

One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.

Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.

What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.

The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.

It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.

What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.

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Israel is implementing its Gaza strategy in Lebanon: turning ‘buffer zones’ into permanent borders

While the US-Israeli war on Iran and its economic repercussions on the global economy continues to be at the center of global media attention, Israel is in the process of re-drawing the map of the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon. If successful, Israel’s plans could have regional and global repercussions. And yet, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon has barely made a blip on the Western media’s radar. 

Last week, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israeli forces will not leave the south of Lebanon after the end of the current war. Katz’s statements are in line with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said last weekend that he had instructed the Israeli army to expand its control in the south of Lebanon up to 10 kilometers, to create a “security buffer zone.” These statements come as the Israeli army has deployed four divisions to the Lebanese border, and continues to push into Lebanese territory.

Everything in the current Israeli invasion of Lebanon is repeated from previous invasions; Israeli orders to civilians to leave their villages in the south, the near 1 million Lebanese displaced, the bombing of infrastructure, especially bridges over the Litani river, and the fighting inside and around Lebanese villages. But there is something different this time; Israel’s destruction of infrastructure is not a mere war strategy. It is yet another announcement of Israel’s renewed doctrine: occupying new areas, often depopulating them by force, and permanently controlling them, basically expanding Israel’s de facto borders with “buffer zones.”

Although Israel has implemented elements of this strategy in the past, this time it is significantly different. First, because Israel is explicitly stating that it wants to permanently occupy new Arab territory, against the backdrop of official statements about ‘Greater Israel’ ambitions. Second, because it is happening without any significant international reaction. And lastly, because this new model that Israel is trying to replicate on a second front could have implications for the future of war and border drawing worldwide. 

This reality raises two critical questions: how did this model become an Israeli official policy? And what will this Israeli vision mean for the Middle East and the world, if realized?

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Israel Is Conducting a Campaign to Ethnically Cleanse Southern Lebanon of Shia Residents

On March 28, George Saeed, 62, and his 24-year-old son Elie were driving back to their home in Debel, a Christian village in southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel. It was a route Saeed knew well. He ran a small laundromat beneath his house, where he washed uniforms for a Polish unit in the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in the nearby village of Tiri. The trip from Tiri used to take a few minutes, but after the main road was bombed by the invading Israeli military he had begun taking a longer route through the neighboring village of Rmeich.

That afternoon, villagers saw George’s car pass through Rmeich and enter Debel, disappearing along the village’s steep, winding roads. When they were roughly 60 meters from their house, the crackle of gunfire rang out, followed by the blare of a stuck car horn.

Elie Louqa, Saeed’s nephew and the former mayor of Debel, was in Beirut when he got a call from his brother describing what had happened. He began contacting UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL), the Lebanese Army, and the Red Cross, asking them to reach the car. Both the Red Cross unit in Rmeich and the nearby UNIFIL contingent told Louqa they could not secure permission from their superiors to move.

After about 90 minutes, a group of young men from the village decided to go themselves. Carrying white blankets and mattresses to signal they were civilians, they reached the site of the attack and found the father and son dead inside their bullet-ridden car. They pulled the bodies out and carried them to the village cemetery for burial.

“You won’t find a man with cleaner hands. He was generous to a fault,” Louqa told Drop Site News. “Go and ask the people of our villages who George Saeed was.”

The killings were just one in a series of attacks on residents of several villages along the southern border who have chosen to remain in their homes despite repeated sweeping displacement orders by the Israeli military covering all of southern Lebanon.

Earlier this week, the Lebanese army announced its forces had withdrawn from southern border villages, leaving residents without even the semblance of protection. At least six Lebanese soldiers have been killed by Israel over the past month. The army said its troops had to “reposition” as they were being encircled and cut off from their supply lines but claimed it continued to “stand by residents” by “maintaining a group of military personnel” in the villages. What this meant in practice, according to residents, was that soldiers from the area could stay in their homes provided they did not wear army uniforms or carry arms.

“We don’t know why the army made this decision,” said Boutros al-Rai, a local farmer and civilian administrator. “For us, its presence made us feel protected.”

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