The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned nine individuals, including Hezbollah parliamentarians, Amal Movement security figures, and Lebanese Army Intelligence officers, signaling that state uniforms no longer confer immunity if the person wearing them serves the militia’s security architecture. Source link
The footage lasts just three minutes. An Israeli flag flies over a position in the village of al-Bayada, in occupied southern Lebanon. One drone approaches the flagpole while another observes from above. The flag falls after the impact. The final frame displays a digitally rendered, torn Israeli flag with the words: “Al-Bayada does not welcome you.” The video’s caption reads: “Flag lowering ceremony”. This is the latest video released by Hezbollah, which reflects a broader context beyond a single hillside in southern Lebanon. Journalists and observers who covered southern Lebanon in the late 1990s may recall Hezbollah’s media strategy before the Israeli withdrawal. Al-Manar TV functioned as more than a television channel; it operated as a psychological campaign in plain view. Repeated footage of Israeli soldiers screaming after being attacked with a roadside bomb, retreating, positions abandoned, and flags lowered, created the perception in the Arab world that Israel was already departing before any official decision to do so had been taken. Back then, the image pushed forward a new reality, one that played a …
TEL AVIV — Israeli troops are confronting a new threat in their fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon: camera-equipped explosive drones that feed live video back to their operators via a fiber-optic tether to evade detection and traditional signal-jamming defenses. Source link
The Syrian Lebanese Higher Council is a relic of the past. It embodied the guardianship that Syria exerted over Lebanon for 15 years, from 1990, the year the civil war ended in Lebanon, until the withdrawal of Damascus’s troops in 2005. Despite the opening of embassies in both countries in 2008, the former Syrian regime never wanted to dissolve this body, which was based in Damascus. The new Syrian authorities acknowledged the clinical death of this institution, which had become an empty shell, but they have not buried this painful symbol, as the government in Beirut would like. More than a year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, on December 8, 2024, relations between Lebanon and Syria reflect the state of that issue. Sensitive topics are finally being addressed, but progress remains slow. Lebanon has made the dialogue that has begun with its neighbor a priority. Read more Subscribers only Syrians celebrate ‘renewed hope’ one year after the fall of the Assad dictatorship After more than half a century of “problematic” relations with Syria …
