Israels

As the sun sets on Israel’s Memorial Day, 12 torches, together symbolising the spirit of the nation, are lit to mark the beginning of Independence Day, the anniversary of the country’s establishment in 1948 – which led to the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians.

To be selected to light one of the torches over the resting place of Theodor Herzl, the man widely credited with the creation of modern Zionism, is regarded as one of the greatest honours in Israel.

This year, among those selected to light the torch on Tuesday evening is Avraham Zarbiv, a rabbi so controversial that even the Israeli military – an organisation that admits to having killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza – has publicly distanced itself from him. A military spokesperson said last week that Zarbiv “was not selected in coordination” with the military, and was not representing it at the ceremony, despite his being an army reservist.

Obliterate

Zarbiv first came to national prominence in Israel in the early months of 2024, when the 52-year-old rabbi and state rabbinical judge was filmed throwing grenades at Palestinians in Khan Younis during a firefight.

Since then, he has recorded himself gleefully demolishing Palestinian homes – his name even becoming a verb meaning to flatten or obliterate – and has delivered sermons from the ruins of Rafah promising “victory and settlement”. Zarbiv pairs it all with the traditional mannerisms of a religious leader, punctuating his threats and violence with footage of him blowing on a traditional ram’s horn, or shofar, as well as reciting prayers and parts of the Torah.

Zarbiv has also shared footage of himself taking part in the demolition of homes in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces are accused of deploying the same scorched earth tactics as they did during Gaza’s genocide.

Speaking to Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 in January 2025, Zarbiv boasted of the destruction inflicted on Gaza.

“There are tens of thousands of dead. The dogs and the cats ate them because no one collected them,” he said. “Tens of thousands of families – they have not a piece of paper, no childhood photo, no IDs, they have nothing. No home, there is nothing. They come, they have no idea where their house is. It’s something unbelievable.”

While the army leadership itself might be seeking to distance itself from Zarbiv, the rabbi himself says that he represents his fellow soldiers.

“I am one soldier among many, I am a soldier of the Givati Brigade,” he said in an interview last week.

Illegal settlement

Last week, the Israeli organisation Kerem Navot, which monitors illegal settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, filed a complaint to Israel’s judicial watchdog after confirming that Zarbiv had built his home illegally on private Palestinian land in the Beit El settlement, accusing him of violating the ethics rules for both judges and rabbinic judges.

That had no bearing, however, on Transport Minister Miri Regev’s decision to nominate Zarbiv for the torch-bearing ceremony.

“Rabbi Zarbiv, a father of six, continues to serve in reserve duty and combines in his life in an inspiring way between the book and the sword – between Torah and the army, between study and action, and between spiritual leadership and security responsibility,” the right-wing minister said.

She continued, describing the man now accused of multiple war crimes as representative of a generation “that refuses to part with responsibility, that chooses to bear the burden and continue to build, out of great faith in the future”.

Nevertheless, in January 2025, The Hind Rajab Foundation, the Belgian-based NGO that seeks to prosecute Israeli soldiers on the basis of the video evidence they themselves frequently provide, filed an official complaint against Zarbiv with the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to the foundation’s lawyers, Zarbiv’s gleeful boast of destroying 50 buildings per week in Gaza, participating in the complete destruction of entire neighbourhoods, and having publicly incited violence and hatred through his appearances on Israeli media, were clear enough breaches of the Geneva Convention and Rome Statute to deserve prosecution.

Zarbiv was not a neutral public figure being honoured for civic virtue, Dyab Abou Jahjah, cofounder of The Hind Rajab Foundation, told Al Jazeera. Rather, “he is a notorious perpetrator of grave international crimes”, Abou Jahjah said.

“His selection [for the Independence Day ceremony] is therefore not incidental – it is revealing,” Abou Jahjah added. “When an individual implicated in acts that constitute genocide is elevated in this way, it reflects the underlying logic of a state project historically rooted in the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. From that perspective, his selection is entirely consistent.”

B’tselem, the Israeli rights group, is also

among those objecting to Zarbiv’s selection.

“The government’s decision to laud Zarbiv as an ‘exemplary citizen’, after more than two years of genocide in Gaza and amid a reality of unprecedented state and settler violence in the West Bank, represents a state-level endorsement of the complete dehumanization of Palestinians and the systematic destruction of Palestinian life,” B’tselem said in a statement.

“This selection sends a clear message to the citizens of Israel and the entire world: In Israel, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes are the ‘spirit of the nation’,” the group added.

China has taken a firm stance against the Israeli escalation in Lebanon, strongly warning against the region becoming a second Gaza and considering the events a blatant violation of Lebanese sovereignty and international law. The most prominent features of the Chinese response up to April 2026 to this Israeli military escalation in southern Lebanon included condemning the targeting of civilians and emphasizing the protection of Lebanese sovereignty while rejecting Israeli violations aimed at destroying the infrastructure of southern Lebanon. The Chinese Foreign Ministry condemned the extensive Israeli raids targeting towns in southern Lebanon, stressing that Lebanon’s sovereignty and security are a red line that must not be crossed. China also emphasized the protection of Lebanese civilians, with Beijing unequivocally affirming that the protection of civilians and civilian objects in armed conflicts is a legal obligation and expressing its shock at the scale of casualties and destruction inflicted on southern villages and towns.

China’s position is based on a comprehensive vision linking the stability of southern Lebanon to a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Beijing believes that addressing the root causes of the conflict is the only way to prevent its spread throughout the Middle East. While condemning the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and civilian areas, China’s Foreign Ministry denounced the Israeli airstrikes that killed hundreds of civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure and property. Beijing categorically rejects any actions that lead to the destruction of infrastructure, considering them a violation of international law. China has consistently emphasized that Lebanon’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity are a red line that must not be crossed. Beijing has also declared its opposition to the Israeli ground incursion into southern Lebanon, warning that such actions exacerbate regional tensions. China has called for diplomatic solutions, urging all parties, especially Israel, to exercise maximum restraint and return to the path of political and diplomatic settlement, asserting that continued violence will not bring security to any party. China condemned the attacks targeting UNIFIL peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon, stressing the need to ensure the safety of UN peacekeepers.

In this context, China deliberately directed veiled criticism at Washington regarding Israeli violations in southern Lebanon. China believes that the failure to contain the escalation in southern Lebanon is partly due to the military and political support provided to Israel by external powers, a clear reference to the United States, which hinders efforts to de-escalate the situation. Simultaneously, China warned of a second Gaza in southern Lebanon. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi explicitly cautioned against a repeat of the Gaza tragedy in Lebanon, emphasizing that violence cannot replace right and justice. China is pressing in international forums, particularly the Security Council, for an immediate and permanent cessation of Israeli hostilities, warning against the region sliding into a full-scale war. This stance reflects China’s desire to bolster its role as a peacemaker in the Middle East and to rival American influence by adhering to political solutions and international law.

Here, China sharply criticized the American role in the Israeli war against southern Lebanon and its recent escalation in April 2026, arguing that Washington contributes to undermining regional stability through its military and political support for Israel. Beijing considered the military operations supported or participated in by the United States to be a flagrant violation of international law and the principles of national sovereignty. While warning against the militarization of the region, China criticized the expansion of the American military presence, describing it as irresponsible and warning that such steps exacerbate tensions rather than de-escalate them. Beijing believes that Washington’s approach to the international order reflects the values ​​of the law of the jungle and fuels chaos and instability in the Middle East. While criticizing the US for its double standards, China, through its Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, condemned the continued Israeli strikes on towns and villages in southern Lebanon despite ongoing efforts to de-escalate the situation. She emphasized that Lebanon’s sovereignty and security must not be violated.

China called on Israel to immediately withdraw from southern Lebanon, warning against a repeat of the Gaza scenario. Chinese President Xi Jinping issued direct warnings demanding the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, cautioning that continued military operations could lead to a humanitarian catastrophe similar to what occurred in the Gaza Strip. He also called for an end to the Israeli escalation in southern Lebanon. China maintains that violence does not solve problems but rather exacerbates crises, urging maximum restraint to de-escalate the volatile regional situation. Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory, asserting that their current military presence violates Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. President Xi explicitly warned against allowing southern Lebanon to become another Gaza, pointing to the risk of a widespread humanitarian catastrophe and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

To halt the cycle of violence and armed conflict in southern Lebanon, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed a four-point peace initiative to bolster stability in the Middle East. This initiative includes a call for a multilateral peace conference under the auspices of the United Nations, the re-establishment of the border along the Blue Line between southern Lebanon and Israel, and a reaffirmation of China’s rejection of any violation of Lebanese sovereignty. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has repeatedly emphasized, most notably on April 9, 2026, that Lebanon’s sovereignty and security are a (red line) that must not be crossed. These Chinese moves position Beijing as an active diplomatic alternative in the region at a time of escalating international tensions between major powers and ongoing regional conflicts. China has begun diplomatic efforts by proposing several peace initiatives to halt the cycle of armed conflict in southern Lebanon. The most prominent of these is the call for a multilateral peace conference. Beijing proposed hosting an international peace conference aimed at stabilizing the region and reinforcing the border along the Blue Line separating Israel and Lebanon, under the auspices of the United Nations. China holds Israel fully responsible, considering the ongoing fighting in Gaza to be the root cause of the instability in the Middle East. Therefore, China called on the international community, particularly the major powers, to play a constructive role in achieving a comprehensive and lasting ceasefire in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. China has also supported the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, strongly condemning any attacks on UNIFIL forces as violations of UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Here, China used its influence in the UN Security Council and international forums to emphasize that any military operations outside the framework of the United Nations violate its Charter. It described the Israeli strikes on towns and villages in southern Lebanon as unauthorized actions.

Based on the preceding analysis, we understand the accuracy of China’s linking of the tensions in southern Lebanon to the war in Gaza. China called for restraint to prevent the conflict from spreading regionally, based on its principles of supporting sovereign states like Lebanon and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. China also called for a return to the diplomatic track to halt the cycle of violent armed conflict in southern Lebanon perpetrated by Israel. China condemned the extensive Israeli strikes, stressing that Lebanon’s sovereignty and security must not be violated. It emphasized the need to protect Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure during Israeli military operations and called for de-escalation and immediate steps to calm the situation and prevent further escalation of the conflict in southern Lebanon.

Israel’s ambassador to the US has held talks with his Lebanese counterpart. But as a pro-settler ‘activist’ and former soldier who took part in invading Lebanon, critics say Yechiel Leiter is a problematic negotiator.

Israel’s far-right national ‌security minister storms the mosque compound under the protection of settlers, drawing condemnation from Palestinians.

Israel’s far-right National ‌Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound ⁠in occupied East Jerusalem’s Old ⁠City – his third incursion into Islam’s third holiest site this year – as Israel arrested at least 18 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Sunday.

Accompanied by Israeli settlers under heavy protection from Israeli forces, Ben-Gvir offered Jewish prayers at the site, which is not allowed for non-Muslims as part of the status quo arrangement in place since 1967, though Jewish people are permitted to visit the compound.

A statement from Jordan’s Foreign Ministry said it considered Ben-Gvir’s visit to be a violation of the status quo agreement at the site and “a desecration of its sanctity, a condemnable escalation and ⁠an unacceptable provocation”.

The Palestinian Authority’s presidency has also condemned the storming of the mosque compound, which has become more frequent in recent years.

In a statement, the presidency said the move was a blatant violation of the historical and legal status quo at the holy site, Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

Ben-Gvir, who has stormed the mosque compound at least 16 times since taking office in 2022, is part of a growing settler movement that wants to take over the Al-Aqsa Mosque, with the far-right Israeli minister having expressed his intention to build a Jewish synagogue in place of the holy Muslim site.

“Today, I feel like the owner here,” Ben-Gvir said in a video filmed at the site and distributed by his office. “There is still more to do, more to improve. I keep pushing the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] to do more and more,” he said.

There has been no comment from Netanyahu’s office so far.

Israel had closed the Al-Aqsa Mosque to the public for 40 days after launching its war on Iran on February 28. Israel often imposes restrictions, especially on Palestinian worshippers, with Israeli authorities also preventing Eid al-Fitr prayers at Al-Aqsa this year – the first such restriction since Israel’s illegal occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967.

The mosque reopened on April 9 to Palestinian worshippers. But later that day, Israeli settlers stormed the compound and performed Talmudic rituals, under the protection of Israeli police, Wafa reported.

Wafa also said that Israeli authorities had extended the daily windows for Israeli settler incursions by an additional 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, Israeli raids have continued across the occupied West Bank, with at least 18 people arrested on Sunday.

Wafa said Israel arrested six Palestinians during a raid on Dheisheh refugee camp, south of Bethlehem.

A  child and a young man were also injured by Israeli forces during a raid on the city of Nablus.

Attacks by Israeli forces across Gaza and the occupied West Bank have continued, along with Israel’s wars on Iran and Lebanon.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 2023, with thousands forcibly displaced.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his government is ready to hold direct talks with Lebanon, a day after Israeli attacks on its northern neighbour killed hundreds of people on the deadliest day of the ongoing round of fighting.

“In light of Lebanon’s repeated requests to open direct negotiations with ⁠Israel, I instructed ⁠the cabinet yesterday to start direct negotiations with Lebanon ⁠as soon as ⁠possible,” Netanyahu’s office wrote ⁠in a statement on Thursday.

“The negotiations will focus on disarming Hezbollah ‌and establishing peaceful relations between Israel and ‌Lebanon.”

The statement comes a day after Israeli attacks across Lebanon killed more than 300 people in a series of devastating strikes that have threatened to undermine a United States-Iran ceasefire.

Israel and the US have said Lebanon was not included in the US-Iran two-week truce, which aims to allow for negotiations on ending their more than monthlong war. Iran and mediator Pakistan have said Lebanon was included in the ceasefire, and several international leaders have called for Lebanon to be included.

Shortly before Netanyahu’s surprise announcement about potential talks, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said he ⁠was working on a diplomatic track on this matter that was starting to be seen “positively” by international actors.

And Lebanon’s cabinet instructed security forces to restrict weapons in Beirut exclusively to state institutions, in a warning to the armed group Hezbollah.

“The army and security forces are requested to immediately begin reinforcing the full imposition of state authority over Beirut Governorate and to monopolise weapons in the hands of legitimate authorities alone,” Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said at the end of a cabinet meeting.

Attacks on Hezbollah

Hours before opening the way for talks with Lebanon, Netanyahu said Israel would continue striking Hezbollah “with force, precision and determination”.

Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 303 people were killed and more than 1,000 wounded on Wednesday in Israeli strikes in central Beirut and other areas of Lebanon, with Salam declaring Thursday a “national day of mourning”.

But Israel continued its bombardment overnight and into Thursday, saying it killed Ali Yusuf Harshi, an aide to Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem. There was no immediate comment from the Lebanese armed group.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported on Thursday that the Israeli army targeted the centre of Bint Jbeil city with heavy artillery shelling.

At the same time, Hezbollah has announced at least 20 operations against Israel and said it had targeted Israeli vehicles on Lebanese territory.

Reporting from Beirut, Al Jazeera’s Malcolm Webb said the Israeli army had issued new forced evacuation orders for the capital’s southern suburbs in advance of an attack.

“[This is an] area where thousands of people had initially fled, so this will force people to be on the move once again, looking yet again for somewhere safe to go to avoid the kind of destruction we can see here at one of the sites in central Beirut that was hit just over 24 hours ago in that wave of bombings across the city,” Webb said.

Since the ongoing Israel-Lebanon conflict began on March 2, Israel has issued evacuation orders for about 15 percent of Lebanese territory, displacing more than 1.2 million people, according to the United Nations. Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,888 people and wounded more than 6,000 others, according to Lebanese health authorities.

Ceasefire deal

As Israel continues its attacks on Lebanon, concerns are growing about the effect it could have on the originally fragile deal.

Since Wednesday, Iran has argued that attacks in Lebanon violate the ceasefire deal, with President Masoud Pezeshkian saying on Thursday that Israeli strikes on Lebanon would render negotiations meaningless, adding that Iran would not abandon the Lebanese people.

However, the US has said Lebanon is not covered by the truce, despite Pakistan, which acted as mediator, saying it was part of the deal.

Other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Turkiye, have said the truce should extend to Lebanon.

Delegations from the US and Iran are expected to meet in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday for talks on ending the war.

Around 3,000 worshippers entered Al-Aqsa for the morning prayer on Thursday, after Israel lifted restrictions.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem has reopened to Palestinian worshippers after a 40-day closure by Israel.

Video verified by Al Jazeera showed Palestinians streaming through its gates early on Thursday morning. Around 3,000 worshippers attended  morning prayers.

Access had been completely prohibited, or restricted to a few dozen faithful at Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites following the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28. Israel often imposes restrictions, especially on Palestinian worshippers.

The Islamic Waqf Department in occupied Jerusalem confirmed that the doors of Al-Aqsa would be reopened to all worshippers from dawn. The Jordanian-affiliated religious authority responsible for managing the mosque did not provide further details.

Video from earlier showed volunteers and caretakers in courtyards and prayer areas preparing to receive worshippers and holding religious rites.

Israeli authorities announced the opening of the mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in occupied Jerusalem on Wednesday evening.

Israeli police attributed the opening of holy sites to what it called “updated instructions from the Israeli Home Front Command”.

The statement noted intensive security reinforcements, including hundreds of police officers and border guards in the alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem and roads leading to the holy sites, aimed at “securing visitors”.

Jerusalem and its holy sites have been subjected to strict security measures and frequent closures during the regional war of the past six weeks.

The restrictions subdued Lent, Passover and Ramadan celebrations for many in some of the holiest sites for Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Authorities also prevented Eid al-Fitr prayers at Al-Aqsa this year – the first such restriction since Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967.

But the bans have been lifted just in time for Orthodox Christians, who celebrate Easter on Sunday, a week after Catholic and Protestants.

No let up in raids in occupied West Bank

Israeli raids have continued across the occupied West Bank.

Israeli forces detained a woman and assaulted a man during an early Thursday raid in Nablus, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

The Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry separately said Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian man near the village of Tayasir in the northern West Bank on Wednesday night.

The ministry said 28-year-old Alaa Khaled Mohammed Sbeih “was shot and killed” by Israeli forces, while the Israeli military said an off-duty soldier fired at a stone-thrower.

Wafa said six young men were detained in a raid on the village of Tayasir, while in Ya’bad, south of Jenin, Israeli troops stormed several homes at dawn, destroying the contents of three houses. Forces also raided the villages of Qusra and Awarta, but no arrests were reported there.

Attacks by Israeli forces across Gaza and the occupied West Bank have continued, along with Israel’s wars on Iran and Lebanon.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank since 2023, with at least 10,000 forcibly displaced.

One of the most striking visuals to emerge in the current conflict with Iran has been videos of ballistic missiles unleashing torrents of cluster munitions at very high altitudes over Israel. In doing so, the Iranians look to have found a worrisome way to consistently get around terminal-phase ballistic missile defenses, especially Israel’s David’s Sling.

The gap that the Iranians are leveraging with these cluster munition missile attacks goes beyond just bypassing terminal defenses. It, by extension, puts greater pressure on diminishing stocks of prized mid-course interceptors to try to defeat these incoming threats before they release their payloads. With all this in mind, what we are seeing with Iran’s attacks on Israel with ballistic missiles with cluster warheads could have even greater implications for future conflicts elsewhere, particularly in the Pacific region.

In some five weeks of fighting, Iran had launched more than 500 ballistic missiles at Israel, with at least 30 of those having carried cluster munition payloads (likely many more), according to the Times of Israel. Iran had fired ballistic missiles with cluster warheads in anger for the first time in attacks on Israel during last year’s 12 Day War.

Iran has developed multiple types of submunitions that can be dispersed via different ballistic missiles in its inventory during the terminal phases of their flight. Ballistic missiles typically fly along roughly parabolic trajectories to their targets. The arc is generally broken down into three main sections: the boost phase right after launch, the terminal phase as the missile comes back down at the end, and the mid-course phase in between. During the mid-course phase, the missiles leave the Earth’s atmosphere, with larger types spending more time in space in the middle of their flight. You can learn more about the complexities of intercepting a target in the mid-course phase in our past report here.

A typical Iranian cluster warhead reportedly contains between 20 and 30 submunitions. However, larger missiles, like members of the Khorramshahr family, are said to be able to carry up to 80. Reports also state that the cluster munitions can contain anywhere between four and 11 pounds of explosives. The damage they can cause is further magnified by the high speed with which they impact the ground.

“Iran has shown pictures in the past of triconic warheads [for ballistic missiles] equipped with at least four different sizes and types of bomblets,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank, told TWZ. “So Iran calls these warheads ‘raining warheads,’ because these different bomblets will be showered on a wider geographic target set than if it was just the traditional unitary high explosive warhead. How many depends on what kind of configuration of bomblets they can actually choose to put in, but it can be easily a dozen-plus to two dozen to three dozen, depending on the size of the bomblets.”

The Iranian submunition installed in Iranian BM launched at Israel was seen TWICE in the past: In 2016 weapons exhibition and in a failed KHORRAMSHAHR missile test in Iran, 2023. pic.twitter.com/AxCYSDxs69

— Tal Inbar (@inbarspace) June 21, 2025

For the first time, a SUB-MUNITION from an Iranian BM was found in Israel. It is not yet clear on what type of missile it was installed. pic.twitter.com/HgwxCsE0FS

— Tal Inbar (@inbarspace) June 19, 2025

“Most importantly, in this conflict, the regime is using the Khoramshar ballistic missile, which is a threshold medium-range ballistic missile modified from an intermediate-range ballistic missile that can carry the heaviest reported warhead weight,” he added. “So, the regime is basically filling a large conical warhead with lots of bomblets and cluster munitions that basically fuse and disperse upon re-entry into the atmosphere, posing a real challenge, even for integrated air and missile defense systems like what the Israelis have, and causing quite a bit of damage and civilian harm.”

Both the shape of the fragment and the serial number pattern indicate it was part of a Khorramshahr reentry vehicle.

Would confirm the suspicion that some of the large submunition releases observed over Israel were linked to the use of the Khorramshahr. https://t.co/KP4Sp1Yy9P pic.twitter.com/B7SC1q6GNQ

— Fabian Hinz (@fab_hinz) March 9, 2026

Khorramshah-4 is shorter than the previous versions as the missile engine is designed inside fuel tank.
The evolvement of different versions of Khorramshahr mostly deal with its re-entry vehicles which @inbarspace showed in this good picture. 3 pic.twitter.com/nm7kC6WfL2

— Mehdi H. (@mhmiranusa) November 3, 2024

Differentiating between missiles carrying cluster warheads and those with unitary ones is likely to be difficult, if not impossible, before any release of submarines occurs. This creates further challenges for defenders, as we will come back to later on.

In terms of dispersion, when Iran first fired cluster munition-laden ballistic missiles at Israel last year, authorities in the latter country said the weapons had released their payloads at an altitude of approximately 23,000 feet (seven kilometers). The submunitions were scattered across an area approximately 10 miles (16 kilometers) in diameter. This is in line with a report last month from CNN, where that outlet assessed two separate Iranian cluster missile attacks to have dropped submunitions across areas in Israel between roughly seven and eight miles (approximately 11 to 13 kilometers) long.

The IDF Home Front Command confirms that Iran launched at least one ballistic missile carrying a cluster bomb warhead at central Israel today.

The missile’s warhead split while descending, at around 7 kilometers altitude, spreading around 20 smaller munitions in a radius of… https://t.co/PF5RCpLfvH pic.twitter.com/2wyrH2JJM3

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) June 19, 2025

Israel’s Haaretz has also previously reported an instance where submunitions, apparently all from one missile, hit seven populated areas within a zone measuring nearly 17 miles (27 kilometers) across. This would point to a higher release altitude than the other cases.

A higher-altitude release earlier in the terminal phase of a missile’s flight inherently presents greater challenges for defenders trying to intercept the warhead before submunition release. Once the payload is dispersed, one larger target suddenly becomes dozens of smaller ones.

The David’s Sling system’s Stunner interceptors have a reported maximum engagement altitude of around nine miles (15 kilometers). However, various factors, especially the position of the launcher in relation to the target’s flight path, would impact the circumstances in which they would be able to reach the upper end of their envelope.

There are terminal missile defense systems with greater reach, such as the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and the ship-launched Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), but their engagement envelopes still face positional constraints. THAAD would likely have the best chance as its interceptors can reach higher altitudes, in some circumstances, near the end of the transition from the mid-course to the terminal stage of flight.

As with Stunner, releases at very high altitudes would preclude intercept attempts by lower-tier terminal defenses like Patriot entirely.

All of this combines to creates a situation in which mid-course intercept attempts are critical for catching cluster munition-laden missiles before they release their payloads. However, inventories of relevant interceptors to defend targets in Israel have reportedly been dwindling after weeks of persistent Iranian ballistic missile attacks. Mid-course interceptors, like the U.S. Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) and the Israeli Arrow 3, are precious munitions that have generally been stockpiled at lower levels, to begin with. They also take years to procure and cost many millions of dollars each.

Retired Army Col. David Shank echoed much of this when speaking to TWZ about the challenges and complexities of responding to Iranian long-range ballistic missiles with cluster munition payloads. Shank, who served as Commandant of the Air Defense Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and as the 10th Army Air Missile Defense Commander in Europe, also highlighted that this threat would require the use of higher-end systems to attempt intercepts, either inside or outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, before any submunition payload is released.

“We talk endo/exo-atmospheric. We’re talking THAAD capability, [and] SM-6/SM-3-capable systems,” Shank explained. “And so we’re really talking upper-tier in order to defeat that type of target once it is launched.”

The video below shows THAAD interceptors being fired at incoming Iranian threats in the course of the current conflict.

“Obviously, the goal is to kill it before they even launch it through a variety of means to do that,” he continued. “But if you can’t do that, and there is some type of air launch. And the next step is that upper-tier capability, coupled with other domains.”

In terms of other domains, “let’s just talk space real quick,” he added. “Sensing that launch and detecting it and then passing that information over a network, ultimately to what we’re talking about now,” systems like THAAD and ships armed with SM-3s and SM-6s that are “capable of defeating that threat with endo- and exo-atmosphere capabilities I mentioned.”

Shank underscored the importance of trying to intercept ballistic missiles with cluster warheads at as high altitudes as possible before they can release their payloads.

“Once it hits that point where bomblets are released, so a mechanism within the platform that releases the bomblets, instead of now having one aerial threat, now you obviously have many,” he said. “So, very difficult now to engage multiple aerial threats at one time.”

Shank told us that watching videos of submunitions being dispersed from Iranian ballistic missiles reminded him of past modeling and simulation of such attacks he observed during his time in the Army.

“I’ve seen modeling and simulation, when I was still in uniform years ago, of how we would fight against those types of early-release munitions,” he said. “They had different names then, but it’s very similar to what we’re seeing now in real time.”

That modeling and simulation “would show that overmatch” and that “need to defeat that capability before it does disperse those early-release munitions or those bomblets,” he added.

The retired Army air defense officer noted that the ballistic missile threat ecosystem in the Middle East, in general, is made more complicated by the relatively short distances those weapons travel from launch points in Iran to their targets.

“In the scenario that’s playing out real time, potentially, if they’re launched out of southwestern Iran at the GCCs [Gulf Cooperation Council states on the Arabian Peninsula] – they’re the closest – so minutes, two, three, four minutes,” said Shank.

The time to react is further compressed when facing missiles carrying scatterable payloads. “You’re down to a minute or two.”

Attempts can still be made to intercept submunitions after they are released. At the same time, in addition to the challenge of trying to prioritize and engage dozens of smaller targets, intercept attempts against individual submunitions also impose different costs on the defender. These are targets that are likely to be cheap even compared to lower-cost interceptors. Trying to shoot them down with something like Patriot would create an even more lopsided exchange ratio. Also their singular destructive power is far less than a unitary payload.

“What’s the cost curve look like?” Shank said, speaking generally about how expensive this proposition could become.

“I talk cost curve a lot, [but] you got to recognize the boots and the people that are on the ground on the other end of that, and other national assets and capabilities,” Shank noted. “What is a Soldier’s life worth? … What is an E-3 AWACS aircraft that is high-demand, low-density – what value do you put on something like that, or even a Patriot radar?”

Overall, Iran’s use of ballistic missiles with cluster munition warheads highlights a “very big challenge in front of us, and so when I say in front of us, obviously in front of the warfighters. It’s a lot,” Shank said, highlighting the broader ramifications. “From an operator perspective, you have to discern which target is which, which one should be the priority to defeat first, how many of those bomblets are possibly going to impact dirt and not be a threat, and which ones will be the threat. You’ve got to discern [that] fairly quickly, and then pass on those engagement authorities to the shooters.”

As noted earlier, it is likely that defenders would be challenged to differentiate between missiles carrying submunitions and those with unitary payloads until a release occurs. This can only make it more difficult to prioritize intercept attempts against missiles with cluster munition warheads, especially in the mid-course phase of flight, when it would be most ideal. This could then contribute to a further wearing down of stocks of critical mid-course interceptors.

Shank stressed that this is not an entirely new problem set for the U.S. military, citing the aforementioned modeling and simulations.

“It helped drive discussions on increased [force] structure, increased requirements. It helped recognize, in this scenario [including missiles with cluster munition warheads], adversarial capabilities with regards to munitions,” he explained. “The results, or the findings, personally, were somewhat laughable.”

“We would run a scenario, not necessarily the Middle East, but we’d run a general scenario, and the outcomes would be, well, we need 48 Patriot battalions, as an example. And then that’s a hypothetical number, but it was a very large number,” Shank said. “And, so, when you think through this, at the time, I think the U.S. Army had 14 Patriot battalions. And this was a 2030-2035 scenario, which we’re a lot closer to today, and we have 16 Patriot battalions. And so even if you factored in – which we were not during that modeling and simulation period, or exercise – but even if you factored in our allies and partners, I’m not sure we have 48 Patriot battalions on planet earth.”

The PATRIOT Missile in Action

TWZ has written on several occasions in the past about the strains on the U.S. Army’s Patriot force, which is inadequate to meet current demands. This is reflective of broader air and missile defense capacity limitations across the U.S. military, despite efforts in recent years to change that paradigm. This has been highlighted again in the course of the current conflict with Iran, and would be an even bigger issue should a high-end fight, such as one in the Pacific against China, erupt.

As an aside to all this, Shank pointed to the importance of so-called “left-of-launch” operations to neutralize threats before they are even launched.

“Within the U.S. Army, we had four ‘pillars’ within integrated air and missile defense. It’s attack operations. It’s active air defense, passive air defense, and command and control,” he noted. “And so the attack operations piece is that left of launch piece. And I would also tie today some of our offensive cyber capabilities as part of attack operations.”

“Again, if we can prevent an adversary from launching or from getting to the launch pad,” he added. “So, whether it’s a supply chain disruption, whether it’s a special operations force with eyes on a target forward on a battlefield, or what we possess now [with] some of our surface-to-surface precision munitions, that can influence and defeat those capabilities before they launch.”

In recent years, the Army and other elements of the U.S. military have also pointed to the value of a similar breadth of left-of-launch activities for disrupting and defeating drone attacks, as you can read more about here.

It should be stressed here that, at least from what has been observed so far, Iran has been using ballistic missiles with cluster munition warheads primarily as terror weapons against population centers in Israel. The high-altitude releases have certainly helped those weapons get around terminal defenses like David’s Sling, but have also limited their ability to focus their effects on specific points on the ground. For vengeance attacks that also wear down the supply of mid-course interceptors, this is likely deemed adequate, and even less accurate cluster attacks still put military target under threat.

However, Iran’s demonstration of how this tactic can strain on an opponent’s layered defenses does have serious implications beyond the current conflict and the Middle East. Independent reports have previously highlighted the vulnerability of key U.S. air bases, especially in the Pacific, to attacks by cluster munition-laden ballistic missiles. Aircraft parked in the open and thin-skinned fuel storage sites are at particular risk from such strikes. This ties into a separate and increasingly heated debate about the value of investing in new hardened infrastructure, which TWZ continues to follow closely.

Those assessments are based on lower-altitude releases where submissions can be more focused on particular target areas. However, high-altitude releases could still be focused, at least to a general degree, on saturating very large area targets, including sprawling established air bases. As an example, the two main runways at the U.S. Air Force’s highly strategic Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, are roughly two miles long. They have taxiways and numerous open parking aprons attached to them. There are many other sprawling facilities on the island, too.

For an adversary like China, a barrage of missiles designed to scatter submunitions across larger areas could be relevant in striking a target like Andersen, or anything similarly large. Those weapons could also be used to help overwhelm defenses, eat up valuable interceptors, and otherwise sow chaos as part of layered strikes that also include more precise missiles, as well as drones. Even dispersing submunitions at lower altitudes to achieve better accuracy, but still relatively high within a system like Patriot’s interception envelope, would give a much smaller window to destroy the missile than compared to a traditional unitary warhead. In a future high-end fight in the Pacific, Chinese forces could also choose to employ this capability to attack large population centers, especially in Japan and elsewhere in the First Island Chain, similar to Iran’s attacks against Israel now.

The development of precision-guided submunitions capable of being released via ballistic missile would further change the equation. In 2024, the Guangdong Aerodynamic Research Academy (GARA) in China notably put forward a tangential concept for a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle carrying different kinds of scatterable payloads, including miniature missiles and drones. Ballistic missiles often also reach hypersonic speeds, generally defined as anything above Mach 5, in the terminal phase of flight, and any submunitions they release have to be able to withstand similar stresses.

There is no doubt that China, in particular, has been keenly watching the outcomes of Iranian missile and drone attacks on Israel, as well as other countries in the region. Israel’s integrated air and missile defense network has long been touted as the best in the world. The Gulf Arab states have also spent billions of dollars over the past decade or so to bolster their capabilities and overall capacity in the past decade or so with this exact scenario top of mind. The U.S. military’s higher-end ballistic missile defense posture in the Pacific remains relatively limited, and focused largely on very particular regions, despite years now of efforts to dramatically expand that architecture.

Iran’s ability to launch retaliatory attacks has been significantly degraded over the past five weeks, but it has been able to keep up a persistent tempo regardless. China has a broader array of far more capable ballistic missiles, as well as other stand-off strike weapons, that it would bring to bear en masse in any future high-end fight in the Pacific.

Other countries, such as Russia or North Korea, could look to capitalize on what Iran has demonstrated with its cluster munition missile attack, as well. There has been a burst in the development and proliferation of ballistic missiles, in general, including to non-state actors, globally, in recent years.

If anything, application of these tactics by Iran help make the case for the Trump administration’s highly ambitious and expensive Golden Dome missile defense network, which will put a much higher-focus on mid-course intercept. This includes stationing interceptors in space.

Overall, while Iran has been using high-altitude releases of submunitions from ballistic missiles to help ensure it can continue executing succes attacks on Israel, it is a tactic that could have significant implications in other contexts in conflicts well beyond the Middle East.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

UN experts say Israel ’emboldened by impunity’ for previous journalist killings in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

Three United Nations experts have called for an independent and thorough investigation into Israel’s recent killing of three journalists in Lebanon, denouncing the deadly incident as “another egregious attack on press freedom by Israeli forces”.

UN special rapporteurs Irene Khan, Morris Tidball-Binz and Ben Saul on Thursday noted that “journalists carrying out their professional duties in armed conflict are civilians and must not be targeted or made the object of attack”.

“The deliberate killing of journalists not directly participating in hostilities constitutes a serious violation of international human rights and humanitarian law and a war crime,” they said in a statement.

The Israeli military killed Al Mayadeen journalist Fatima Ftouni, her brother, freelance photojournalist Mohamad Ftouni, and Al-Manar’s Ali Shoaib in a targeted strike on their car in southern Lebanon on March 28.

Al Mayadeen and Al-Manar are pro-Hezbollah media outlets, and Israel accused Shoaib – without presenting any evidence – of being a fighter with the Lebanese armed group.

That claim was rejected by Shoaib’s colleagues as well as by the UN experts, who on Thursday also stressed that working for media outlets affiliated with an armed group does not mean journalists are directly participating in hostilities under international law.

“Israeli officials know this, yet they choose to ignore it – emboldened by impunity for their previous killings of journalists in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank,” they said.

In February, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all killings of journalists in 2024 and 2025.

More than 60 percent of the 86 members of the press killed by Israeli fire last year were Palestinian journalists reporting from the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s genocidal war in the coastal enclave, the advocacy group found.

After the killings in southern Lebanon last week, CPJ’s Middle East director Sara Qudah also warned that Lebanon is becoming “an increasingly deadly zone for journalists, despite their status as civilians who must not be targeted”.

“We have seen a disturbing pattern in this war and in the decades prior of Israel accusing journalists of being active combatants and terrorists without providing credible evidence,” Qudah said in a statement.

“Journalists are not legitimate targets, regardless of the outlet they work for.”

The UN experts also warned that Israel’s killing of Lebanese journalists is part of “an abominable push … to silence reporting on Israel’s current military action in Lebanon, and shut down news coverage of war crimes committed, just as it did in Gaza”.

At least 1,345 people have been killed and 4,040 wounded in intensified Israeli attacks across Lebanon since early March, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health.

The Israeli parliament’s approval of a legislation that seeks the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks has stoked fears among the Palestinians and drawn condemnation from the international community, dismayed at the further entrenching of what rights groups have long described as Israel’s “system of apartheid”.

The law, which does not apply to Jewish citizens of Israel, was met with jubilation among its backers in the country’s far right.

France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom have all raised concerns over what many describe as the overtly racist nature of the bill, whose nature and wording appear to exclusively target Palestinians.

“We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill. The adoption of this bill would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles,” the foreign ministries wrote in a joint statement on Sunday.

Rights groups have also criticised the bill, with Amnesty International in February saying the legislation would make the death penalty “another discriminatory tool in Israel’s system of apartheid”.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday called the law discriminatory as it would primarily, if not exclusively, be applied to Palestinians.

“Israeli officials argue that the imposing the death penalty is about security, but in reality, it entrenches discrimination and a two-tiered system of justice, both hallmarks of apartheid,” Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

“The death penalty is irreversible and cruel. Combined with its severe restrictions on appeals and its 90-day execution timeline, this bill aims to kill Palestinian detainees faster and with less scrutiny.”

Nevertheless, on its successful passage through parliament, amidst the celebrating lawmakers, the legislation’s principal champion, far- right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir – who has previous convictions for far-right “terrorism” – was seen brandishing a champagne.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had attended the chamber to support the bill, could also be seen congratulating lawmakers on its passage.

So, how can Israel pass a law targeting one ethnic group and not others? Is that legal, and is this the first time Israel has passed legislation that deliberately discriminates against Palestinians?

Here’s what we know.

How does the law target Palestinians and not Israelis?

By limiting the bulk of the legislation to the military courts that only try Palestinians under occupation.

Under the new legislation, anyone found guilty of the killing of an Israeli citizen within the occupied West Bank will, by default, be sentenced to death by the military courts overseeing the occupied territory.

While the courts do not regularly publish statistics on convictions, in 2010, the court system did concede that, of the Palestinians tried for offences committed in the occupied West Bank, 99.74 percent were found guilty.

In contrast, Israeli settlers, who have killed seven Palestinians in just the weeks following the start of their country’s war on Iran in late February, are tried in civilian courts in Israel. According to an analysis by the UK’s Guardian newspaper in late March, Israel has yet to prosecute any of its citizens for killing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade.

Under the new legislation, Israel’s civilian courts are granted an extra degree of leniency in sentencing Israelis found guilty of killing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, with judges having the option to choose between the death penalty and life imprisonment.

Sentences for the military courts trying Palestinians, in contrast, carry an automatic death penalty, with life imprisonment only available under extreme circumstances.

According to a study by the Israeli rights group, Yesh Din, conviction rates for settlers found guilty by civilian courts of committing crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) between 2005 and 2024 ran to about 3 percent. Some 93.8 percent of investigations into settler violence were closed at the end of an investigation with no indictment filed, the group noted.

Underpinning much of this is Israel’s 2018 Nation State law, which, in the eyes of many, codifies Israel’s apartheid system of government, defining Israel as the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people and prioritising Jewish settlement as a national value.

Critics argue that it downgrades the status of Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the population, by omitting any guarantee of equality.

How is that even legal?

According to many, it isn’t.

Despite the best efforts of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – who has administrative power over the occupied West Bank – to annex the Palestinian territory, it remains a foreign territory under military occupation.

According to Amichai Cohen, a senior fellow at the Center for Security and Democracy of The Israel Democracy Institute, international law does not permit Israel’s parliament to legislate for the West Bank, since the area is not legally part of Israel’s sovereign territory.

In September 2024, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly called for end to Israeli occupation of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem within a year. The UNGA resolution backed an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which called Israeli occupation “unlawful”.

Similarly, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel announced it had already taken the matter to Israel’s highest court only minutes after the bill was approved. The group argued that the measure was “discriminatory by design” and that lawmakers had no legal authority to impose it on Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, who are not Israeli citizens.

Is this the first time Israel has been accused of using its legal system to target Palestinians?

Far from it.

Human rights groups – including HRW and Amnesty International – have long argued that the legal systems applying to Palestinians and to Israeli settlers in the West Bank are fundamentally unequal.

Palestinians live under military law, while settlers fall under Israeli civil law, creating two parallel systems in the same territory.

According to rights groups, this structure enables discriminatory detention practices, such as administrative detention (where people can be held indefinitely without charge), dramatically unequal protections under the law, and the selective enforcement of those laws, which have all underpinned widespread accusations of apartheid.

As of March 2026, approximately 9,500 Palestinians are detained in Israeli prisons under harsh conditions, with about half held under administrative detention or labelled “unlawful combatants”, denied trial and unable to defend themselves.

Legislation relating to the treatment of children in custody has led to concern among many international observers and rights groups. Palestinian minors can be interrogated without parental present and are often denied timely access to legal counsel in defiance of Israel’s own and international law, the HRW noted.

Another key area of international concern is the ongoing demolition of Palestinian homes built without permits, which are nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain. Unauthorised settler outposts, in contrast, are rarely troubled and increasingly retroactively legalised.

Beirut, Lebanon – It is four weeks into the United States-Israeli war on Iran, and millions of civilians are suffering in Lebanon, now facing a second large-scale Israeli attack on their country in less than two years.

About a quarter of Lebanon’s population has been displaced after Israel’s mass forced evacuation orders from the country’s south and Beirut’s southern suburbs, known as Dahiyeh.

Many of the displaced are extremely frustrated and fatigued. And even those who are not displaced are feeling the pressure, with deadly Israeli attacks continuing, petrol prices increasing, business in general slowing down, and little sign that the conflict will end any time soon.

Samiha, a Palestinian teacher who had been living near Tyre, in southern Lebanon, but recently relocated to Beirut, said the experience was “not good at all”. However, with the previous Israeli campaign in Lebanon not long ago, her family came into this round more prepared.

“It’s not the first time for us. Now we know more about where to go.” Still, she maintained, “we don’t know how long this will last and if there is a solution”.

Foreigners most vulnerable

Israel intensified its war on Lebanon again on March 2, after Hezbollah responded to Israeli attacks for the first time in more than a year.

Hezbollah – a close ally of Iran – claimed the attack was retaliation for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination two days earlier. A ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah had ostensibly been in effect since November 27, 2024, despite the United Nations counting more than 10,000 Israeli ceasefire violations in that period, and hundreds of Lebanese deaths.

After Hezbollah’s reply, Israel intensified its attacks on the south and declared its intention to occupy southern Lebanon. Israel also issued forced evacuation orders for areas of southern Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and a few villages in the eastern Bekaa Valley, leading to a massive displacement crisis of at least 1.2 million people, according to the Lebanese government. Now, Israel has also stated its intent to occupy southern Lebanon and set up a so-called security zone, while destroying more villages along the southern border.

The crisis has hit people who live in Lebanon severely, particularly the country’s most vulnerable people.

“The most vulnerable cases that we’re coming upon are happening, either migrant workers, either Syrians, foreign bodies, basically,” Rena Ayoubi, a volunteer who has organised aid near Beirut’s waterfront, Biel, told Al Jazeera.

She said other people who have suffered deeply in this period include: people with chronic diseases, cancer patients on dialysis, people who cannot access insulin, and displaced people who don’t have access to a fridge to store their medicine.

‘Different in scale and speed’

A series of catastrophes is unfolding, with women, children and those suffering with psychological issues suffering the most, according to a variety of sources, including aid workers, volunteers and UN workers. The humanitarian crisis in 2024 was severe, they said, but 2026 is on a whole different level.

“Now is significantly different in the scale and speed and number of people impacted,” Anandita Philipose, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency (UNFPA)’s representative in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. “The mass evacuation orders are new. The scale of displacement is new. The fact that civilian infrastructure was targeted is new.”

Many women, in particular, have been displaced not only from their homes but from their healthcare networks, including offices or support systems that will help them through pregnancies.

“Pregnant women do not stop giving birth in the middle of conflict, and women don’t stop having periods in the middle of conflicts,” Philipose said.

Israel’s latest war on Lebanon has so far killed 1,094 people and wounded another 3,119 in Lebanon, according to the country’s Ministry of Public Health. Among the dead are 81 women and 121 children, in just over three weeks.

“Children have yet again been caught up in this escalation, Heidi Diedrich, national director of World Vision in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera. “Children are deeply affected by the violence regardless of their protected status as civilians under international humanitarian law, and regardless of their rights as children. We are deeply concerned that this escalation will continue to impact children in Lebanon for weeks or even months to come.”

Never-ending trauma

At an office building in Beirut, two volunteers sit behind desks waiting for phones to ring. The volunteers are closely monitored by clinical psychologists. On the other end are people calling in for help, many in some of their darkest moments.

This is the office for the National Lifeline in Lebanon (1564) for Emotional Support and Suicide Prevention Hotline, a collaboration between the National Mental Health Programme and Embrace, a nonprofit focused on mental health. 1564 is the phone number that people who require psychological support can dial.

“We’ve been in the worst situation for the past two years,” Jad Chamoun, operations manager at the National Lifeline 1564, told Al Jazeera from the Lifeline centre in Beirut.

“Even when there was a ceasefire, people were still living under the conditions, they were still displaced.”

Even before March 2, about 64,000 people in Lebanon were displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration. According to a March 2025 report from Lebanon’s National Mental Health Programme, three in five people in the country “currently screen positive for depression, anxiety, or PTSD”. And that was before the current intensification.

“The living conditions we’re in is a continuous trauma, because it’s never ending,” Chamoun said. Lebanon went through one of the world’s worst economic crises in 2019, which continues today. In the following years, people in Lebanon experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, the Beirut explosion, mass emigration, and now two Israeli large-scale military campaigns in short succession.

Amid the current violence, the number of calls has increased substantially, Chamoun said, from about 30 a day during 2024’s Israeli attacks to almost 50 a day now. But, he added, that the peak for calls tends to be a few months after the end of a conflict or crisis. Currently, people are in survival mode.

The cascading series of disasters and brutal Israeli aggression has left many in Lebanon near, or well past, their breaking points. Many are falling through the cracks. Volunteers and professionals at efforts like this one are doing what they can to catch as many people as they can.

“We try to sit with them in the darkness, which is what’s heavy around us. We try to share with them this pain,” Chamoun said. “And this is what’s been the heaviest nowadays.”

Israel’s Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir issued a stark warning to the country’s cabinet this week: unless urgent measures are taken, the Israeli army is on the brink of collapse.

According to a report by Israel’s Channel 13 on Thursday, Zamir told ministers that he was “raising 10 red flags”, urging the government to move quickly on long-delayed legislation to alleviate the strain on its “exhausted” military.

The army has been overseeing what rights groups and the United Nations have determined is a genocide in Gaza, the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank and numerous incursions into Lebanon and Syria.

Addressing ministers, Zamir stressed the need for a “conscription law, a reserve duty law, and a law to extend mandatory service”, adding that without these measures, “before long, the [Israeli military] will not be ready for its routine missions and the reserve system will not last”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since said that plans will be made to extend mandatory military service. However, this is not the first time the alarm has been raised that the military is straining under the pressure of repeated operations, which have seen it involved in the killings of tens of thousands of civilians across the Middle East.

The first came as early as June 2024, just eight months into the genocidal war on Gaza, when France24 reported on shortfalls in troop numbers, exhaustion and a lack of supplies.

That situation has only worsened since.

So, how large was the army before October 2023, how active has it been and how has the current era of unprecedented regional aggression sapped the military’s reserves? Here is what we know.

How suited is the Israeli army to its country’s forever wars?

Not very.

Launched in 1948, the idea of an Israeli military made up of a relatively small standing army backed by a large reserve corps of mobilised citizenry was the plan from the outset in order to instil a narrative of social cohesion, national identity and shared responsibility within the new country’s populace. Reservists would move between civilian life and military service to achieve this.

Before the war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023, Israel’s standing army numbered just 100,000. This was immediately bolstered by calling up 300,000 reservists, pulling Israel’s “citizen soldiers” from their jobs and families to take part in the bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel.

Ultimately, this means that the majority of troops serving are reservists rather than career soldiers.

Where are Israeli troops now?

On March 1, the day after US-Israeli strikes on Iran began, Israel announced the mobilisation of another 100,000 reserve soldiers.

That was in addition to 50,000 reservists currently on duty as a result of the Gaza war.

At the time, military sources said the additional troops would bolster existing positions along the border with Lebanon, its frontier and occupied positions within Syria, as well as in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

Additionally, Israel’s Home Front Command called up 20,000 reservists, primarily for search and rescue operations, with reinforcements also deployed to the Israeli Air Force, Navy and Intelligence Directorate.

Israel has since deployed “thousands” of those troops to take part in its invasion of southern Lebanon, which it resumed in response to rocket fire from Iranian ally Hezbollah on March 3.

Addressing the same security cabinet meeting as Zamir, Central Command chief Major General Avi Bluth told ministers that government policies in the occupied West Bank were also placing increasing pressure on the military’s already stretched manpower.

According to the report, Bluth told ministers that over the past year, the government has approved the construction of multiple illegal settlements in the Jordan Valley and elsewhere in the West Bank as part of a wider operation characterised by rights groups and more than 20 countries as Israel’s “effective annexation” of the occupied Palestinian territory.

Bluth added: “This is your policy, but it requires security and a full protection package, because the reality on the ground has completely changed – and that requires manpower.”

Are Israeli troops exhausted?

According to many of the army’s own members, particularly reservists, they are.

Speaking to the Ynet News outlet, which is typically supportive of Netanyahu and his ruling Likud party, one reservist told the newspaper in December of his decision not to report for duty.

“We have battles to fight at home,” he said, explaining his decision. “There are guys on the team who were fired from their jobs, others whose families are barely staying afloat, or who have been dragging out their studies for a very long time. This is a problem, a complexity that is hard to describe.”

Resentment of the apparent exemption offered to members of Israel’s ultra-religious Haredim community, whose refusal to enlist for service is often overlooked by politicians, is also growing, Israeli media reports.

Responding to Zamir’s comments to the security cabinet, Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, took to Twitter to address the government directly.

“The government must stop the cowardice, immediately halt all budgets to the Haredi draft dodgers,” he said of the extensive social benefits many in Israel’s ultra religious community rely upon. “Send the military police after the deserters, draft the Haredim without hesitation,” he said.

“The warning has been given. It’s on your heads. It’s in your hands. You cannot continue to abandon Israel’s security, in wartime, for petty politics.”

As the United States-Israeli war on Iran rages on, schools across Israel have been closed, cultural venues shuttered and large gatherings cancelled under police orders.

Dissent against the war, if there is much at all, has little chance of being aired.

A few demonstrations against the war, such as those staged by the Israeli-Arab activist group Zazim, still flicker through central cities, but they do so under heavy supervision, with officers warning crowds to disperse when sirens sound or when assemblies grow beyond what commanders deem safe.

The effect is a public sphere constrained less by decree than by the constant threat hanging overhead.

“Kids aren’t going to school, while employers are insisting their parents go to work,” Zazim’s co-founder and executive director, Raluca Ganea, says. Everyone is too overwhelmed by the daily grind to voice any dissatisfaction, she adds.

“We’re enduring multiple missile attacks daily, which means people aren’t sleeping. It’s like a manual for tyrants. It’s how you suppress protest or opposition and it’s working so far,” she added.

“We’ve attempted a couple of protests, but people are just too tired to engage,” Ganea says of Zazim’s efforts to resist the war. “It’s not so much that people are telling you that you can’t so much as protesting becomes impossible when a missile attack could happen at any time.”

Support for the war on Iran has remained strong in Israel, a fact borne out by polls. But as exhaustion grows and resentment builds over having their fates decided by often distant leaders such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, who have shown little investment in their welfare, the societal fractures that came to define the war on Gaza are almost inevitable, she warns.

“It’s depressing,” she says. “The only response people have is to feel helpless when their fate is in the hands of people like Trump and Netanyahu, who really don’t care about them.”

Those who have put their heads above the parapet to object openly to the war are shunned anyway, as 19-year-old Itamar Greenberg knows only too well. People spit at him in the street.

“It comes in waves,” he says of the criticism he faces for his opposition to the war on Iran on the streets of his hometown, near Tel Aviv. “Sometimes they follow me, shouting ‘traitor’ or ‘terrorist’.”

Itamar is clear enough that he isn’t a terrorist, though he seems ready to accept the label of traitor if it means halting the war on Iran.

“At my university, everywhere, they say my opposition to the war on Iran is somehow crossing a red line. For instance, because of the [danger to the Israeli] hostages, some people could understand opposition to the genocide on Gaza, but opposing the war on Iran, the great evil, is somehow too much,” he says.

Rising censorship

Across Israel, journalists and activists like Itamar describe a pervasive atmosphere of self-policing and censorship that, they say, has left people less informed about the consequences of the war than the citizens in Iran, whom many in their media encourage them to pity.

In a country largely unified against a threat that, for generations, politicians have told them is existential, criticism, dissent or opposition is, for the majority, beyond the pale.

This way of thinking is baked into Israeli society. The systems employed by the country’s military censor today to curtail media reporting predate the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Furthermore, new wartime restrictions on what can and cannot be broadcast of the Iranian missile barrages targeting Israel, where they land and what damage they have done – introduced on March 5 – mean these largely go entirely unreported, Israeli journalists say.

Reporting on the new media restrictions in mid-March, the Israeli magazine +972 documented one instance when journalists were permitted to report on debris that had hit an educational facility, but did not mention the actual strike by an Iranian missile, which had successfully hit its intended target nearby. Nor were they allowed to examine the site.

In another case reported by +972, journalists photographing damage to a residential block said they were approached by a man they believed to be linked to a security agency. He asked police to stop reporters from recording the real target of the attack, which was located behind them. The police officer replied that the journalists would not have noticed that site at all had it not been pointed out, since the visible destruction was concentrated on the civilian building.

The censorship, which had been growing more relaxed in recent years, had been tightened once more during the current war, Meron Rapoport, an editor at +972’s sister paper, Hebrew language Local Call, told Al Jazeera, “We don’t really know what is being or with what explosives,” he said, “The IDF [Israeli army] announcements always refer to strikes being on ‘uninhabited areas,’ which is peculiar, because there aren’t that many uninhabited areas in Tel Aviv. It’s a very compact city.”

Indeed, Iran has launched multiple missiles at Tel Aviv, some of which have resulted in damage and injuries – either by the missiles themselves or by debris falling following interception. Most recently, on Tuesday, missiles triggered air raid sirens in the city, where gaping holes were ripped through a multistorey apartment building.

Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency medical service said: “Six people were lightly injured at four different sites.”

“It’s curious,” Rapoport says. “Israeli commentators are always saying how the Iranian public has no real idea how badly they’re being hit. The irony is that they probably have a better idea of how hard Israel is being hit than most Israelis.”

Iranian missiles struck two communities in southern Israel, leaving buildings shattered and dozens injured in dual attacks not far from Israel’s main nuclear research centre.

The Iranian strikes late on Saturday came after Tehran’s main nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz was hit earlier in the day. Israel denied responsibility for the strike on Natanz, nearly 220km (135 miles) southeast of Tehran.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the strike on Natanz, which was also hit during the first week of the war and the 12-day war last June. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova said such strikes posed a “real risk of catastrophic disaster throughout the Middle East”.

Iran retaliated hours later.

Israel’s military said it was not able to intercept missiles that hit the southern cities of Dimona and Arad, the largest near the centre in Israel’s sparsely populated Negev desert. It was the first time Iranian missiles had penetrated Israel’s air defence systems in the area around the nuclear site.

The Israeli Ministry of Health said at least 180 people were wounded in the missile attacks on the southern city of Dimona and nearby Arad.

Dimona is about 20km (12 miles) west of the nuclear research centre, and Arad is around 35km (22 miles) to the north.

Israel is believed to be the only Middle East nation with nuclear weapons, though its leaders refuse to confirm or deny their existence. The UN nuclear watchdog said on X it had not received reports of damage to the Israeli centre or abnormal radiation levels.

An Iranian missile has struck the southern Israeli cities of Dimona, home to the country’s main nuclear facility, and nearby Arad, wounding dozens of people and causing significant damage, in one of the most dramatic escalations since the US-Israel war on Iran began.

Iranian state television quickly reframed Saturday’s strikes as a “response” to what it said was a strike on Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment complex earlier in the day, marking a stark new phase of tit-for-tat targeting in the conflict, now in its fourth week.

Nearly 100 people were wounded in the attacks, according to Israel’s emergency services, including a 10-year-old boy who paramedics said was in critical condition with multiple shrapnel wounds. Seven others are also in critical condition.

An Israeli military spokesman said Israel’s air defence systems activated during the attacks, but failed to intercept some of the missiles, even though they were not “special or unfamiliar”.

The country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the attacks which wounded nearly 100 people, called it a “difficult” evening for Israel, and again vowed to continue attacking Iran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had received no indication of damage to the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center at Dimona itself, and that no abnormal radiation levels had been detected in the area.

The nuclear watchdog said it was closely monitoring the situation, with Director General Rafael Grossi urging that “maximum military restraint should be observed, in particular in the vicinity of nuclear facilities”.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said that three separate impact sites had been identified across Dimona, with one three-storey building having completely collapsed and several fires breaking out.

Witness footage verified by Al Jazeera, which is banned from operating inside Israel, showed a missile striking the city, followed by a large explosion.

Arad, another town near the nuclear facility, was also directly attacked, Israel’s firefighting service said in a statement, with extensive damage reported in the city centre.

“In both Dimona and Arad, interceptors were launched that failed to hit the threats, resulting in two direct hits by ballistic missiles with warheads weighing hundreds of kilograms”, firefighters said.

School in the surrounding Ramat Negev Regional Council was cancelled for the following day.

Earlier on Saturday, the Israeli military announced it had struck a research and development facility at Tehran’s Malek Ashtar University, which it said had been used to develop components for nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

The military said it “will not allow the Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons”.

Iran said that the US and Israel had targeted its Natanz enrichment complex that morning, though it reported no radioactive leakage.

An unnamed Israeli official, quoted by the Associated Press news agency, denied that Israel was responsible for the Natanz strike, but the Israeli army has not released a full statement on the matter.

Dimona has been at the heart of Israel’s nuclear programme since its research centre, built in secret with French assistance, opened there in 1958.

Eye-for-an-eye approach

Israel is believed to have developed nuclear weapons by the late 1960s. Its policy of deliberate ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying their existence, was part of a deal quietly struck with Washington, which judged that an open declaration would risk triggering a regional arms race.

Abas Aslani, a senior fellow at the Centre for Middle East Strategic Studies in Tehran, told Al Jazeera that Iran has been pursuing an eye-for-an-eye approach designed to re-establish deterrence.

“Tehran wants to reduce the gap between words and actions,” he said, adding that Iran’s goal was to make its threats credible enough to underpin a new long-term security arrangement, not to simply force a ceasefire, but establish deterrence.

The attacks came as the broader war grinds through its fourth week.

More than 1,400 people have been killed in Iran since the US and Israeli strikes began on February 28, including more than 200 children.

Iran has retaliated across the region, launching what it described as its 70th wave of attacks on Saturday, targeting Israeli and US military positions, as millions of Iranians marked the Persian New Year, Newroz, and Eid al-Fitr under the shadow of war.

The Israeli military has launched waves of air raids across southern Lebanon after announcing “limited and targeted ground operations” against Hezbollah positions. Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr is in Marjayoun, which has been turned into an active war zone following clashes.

It took just two days for Lebanon to be dragged into the US-Israeli war against Iran.

After a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah came into effect in Lebanon in November 2024, cross-border violence did not really end.

Now, nearly one million people have been forced from their homes.

The UN chief said Lebanon is part of a war it did not choose, but Israel is ramping up its offensive.

The Israeli defence minister says that if the Lebanese government will not rein in Hezbollah, Israel will.

So, what happens if it does? And what does that mean for civilians?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Nadim Houry – Executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative

Maureen Philippon – Norwegian Refugee Council’s country director for Lebanon

Nicholas Noe – Editor-in-chief of the Beirut-based news service, Mideastwire.com

Israel has killed almost 600 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 750,000 in less than two weeks. This is the opening act of Israel’s Gaza doctrine applied to a new front. The formula is consistent: Displace – either by ordering people to leave or by destroying their means of survival. Demolish civilian infrastructure to prevent return and expand territory through so-called “buffer zones”. Fragment any coherent governance by carving territory into disconnected enclaves where military action continues at a lower intensity.

I spent three years working in Palestine before being expelled by Israeli authorities. I watched this doctrine develop in real time. Now, from Beirut, I am witnessing its replication.

In the West Bank, Israel has spent decades fragmenting territory and denying Palestinians any contiguous geography. Water wells sealed with cement, homes demolished over impossible-to-obtain permits, herders pushed from their land by illegal settlement outposts. In Gaza, the same logic was applied with far greater speed and fury.

In October 2023, Israel announced that every Palestinian north of Wadi Gaza had to leave immediately. Days earlier, Israel’s defence minister had declared a complete siege: No electricity, no food, no water. By labelling an entire population as the enemy, Israel created a class of expendable people. The military released maps with Gaza divided into numbered blocks. When your number was called, you were forced to leave. Evacuation orders became the alibi for the crimes that followed. People were ordered into al-Mawasi, a stretch of coastline Israel designated a “safe zone”, a concentration area for hundreds of thousands living in tents, where air attacks continued. So-called evacuation zones were depopulated and destroyed.

Classic counterinsurgency logic would have entailed “clear, hold, and rebuild”. Israel’s approach was radically different: Destroy, displace, dismantle. The goal was not to pacify territory but to empty it. In both Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel has treated civilian populations as indistinguishable from the resistance they support. Their displacement is the objective. The collapse of their political representation is a condition Israel seeks to make permanent. This is settler-colonial logic in contemporary military form.

The same playbook has now arrived in Lebanon, but with a revealing difference from previous Israeli operations here. In the first Lebanon war in the 1980s, Israel sought to install a sympathetic government. Gaza has shown that Israel has abandoned that aspiration. The goal is no longer to determine who governs a territory but to ensure that no coherent governance exists at all. Nor is Israel alone in this; the UAE’s approach in Yemen and the Horn of Africa – and its support to Israel in Gaza – reflects the same preference for isolated enclaves. What has emerged is a regional doctrine of fragmentation shared between aligned powers.

Israel has issued evacuation orders for the entirety of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut. The familiar map that appeared on my screen in Beirut last week had the same design and the same deadly ambiguity as the ones we dealt with in Gaza; announced evacuation zones failed to match those shown on the map. In Gaza, those who crossed the invisible lines were killed.

Hundreds of thousands of people are now on the move. Schools have become shelters, health workers have been killed, and people are sleeping on the seafront where just two nights ago a tent was bombed. Israel has threatened to attack Lebanese state infrastructure if the government fails to act against Hezbollah – extending its aims from displacement and infrastructure destruction towards the forced destabilisation of the state itself. The Lebanese government has responded by forbidding Hezbollah from firing. This is precisely the internal fracturing that Israel’s strategy appears designed to provoke.

But Lebanon is not Gaza. Hamas was fighting with an improvised arsenal inside a besieged strip of land, and this already proved challenging for Israeli forces. Hezbollah commands more sophisticated weaponry, hardened infrastructure, and decades of preparation for this kind of war. It has shown it can absorb heavy blows and strike back, surprising both Israel and outside observers with the depth of its capabilities. Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa have already met significant resistance. It is here that the doctrine may encounter its limits – not through diplomatic pressure, which has failed to materialise, but through asymmetric military reality. Iran has made Lebanon’s fate explicitly part of any ceasefire calculus, signalling a unification of fronts that Israel had thought were weakened.

A doctrine built on the assumption of impunity has encountered little resistance in the conference halls of a so-called rules-based order. The Gaza doctrine is the expanded version of what Israel previously called the “Dahiyeh doctrine” – the use of overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure – now weaponised towards a larger end: The permanent redrawing of the region’s geography, demography, and political order.

This doctrine has developed in a vacuum of accountability. The International Court of Justice has been ignored. The Security Council has been paralysed. Governments have continued trading with Israel as it steadily normalised the unacceptable. Daniel Reisner, who headed the international legal division of Israel’s military advocate general’s office, was candid in saying that “If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it […] International law progresses through violations.”

The United States is not a bystander to this failure; it is an active participant in deepening it. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the transatlantic alliance in ethnonationalist terms and cast colonialism as a Western achievement. At an event in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee expressed confidence that Washington would “neuter” both the ICC and the ICJ – the very institutions through which accountability might otherwise be pursued.

What is unfolding in Lebanon is the political continuation of an ongoing settler-colonial project. The evacuation orders are precursors to mass destruction, designed to prevent return and permanently alter the landscape. Stability in the Middle East demands more than ceasefire agreements that manage fragmented populations while permitting lower-grade warfare to continue. It requires unconditional enforcement of international law, full accountability for those prosecuting this doctrine, and the right of return and reconstruction – from Beit Hanoon to Beirut.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.