Worldcrunch
With up to two million displaced, United Nations designated more than 50 sites and shelters as the most vulnerable areas for floods and rainfall across Gaza. But as some people have been displaced multiple times, and humanitarian aid is being blocked, refugees have few options to shelter themselves ahead of the upcoming winter.
Israel’s war on Gaza has turned into a bloodbath, as ultimately demanded by the country’s ultra-religious rulers to remain in power as long as possible.
Never since it became the “great protector” of the Jewish state has the United States shown so much weakness towards Israel, as the Israeli prime minister stays one step ahead of his adversaries in a cunning maneuver to help Trump return to the White House.
Benjamin Netanyahu escaped the growing calls to stop the war in Gaza and bring the hostages back, by launching another war on Hezbollah. It’s a taste of what’s to come.
Initially presented as “limited,” Israeli operations have escalated sharply in Lebanon, and the Israeli Prime Minister has called on the country’s citizens to rise up against Hezbollah. What is Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim in this war?
As Israel’s air strikes on Lebanon intensify, following the unprecedented exploding pagers attack, the severely injured get care inside Geitawi General Hospital that aims to salvage their forever altered lives.
Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly urged the Lebanese to turn on Hezbollah, as he drops bombs that kill thousands of civilians. But every citizen knows what an occupier looks like.
The Lebanese coastal metropolis has long been a source of inspiration and freedom for Baghdad native poet Aya Mansour. As Israel sends ground troops into Lebanon, she asks how the world can watch as fire and smoke covers the beauty of Beirut without saying a word.
Israel’s aggression over the past few months, no matter how successful, is ultimately a sign of its weakness. Yet it is able to achieve its goals from the support it receives from a number of players inside and outside the region, whether they realize it or not. That even, paradoxically, includes Iran.
Egyptian authorities give Gaza’s refugees a 45-day tourist visa which doesn’t allow them to apply for residency, study or work in the country. But online learning platforms, including the West Bank’s official educational system, are helping children with their schooling, despite the war.
When Emmanuel Macron called for an embargo on arms supplies to Israel, he was aiming at the United States, following the failure of the attempted ceasefire in Lebanon. Paris even speaks of ‘duplicity’ by Washington and Israel. It’s just the latest example of the failure of diplomacy in the face of the “logic of war.”
An increasingly positive era of post-Holocaust Jewish life in Germany ended one year ago — the sense of progress and confidence gave way to a new, age-old fear, writes Sascha Chaimowicz in Die Zeit.
The international press is marking one year since Hamas militants launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, triggering a war that has killed tens of thousands and triggered a dangerous escalation in regional tensions. “A complicated grief” as one headline put it…
One year after the massacre of October 7, the wars continue (and expand) across the Middle East, and may currently look like Israel is achieving its military and security goals. But it will be a failure without any political solution.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei vowed on Friday that the country’s regional allies would “not back down” against Israel. Yet neither criticism of Tehran has been growing among Hezbollah supporters since the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel has targeted Hashem Safieddine, the younger cousin of slain Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, in an overnight air strike early Friday. Believed to be the heir apparent, Safieddine rose through the ranks and positions within the organizational structure. He also has very strong ties, and family connections, with hardliners in Iran.
Was it the “Mother of Miscalculations?” Tehran’s decision to launch a second missile attack on Israel demonstrates its weakness at home and abroad. The Iranian regime may soon face the consequences, as a possible series of events could be triggered by a reprisal from the better-equipped Israeli military.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out a careful plot to push and ultimately shatter the long-established “rules of engagement” in the Middle East. It caught everyone, from Iran to Hezbollah to the White House, by surprise. The aim is to remake the whole region to revolve around Israel.
A core group of Iranian legislators demanded that Tehran to stop tiptoeing around Israel, and to seek revenge for the deaths of Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. The “war trap” be damned. But now the ball is in the hands of Israel’s own hardline government.
The defeat inflicted on Hezbollah and the weakening of the pro-Iranian axis has shifted the power balance toward Israel, which is continuing its offensive with a ground incursion into southern Lebanon, and dreams of building a “new Middle East.” But we’ve seen this playbook before.
As Israel celebrates the death of Hezbollah’s leader, Washington and Tehran both suddenly seem powerless, looking like spectators of an unraveling tragedy that is beyond their control. Yet, given its demographics and geography, Israel desperately needs allies.
The Israeli Prime Minister has scored a major victory with the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. But Netanyahu is showing no signs of relenting, continuing the bombing of Lebanon, and also striking Yemen. All with Iran as the ultimate target. Yet can force alone guarantee Israel’s security?
Wounded by the bombs, some had to face surgeries on kitchen tables. La Stampa reporter Francesca Mannocchi met them and their parents in Doha, Qatar, where they seek refuge.
The call in Lebanon to “postpone politics” is driven by a narration of the war as a religious, and not a political, event: that’s the root of Hezbollah’s ideology.
Israel has killed Hassan Nasrallah, longtime charismatic head of Lebanese militant organization Hezbollah. His recent leadership had been marked by a new kind of realism in the face of the balance of power, and served as a complement to Hezbollah supporters’ knee-jerk celebrations even when they are defeated.
As Israel continued its strikes in several parts of the country, more than 30,000 Lebanese and Syrians living in Lebanon set out for the Syrian border. It’s an improbable turn of events, after years of Syrians fleeing into Lebanon.
The first calls for ceasefire made by the United States and France, supported by a broad coalition, was ignored by the belligerents Hezbollah and Israel, for different reasons. The risk of escalation, including an Israeli ground invasion, grows with each passing day.
The author, whose family was forced to flee during the 1947 “Nakba” expulsion of Palestinians, sees how the event has been used by leaders in the Arab world to wield authority without actually improving anyone’s life.
Nearly a year into the war in Gaza, the people of Lebanon are paying a price for both a failing of Hezbollah security, and more broadly for a support war so ambiguous that it’s impossible to understand its cause, purpose, or if anything has been achieved.
![Close-up photo of a Hezbollah supporter sporting a headband that reads in Arabic and Hebrew "We swear we will cross [into Israel]" during a rally in Beirut.](https://worldcrunch.com/assets/uploads/2025/03/close-up-photo-of-a-hezbollah-supporter-sporting-a-headband-that-reads-in-arabic-and-hebrew-we-swear-we-will-cross-into-israel-during-a-rally-in-beirut-1568x1176.jpg)
We have entered a new phase of confrontation. The war on the northern front has become a reality and not just threats. Hezbollah may be reeling after the pagers attack and the bombings in southern Lebanon, but it is also set to go on the offensive, taking aim at Israel’s northern coastal city of Haifa.
It was the exceptional time that changed the equation, and revived the Palestinian dream. It also awakened the hidden Israeli plans: the extermination of the Palestinian people, the liquidation of their cause, and the evacuation of their land.
With its unprecedented attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon that again killed innocent victims, Israel now faces the risk of losing the war not just on moral and legal grounds, but also from a strategic perspective.
Unprecedented attacks via pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members comes amid a growing consensus in Israel in favor of launching a war across the border into Lebanon. Meanwhile, the U.S. may have given its assent and the Lebanese government appears unable to intervene, with Hezbollah holding all the cards on this side of the border.
The porn industry and amateur and professional adult content plays a role in the Israeli war on Gaza. Some pornographic companies did not only provide support to Israel, but adult content also contributed to drawing a violative imagination about Israeli soldiers and their relationship with the battlefield and the Gazan victims. It is part of a long history linking pornography and war.
It seems the White House will pay attention to your case depending on your ethnicity, but it’s actually your politics. The Biden administration’s response to the death of Turkish-American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi after the Israeli-American hostages killed by Hamas raises the question: does the United States only care about its citizens when they agree with US policy?
Efforts to vaccinate children in Gaza are undoubtedly motivated in part by moral reasons, but they also stem from the world’s concern – especially in neighboring countries – about the virus becoming endemic in the Palestinian enclave. The writer recalls how it can all implode, or spread, at any time.
If there is a real peace project and an Israeli intention to solve the Palestinian tragedy, Hamas would have lost its justification for existence. Not just Hamas, but all the resistance factions.
Residents of southern Lebanon believe that their hometowns will remain an open arena for a long-term war between Israel and Hezbollah, even if this has only happened so far in a way that allows both sides to stop short of declaring an all-out war.
Israel saw a general strike and huge demonstrations following the death of six hostages at the hands of Hamas. The protesters are angry at their prime minister, who is multiplying the obstacles to a ceasefire agreement that could save the last living hostages.
For two decades Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah spoke about destroying Israel, but in recent speeches, he’s just demanding it pull out of Gaza. It’s one more sign that its patrons in Tehran have made a calculation to try to salvage a status quo in the region.